Judicial hierarchy and discursive influence.

We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the US federal courts to examine the role of the US Supreme Court in influencing the direction of legal discourse in the federal courts. We propose two mechanisms for how the Court affects innovation in legal language: a selection mechanism where the Court's influence primarily derives from its discretionary jurisdiction, and an authorship mechanism in which the Court's influence derives directly from its own innovations. To test these alternative hypotheses, we develop a novel influence measure based on a dynamic topic model that separates the Court's own language innovations from those of the lower courts.

A General Approach to Adjusting Genetic Studies for Assortative Mating.

The effects of assortative mating (AM) on estimates from genetic studies has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. We extend existing AM theory to more general models of sorting and conclude that correct theory-based AM adjustments require knowledge of complicated, unknown historical sorting patterns. We propose a simple, general-purpose approach using polygenic indexes (PGIs).

The Measurement of Subjective Value and Its Relation to Contingent Valuation and Environmental Public Goods.

Environmental public goods--including national parks, clean air/water, and ecosystem services--provide substantial benefits on a global scale. These goods have unique characteristics in that they are typically "nonmarket" goods, with values from both use and passive use that accrue to a large number of individuals both in current and future generations. In this study, we test the hypothesis that neural signals in areas correlated with subjective valuations for essentially all other previously studied categories of goods (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum) also correlate with environmental valuations.