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A Sharp Test for the Judge Leniency Design

Mohamed Coulibaly, Yu-Chin Hsu, Ismael Mourifié, Yuanyuan Wan

arXiv 10 May 2024 · Econometrics · 2 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2405.06156 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We propose a new specification test to assess the validity of the judge leniency design. We characterize a set of sharp testable implications, which exploit all the relevant information in the observed data distribution to detect violations of the judge leniency design assumptions. The proposed sharp test is asymptotically valid and consistent and will not make discordant recommendations. When the judge's leniency design assumptions are rejected, we propose a way to salvage the model using partial monotonicity and exclusion assumptions, under which a variant of the Local Instrumental Variable (LIV) estimand can recover the Marginal Treatment Effect. Simulation studies show our test outperforms existing non-sharp tests by significant margins. We apply our test to assess the validity of the judge leniency design using data from Stevenson (2018), and it rejects the validity for three crime categories: robbery, drug selling, and drug possession.

Citation extraction

41
references
100
in-text mentions
41
distinct cited
1
self-citations
16,516
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 57% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Stevenson (2018) Distortion of justice: How the inability to pay bail affects case outcomes1.00074100%
2Frandsen, Lefgren, and Leslie (2023) Judging Judge Fixed Effects0.94112483%
3Heckman and Vytlacil (2005) Structural equations, treatment effects, and econometric policy evaluation 10.9416383%
4Mourifié and Wan (2017) Testing Local Average Treatment Effect Assumptions0.87452100%
5Kitagawa (2015) A Test for Instrument Validity0.87452100%
6Kowalski (2016) Doing more when you're running late: Applying marginal treatment effect methods to examine treatment effect heterogeneity in exp…0.87452100%
7Hsu, Liu, and Shi (2019) Testing generalized regression monotonicity0.81142100%
8Mogstad, Torgovitsky, and Walters (2019) Identification of causal effects with multiple instruments: Problems and some solutions0.81142100%
9Carr and Kitagawa (2021) Testing instrument validity with covariates0.73732100%
10Vytlacil (2002) Independence, Monotonicity, and Latent Index Models: An Equivalence Result0.73732100%

Showing the top 10 of 41 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Leniency Designs: An Operator's Manual0.40511
2Testing Exclusion and Shape Restrictions in Potential Outcomes Models0.40511