The Local Political Economy Symposium at USC brings together nationally renowned scholars who study the most pressing political-economic issues at the local level — from compensation of public employees, to municipal bankruptcy, to criminal justice reform.
Empires – or political units made up of several territories and peoples, typically created by conquest and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries – have existed across recorded time, both ancient and modern. The political economy of empire as a scholarly enterprise can take several forms, including studying Read more…
How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing How do judges’ previous professional experiences affect outcomes? We investigate the question by documenting the effect of judges’ previous criminal justice experience on sentencing. Leveraging millions of federal sentences from 2010 to 2019, we find Read more…