IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v17y2015i2p313-360..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Empirical Evaluation of Law: The Dream and the Nightmare

Author

Listed:
  • John J. Donohue

Abstract

I discuss the empirical revolution in law and economics, and use the analysis of the deterrent impact of the death penalty to chart the tremendous advances in estimating causal effects since the mid-1970s. This story highlights how ostensibly sophisticated studies frequently generate incorrect estimates, and how difficult it is to know what studies should be believed—a difficulty open to being exploited by those (the media, think tanks, and others) who seek to promote clearly weak studies for some private agenda. I offer a hierarchy of methodologies to assist in evaluating empirical studies and some suggestions for promoting the search for truth.

Suggested Citation

  • John J. Donohue, 2015. "Empirical Evaluation of Law: The Dream and the Nightmare," American Law and Economics Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 17(2), pages 313-360.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:313-360.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahv007
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Gabriel Costeira Machado & Cristiano Aguiar De Oliveira, 2018. "The Deterrent Effects Of Brazillian Child Labor Law," Anais do XLIV Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 44th Brazilian Economics Meeting] 237, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    2. Chin, Jason & Zeiler, Kathryn, 2021. "Replicability in Empirical Legal Research," LawArXiv 2b5k4, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:oup:amlawe:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:313-360.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    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.