Legal Outcomes and Home-Court Advantage: Evidence from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Shift to Administrative Courts
研究了2010年《多德-弗兰克法案》允许美国证券交易委员会将案件移入行政法庭后，被告和解概率增加30个百分点、非金钱处罚概率增加36个百分点、金钱处罚概率降低24个百分点，表明行政法官缺乏独立性可能带来机构主场优势。
Administrative law judges’ (ALJs’) relative lack of formal independence has engendered worries that they give agencies a home-court advantage. We examine the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which allowed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to move cases into its administrative court. The problem with this policy experiment is that the SEC retains the discretion to bring cases in federal court, so it is impossible to identify which cases the policy treats. We propose a difference-in-differences design, using natural-language-processing methods to create control and treatment groups. We construct propensity scores using random-forest methods. After binning cases into likely or not likely to be affected by the courts’ expansion, the difference-in-differences estimation indicates that the expansion made defendants 30 percentage points more likely to settle and 36 percentage points more likely to receive a nonmonetary penalty. There is a 24-percentage-point reduction in the likelihood of a monetary penalty.