The Fall 2020 Department of Economics Seminar Series kicks off Thursday, October 1st at 3:30pm. This semester’s seminars will be held in conjunction with the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics and will all be online via Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/92525533506). The seminars are free and open to everyone. October 1st’s speaker is Dr. Suresh Naidu, an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Dr. Naidu has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His work spans from Labor Economics to Development to Political Economy, all with an applied focus. Naidu has published in the Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Science, among others. He is a key figure in the CORE-USA textbook project. Dr. Naidu will be presenting his paper, “Ideas Have Consequences: the Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice.” Abstract: This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the effects of the early law-and-economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, an intensive economics course that trained almost half of federal judges between 1976 and 1999. Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts and 1 million District Court criminal sentencing decisions, we estimate the differences-in-differences effect of Manne program attendance using judge fixed effects. Selection into attendance was limited the program was popular across judges from all backgrounds, was regularly oversubscribed, and admitted judges on a first-come first-served basis and we further adjust for machine-learning-selected covariates predicting the timing of attendance. We find that after attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language in their opinions, issue more conservative decisions in economics-related cases, rule against regulatory agencies more often, favor more lax enforcement in antitrust cases, and impose more/longer criminal sentences. The law-and-economics movement had policy consequences via its influence in U.S. courts, showing that theoretical legal ideas can directly influence economic policies by persuading federal judges.

(Stay) Homecoming & Family Weekend is Oct. 1-3 and will look different this year, but the purpose will remain the same: A celebration of what unites us as Rams, connection and community, and fun for everyone 🐏💚 Details about this year’s virtual CSU Homecoming ➡️https://homecoming.colostate.edu/