The impact of working conditions on productivity: Evidence from the US public defense system

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Liu, Zhihan; Mahler, Amy C.
• 署名单位: University of Southern California; RAND Corporation
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2026.105630
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: gender; HEALTH; judges

摘要

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to effective legal representation for all defendants, regardless of income. In practice, this constitutional promise depends critically on the working conditions of the public de fenders who represent low-income clients. This paper examines how the workloads public defenders face affect the outcomes of the cases they handle. Using the universe of public defense case records from two U.S. states and quasi-random variation in workloads induced by strict case assignment rules, we find robust evidence that a one-standard-deviation increase in an attorney's workload (about 25 additional cases) increases incarceration sentence length by 12 percent, with suggestive evidence of higher probability of conviction. We explore mech anisms using granular attorney time-use data and find that rising workloads reduce time spent across all tasks by 18 percent, while some independent tasks, such as reviewing evidence and conducting legal research, may be dropped entirely.