Non-Monetary Incentives and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from U.S. Courts, 262 Journal of Public Economics (October 2026).
Federal judges—who enjoy lifetime tenure and constitutionally protected salaries—represent an especially hard test case for incentive-based bureaucratic reform. I study the “six-month list,” a reform requiring U.S. federal courts to publicly identify judges with overdue matters. Using a regression discontinuity design and other methods, I find that matters most exposed are resolved approximately 14% faster than those least exposed, with larger effects among younger, non-white, and female judges. The speed gains come with tradeoffs: upfront time savings are partially offset by downstream delays, and more-exposed matters are more likely to be reversed on appeal. A bunching analysis estimates aggregate time savings of approximately 4%, demonstrating that non-monetary levers can shift behavior even among highly insulated elite professionals.
Bonuses, Buy-outs, and Worker Sorting in the Public Sector: Evidence from the U.S. Military (with Christina Patterson and William Skimmyhorn), Management Science (forthcoming).
Constrained in their flexibility to hire and fire personnel, public sector organizations must pay close attention to employee retention. With few other options at their disposal, managers frequently use cash bonuses to incentivize retention or buy-out offers to incentivize exit. Both policies are known to be effective at achieving quantitative staffing goals, but how do such policies affect worker sorting? We develop a model of public employee retention to show that the marginal effect of cash retention incentives is theoretically non-monotone in ability, and that predicting which workers are likely to be most responsive requires empirical investigation. We then leverage administrative data and quasi-random exposure to both lump-sum bonuses and early retirement buy-outs in the U.S. Army to estimate their effects on the quality of retained workers. We find that low-ability soldiers are relatively more responsive to both lump-sum bonuses and early retirement offers, and both effects are large enough to meaningfully alter the organization’s average ability profile. We provide suggestive evidence that differences in financial liquidity, time preferences, and individual taste for service may help explain the observed patterns of selection.
Civilian Harm and Military Legitimacy in War: Evidence from the Battle for Mosul in Iraq (with Benjamin C. Krick and Mara R. Revkin), 79 International Organization 2 (2025): 332-357.
The legitimacy of armed forces in the eyes of civilians is increasingly recognized as crucial not only for battlefield effectiveness but also for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. However, the micro-determinants of “military legitimacy” are poorly understood. We argue that perceptions of military legitimacy are shaped by two key dimensions of warfare: just cause and just conduct. Leveraging naturally occurring variation during one of the most deadly urban battles in recent history—the multi-national campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq—we evaluate our theory with a mixed-methods design combining original survey data, satellite imagery, and interviews. Civilians living in neighborhoods where armed forces were less careful to protect civilians view those forces as less legitimate than civilians elsewhere. Surprisingly, these results persist after conditioning for personal experiences with harm, suggesting that perceptions are influenced not only by victimization—consistent with previous studies—but also by beliefs about the morality of armed forces’ conduct and the cause for which they are fighting.
Law review articles
Specialization All Around: Generalist Courts, Specialist Judges (with Jonathan Seymour), 76 Duke Law Journal (forthcoming).
Federal courts and Article III judges are famously “generalist,” in the sense that each does a bit of everything. Departures from the generalist ideal are well known, but their extent is underappreciated. This article takes comprehensive stock of federal judicial specialization, with a special emphasis on what we call “informal” or “hidden” specialization—the de facto specialization that occurs, when appellate judges route opinion assignments to a colleague with a known expertise, or when district judges rely on specialized staff attorneys for help with prisoner litigation matters. Beyond the formal vs. informal distinction, we develop a general taxonomy that helps identify and organize the key dimensions of heterogeneity across examples of judicial specialization. We close by arguing that informal judicial specialization is something of a double-edged sword. It facilitates valuable judicial experimentation and adaptation, but it also amplifies known risks of specialization—including bias, judicial capture, and doctrinal drift—and generates distinctive hazards of its own.
The Judicial Administrative Power (with Joseph Schottenfeld), 93 George Washington Law Review 349 (2025): 349-409.
Federal judges spend considerable time on activities that fall outside the adjudication of individual cases and controversies. They promulgate court rules, oversee pretrial detention services, and select lawyers to serve as public defenders. This Article traces the origins of these and other acts of “judicial administration,” organizes them into a loose framework of three primary activities—rulemaking, managing, and communicating—and describes their relationship to adjudication. Our framework reveals an administrative power with far-reaching consequences for private litigants, judicial employees, and the public at large. We argue that the judicial administrative power upends core notions of what makes the judiciary the judiciary: it frees judges from the constraints of ordinary adjudication, empowers the judiciary to proactively solve problems of its own choosing, and alters the considerations viewed as appropriate for judges to weigh when their decisions affect people’s rights. It also blurs the lines between legislative, administrative, and adjudicatory forms of governance, with costs for higher-level values like democratic accountability, transparency, and rule of law. The Article closes with a series of proposed reforms, each designed to treat judicial administration as administrative first and judicial second, rather than the other way round.
Working Papers
Laxity, Leniency, and the Liberal Rules of Civil Procedure (with Joseph Schottenfeld) (law-review-style working paper).
Despite episodes and areas of retrenchment, modern civil procedure continues to be animated by a “liberal ethos” that favors access to the courts and resolution on the merits. This Article examines one mechanism courts use to pursue that ethos: the forgiveness of procedural error. It develops a framework for understanding how judges remediate errors in an adversarial system built to expose them, distinguishing two modes of forgiveness. Laxity construes a rule or a party’s action charitably, letting a case proceed as though no error occurred. Leniency gives parties a chance to correct the error. Both appear throughout our system of procedure, most visibly in the interpretation of pleadings, where courts liberally construe pleadings (laxity) and freely grant leave to amend defective ones (leniency). With the benefit of this framework, we can start to answer a commonplace but underexamined question—what a court should do when an error could be addressed by either laxity or leniency. We argue that laxity and leniency are complementary in theory but often in tension in practice. We also compare forgiveness to other means of achieving liberal adjudication, such as procedural simplification, party instruction, and accommodation.
Do Military Housing Allowances Inflate Local House Prices? (with Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham) (semi-permanent working paper).
Popular & shorter works
The Progressive Case for American Power: Retrenchment Would Do More Harm Than Good (with Megan A. Stewart and Mara R. Revkin), Foreign Affairs (June 2024).