Job Market Paper
Judicial quality and recidivism for high-profile criminals: structural evidence from US federal courts

Policy concern regarding recidivism is considered to be one of the recent debates in the literature. This paper aims to look at the recidivism of high-profile criminals as a strategic action related to the expected composition of the federal bench and, therefore, punishment. Empirical findings suggest that a 1 standard deviation increase in the Republican-associated share of justices on the bench leads to an increase in recidivism for fraud by 3.8 percentage points. The proposed mechanism is the strategic anticipation of lower punishment for white-collar crimes, estimated in a single-agent dynamic discrete choice (DDC) framework. Counterfactual experiments suggest that regulating equal composition of the benches by party nominations in the federal courts leads to a decrease in recidivism by 4.04 percentage points.

Working papers:

Career concerns and judicial biases in labor litigation: evidence from US federal courts

Party polarization of US judicial system has become a large issue nowadays. Using the novel dataset from public database of published judicial opinions of federal justices and appropriate text mining techniques, this study documents that conservative judges in District Courts have a 3.5 % bias against workers in labor litigation, and this bias is dynamic in electoral cycles. We estimated structural life-cycle model of moral hazard in sentencing and career decisions and show that the justices are more biased (not follow their type in the rulings) in electoral years by maximizing their chances of promotion to a higher court positions.

Work in progress:

Estimating the effect of import sanctions on Russian metals using LASSO