Petra Todd, University of Pennsylvania

Presentation Title: I’ll Be Watching You: The Effects of Randomly Assigned NYC Immigration Court Observers

About the Presentation

This paper reports findings from a randomized controlled trial in which law and college students were assigned to observe immigration judges during removal hearings. We study whether judicial observation affects how judges exercise procedural discretion. We find that, despite increasing procedural protections and lengthening proceedings, observation does not measurably reduce unfavorable outcomes for the respondent. Our findings suggest that, in institutional settings where agents have substantial discretion and strong professional norms, observation may influence behavior not only through the possibility of sanction, but also by making decision-makers more attentive to the ethical norms associated with their profession.

About the Speaker

Petra Todd is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Economics at University of Pennsylvania.  She regularly publishes in leading economic journals and also published a book with Paul Glewwe on program evaluation methods. She is a research associate of NBER, the U Penn Population Studies Center, HCEO, and IZA (now LISER). She is also a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Econometric Society Fellow, a Society of Labor Economists Fellow, and an International Association for Applied Econometrics Fellow. Her research is in the areas of labor economics, economics of education, development, econometrics, criminology and demography.  She has written influential papers on matching, control function methods, and regression-discontinuity (RD) methods for evaluating the effects of treatment interventions with nonexperimental data.    Another focus of her research is on modeling household behaviors, such as choices about fertility, schooling, employment, retirement and savings.  She also participated in several randomized social experiments and was an expert consultant in designing the Progresa conditional cash transfer program experiment.  Her recent work suggests ways of combining structural modeling with experimental methods to learn more from experimental data.  It also examines the importance of personality traits in explaining household interactions, as determinants of labor market and fertility outcomes.

Seminar Format:

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity.  Please use this link to RSVP for in-person attendance.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom registration link.  Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send a request to the meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.