IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id11299.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

Author

Listed:
  • Ozkan Eren
  • Naci Mocan

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. It investigates the behavior of judges, the conduct of whom should, by law, be free of personal biases and emotions. It finds that unexpected losses increase disposition (sentence) lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex-ante, have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. This presents evidence that the results are not influenced by defendant or attorney behavior or by defendants’ economic background. Importantly, the results are driven by judges who have received their bachelor’s degrees from the university with which the football team is affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one domain on a behavior in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly-educated group of individuals (judges), with decisions involving high stakes (sentence lengths). They also point to the existence of a subtle and previously-unnoticed capricious application of sentencing. [Working Paper 22611]

Suggested Citation

  • Ozkan Eren & Naci Mocan, 2016. "Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles," Working Papers id:11299, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:11299
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Articles/show_Article.aspx?acat=InstitutionalPapers&aid=11299
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chen, Daniel L. & Prescott, J.J., 2016. "Implicit Egoism in Sentencing Decisions: First Letter Name Effects with Randomly Assigned Defendants," TSE Working Papers 16-726, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    2. Ozkan Eren & Naci Mocan, 2021. "Juvenile Punishment, High School Graduation, and Adult Crime: Evidence from Idiosyncratic Judge Harshness," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 103(1), pages 34-47, March.
    3. Chen Daniel L., 2019. "Law and Literature: Theory and Evidence on Empathy and Guile," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 1-33, March.
    4. Beland, Louis-Philippe & Brent, Daniel A., 2018. "Traffic and crime," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 96-116.
    5. Chris Birdsall & Seth Gershenson & Raymond Zuniga, 2020. "The Effects of Demographic Mismatch in an Elite Professional School Setting," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 15(3), pages 457-486, Summer.
    6. Chen, Daniel L. & Philippe, Arnaud, 2018. "Clash of norms: Judicial leniency on defendant birthdays," IAST Working Papers 18-76, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
    7. Ramos Maqueda,Manuel & Chen,Daniel Li, 2021. "The Role of Justice in Development : The Data Revolution," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9720, The World Bank.
    8. Chen, Daniel L., 2016. "Priming Ideology: Why Presidential Elections Affect U.S. Judges," TSE Working Papers 16-681, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Aug 2016.
    9. Chen, Daniel L. & Loecher, Markus, 2016. "Mood and the Malleability of Moral Reasoning: The Impact of Irrelevant Factors on Judicial Decisions," IAST Working Papers 16-49, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), revised Sep 2019.
    10. Christian Dippel & Michael Poyker, 2023. "Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 66(3), pages 511-534.
    11. Chen, Daniel L., 2016. "Mood and the Malleability of Moral Reasoning," TSE Working Papers 16-707, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Feb 2017.
    12. Chen, Daniel L., 2018. "Machine Learning and Rule of Law," IAST Working Papers 18-88, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
    13. Chen, Daniel L., 2018. "Machine Learning and the Rule of Law," TSE Working Papers 18-975, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    14. Daniel Weimar & Markus Schauberger, 2018. "The impact of sporting success on student enrollment," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 88(6), pages 731-764, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:11299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.