Two Essays on Legal Entanglements and One Essay on Worker Voice

Abstract

This dissertation explores topics in labor economics and topics in the economics of the criminal legal system. In the first chapter, I study how worker voice can lead to worse outcomes for workers and employers when employers cannot adopt workers' suggestions. I develop and empirically test a model where voice changes a worker's reference point for working conditions, creating the risk of reference-dependent ``loss'' and lowered productivity. I test the disappointment hypothesis in an online experiment with real-effort tasks. I find that when a worker receives their less preferred working condition, asking about preferences beforehand lowers willingness-to-work by about 9 percent. I find similar patterns in observational analyses of nationally representative surveys in the US and UK. Furthermore, I find patterns of employer voice-seeking that are consistent with a counter-intuitive prediction of my model---for low-ability employers, being more able to adopt workers' preferences can lead to less voice-seeking. My findings caution that voice-seeking without follow through is worse for labor productivity than not asking at all. The second chapter explores the consequences of violating compulsory government procedures. Millions of Americans must navigate complex government procedures under the threat of punishment. Violating these requirements can lead to poverty traps or deepening legal system involvement. We use a field experiment to estimate the effect of failing to appear for court on subsequent legal contact. The treatments reduce failure to appear by 39 percent. Using treatment assignment to identify the causal impact of minor procedural violations, we find no effect on arrests. However, for lower-level cases, violations increase fines and fees paid by 60 percent or $80, equivalent to a high-interest loan, showing that minor procedural violations can be costly. The third chapter studies how criminal legal system fines and fees criminalizes poverty. This chapter and the following abstract are reproduced from (Pager et al., 2022). Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. Court debt charged to indigent defendants thus neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection.