We combine unsupervised machine learning and econometric methods to study England’s print culture in the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machine learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became less antagonistic and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon’s epistemological contributions. Vector autoregression estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas stimulated focus on science, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.

We argue that topic-modeling, an unsupervised machine-learning technique for analysis of large corpora, can be a powerful tool for legal-historical research. We provide a non-technical introduction to topic-modeling driven by the presentation of an example of how researchers can use the data that topic-modeling produces. The context of the example is pre-industrial English caselaw on finance. We generate new insights on the timing of pertinent legal developments, the linkages of law on finance to other areas of law, and the relative importance of common-law and equity in the emergence of law and legal ideas relevant to finance. We argue that topic-modeling has the potential to bridge traditional legal history and economics, increasing the influence of the former on the latter, which is overdue. The output of topic-modeling includes the data required to generate a quantitative macroscopic overview of the flow of legal history. These data can be used in many ways in subsequent legal-historical research. Epistemologically, topic-modeling offers an escape from the temptations of Whig history and opens up new avenues for inductive analysis characteristic of traditional historical research.

This is the second of two papers that generate and analyze quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and associated legal ideas before the Industrial Revolution. In the first paper, we estimated a 100-topic structural topic model, named the topics, and showed how to interpret topic-prevalence timelines. Here, we provide examples of new insights that can be gained from these estimates. We first provide a bird's-eye view, aggregating the topics into 15 themes. Procedure is the highest-prevalence theme, but by the mid-18th century attention to procedure decreases sharply, indicating solidification of court institutions. Important ideas on real-property were substantially settled by the mid-17th century and on contracts and torts by the mid-18th century. Thus, crucial elements of caselaw developed before the Industrial Revolution. We then examine the legal ideas associated with England's financial revolution. Many new legal ideas relevant to finance were well accepted before the Glorious Revolution. Finally, we examine the sources of law used in the courts. Emphasis on precedent-based reasoning increases by 1650, but diffusion was gradual, with pertinent ideas solidifying only after 1700. Ideas on statute applicability were accepted by the mid-16th century but debates on legislative intent were still occurring in 1750.

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date, there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England's institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, we generate and analyze the first quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and its associated legal ideas. We achieve this in two companion papers. In this, the first of the pair, we build a comprehensive corpus of 52,949 reports of cases heard in England's high courts before 1765. Estimating a 100-topic structural topic model, we name and interpret all topics, each of which reflects a distinctive aspect of English legal thought. We produce time series of the estimated topic prevalences. To interpret the topic timelines, we develop a tractable model of the evolution of legal-cultural ideas and their prominence in case reports. In the companion paper, we will illustrate with multiple applications the usefulness of the large amount of new information generated by our approach.

We draw on uniquely detailed micro-level data from a Belgian professional medical liability insurer to examine how different procedural and legal events that take place during the unfolding of a medical malpractice claim influence the timing of its settlement. Utilizing the competing risks regression framework, we find that settlement hazard is all else equal statistically significantly positively associated with the completion of those procedural and legal events that most effectively reveal factual information about the underlying medical malpractice case. Consistent with theory, settlement hazard is either unassociated or even negatively associated with the completion of other procedural and legal events. Our analysis, therefore, provides policy insights into which aspects of the resolution process could be emphasized, and which de-emphasized, in order to reduce the often excessive duration of medical malpractice claims and its adverse effects on the healthcare system.

We examine the effectiveness of bankruptcy institutions at promoting socially efficient allocation of resources. Under the Slovenian simplified reorganization procedure, firms with rejected reorganization proposals are not automatically liquidated. This unique institutional feature facilitates an estimation of the extent of different types of filtering failures. Based on an ex-post conceptualization of firm viability, Type I errors (the acceptance of plans by non-viable firms) are more likely than Type II errors (the rejection of plans by viable firms) and the overall incidence of filtering failure is 27%. Based on an ex-ante conceptualization of firm viability, any given reduction in Type II errors would give rise to three times as many Type I errors. We contextualize our findings in the light of prior results in the literature, alternative mechanisms for insolvency resolution, and related bankruptcy reorganization schemes internationally where courts are awarded a comparatively more prominent role.

Public Law 280 transferred jurisdiction over criminal and civil matters from the federal to state governments and increased the extent of nontribal law enforcement in selected parts of Indian country. Where enacted, the law fundamentally altered the preexisting legal order. Public Law 280 thus provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of legal institutions and their change on socioeconomic outcomes. The law's controversial content has attracted interest from legal scholars. However, empirical studies of its impact are scarce and do not address the law's endogenous nature. We examine the law's impact on crime and on economic development in U.S. counties with significant American-Indian reservation population. To address the issue of selection of areas subject to Public Law 280, our empirical strategy draws on the law's politico-historical context. We find that the application of Public Law 280 increased crime and lowered incomes. The law's adverse impact is robust and noteworthy in magnitude.