Clash of norms: Judicial leniency on defendant birthdays

Daniel Chen and Arnaud Philippe

No 18-76, IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST)

Abstract: We document judicial leniency on defendant birthdays across 5 million decisions. French sentences are 1% fewer and 3% shorter. U.S. federal sentences are 33% shorter in the day component of sentences (the month component remains unaffected). New Orleans sentences are 15% shorter overall. No leniency appears on the days before or after a defendant’s birthday. Federal judges using deterrence language in opinions, are unaffected, isolating the judicial as opposed to defendant channel. The effect is doubled when judge and defendant share the same race. Our courtroom setting rules out many models of social preferences with reciprocity motives.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://iast.fr/pub/32765
http://users.nber.org/~dlchen/papers/Clash_of_Norms_JEBO.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Clash of norms: Judicial leniency on defendant birthdays (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:iastwp:32765

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().