Bad News From the Front and From Above: Bombing Raids, Military Fatalities and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany

Abstract

We examine how the decision-making of political elites respond to an imminent external threat to the existence of the state in times of war. To do so, we exploit exogeneous variation in exposure to battle deaths and bombing raids to estimate the effect of variation in the intensity of war on the probability that individuals charged with treason and/or high treason in Nazi Germany received the death sentence. A doubling of the number of military fatalities as well as bombing raids in the same week in which a defendant was sentenced increased the likelihood of receiving the death penalty by about 10 percentage points. (JEL K14, N44)

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

“…The fan base of the team goes well beyond the student body of the university: average attendance to home games was around 92,500 between 1996 and 2012. 1 Clotfelter (2015) details the extent of fans' devotions and their emotional ties to college teams. 2 By special permission from Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Youth Services, Office of Juvenile Justice, we obtained access to the universe of defendant files from 1996 to 2012.…”

“…2 By special permission from Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Youth Services, Office of Juvenile Justice, we obtained access to the universe of defendant files from 1996 to 2012. For each file, we have basic demographic 1 Describing LSU football just as an event would be a huge understatement for the residents of the state of Louisiana. Devotion to LSU football is deeply ingrained into the culture of the state.…”

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

“…if evaluated on a day unusually warmer for that location at that month of the year, than on a day with a different temperature realization. 3 However, as our opening paragraphs suggest, cautiously we propose that the analysis provides a prima facie case that temperature may damage decision consistency and quality in a much wider set of settings. If experienced, professional judges, working in an environment in which they are protected from outdoor temperature with high-quality climate-control technology, are as subject to influence as our analysis suggests, what should we think might be the impact of temperature on the wider population of agents (consumers, investors, managers, etc.)…”

Challenging Encounters and Within-Physician Practice Variability

“…Finally, our work is also related to existing literature that shows that di↵erent arbitrary events, such as sports matches, weather, pollution, and the news influence expert decisions in various domains (Eren and Mocan, 2018;Chen and Loecher, 2020;Heyes and Saberian, 2019;Kahn and Li, 2019;Geerling et al, 2020). For a recent review, see Kahneman et al (2021).…”