Who says academics are skittish about pursuing potentially explosive research topics? In “Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards: Evidence from Three Data Sets,” in the Journal of Legal Studies, Eric Helland of Claremont McKenna and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University analyze data on jury awards by county. Their conclusion: “An increase in the black county poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise the average personal injury tort award by 3 to 10 percent. An increase in the Hispanic county-poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise awards by as much as 7 percent although this effect is less well estimated. These effects imply that forum shopping for high-poverty minority counties could raise awards by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Average awards fall with increases in white (non-black, non-Hispanic) poverty rates in two of our datasets, thus making these findings even more surprising.” (JLS table of contents; Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy got there first).
Race, poverty and tort awards
Who says academics are skittish about pursuing potentially explosive research topics? In “Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards: Evidence from Three Data Sets,” in the Journal of Legal Studies, Eric Helland of Claremont McKenna and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University analyze data on jury awards by county. Their conclusion: “An increase in the black […]
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