Is this junk or pseudo science disseminated by the American Economic Association? Both? The AEA is caught spreading the demagoguery of systemic racism! This paper is not new, it was published in 2018.
Caveat: I did not read the whole paper, but I perused major portions of it.
Caveat: I did not read the whole paper, but I perused major portions of it.
Again correlation is not causation!
The dubious study is limited to only one college football team (i.e. LSU) and only to the juvenile cases of the state of Louisiana. The abstract of the paper does not even mention these limitations! Further, the paper spends about 20-25% of the entire content on predicting football game outcomes!
Did these researchers make any efforts:
- To find out whether these judges were even football fans and of which team?
- What about female judges?
- Apparently, there are 11% black judges on juvenile courts in LA. How did they decide? The researchers are silent.
- Did they correct for the fact that 33% of the total 4.6 million population of Louisiana are black Americans?
- Where these decisions appealed of "unlucky juveniles"? Did the researchers look into the results of appeals? Perhaps not.
According to the researchers, almost 73% of the judges are affiliated with the Democratic Party.
"Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpected losses increase 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. The impact of upset losses on sentence lengths is larger for defendants if their cases are handled by judges who 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 decisions in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly educated group of individuals (judges) who make decisions after deliberation that involve high stakes (sentence lengths). They also point to the existence of a subtle and previously-unnoticed capricious application of sentencing."
Credits: The Batch by Andrew Ng
No comments:
Post a Comment