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Do Tax Judges Think About The Economy?, Orli Oren-Kolbinger

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Does the macroeconomic environment affect judicial decisions and thereby shape the law? Even though the normative significance of understanding judicial decision-making is undeniable, empirical research into how judges make decisions is woefully incomplete. This is the first Article to empirically examine the stabilizing fiscal potential of judicial decisions in tax disputes. In this Article, I use empirical methods to test whether macroeconomic conditions—namely, the business cycle—affect the outcomes of judicial decisions in tax cases. Economic theory prescribes either an anti-cyclical response to the business cycle or no response at all. I test this hypothesis with a novel dataset constructed of …