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The Marshalsea Underwater: Natural Disasters and Legal Debt Defaults

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  • Singh, Tejendra Pratap

Abstract

National estimates suggest that a large fraction of the United States population is unable to cover modest emergency expenses using liquid savings. At the same time, natural disasters are increasing in frequency, intensity, and duration with ever-expanding destruction potential. Using exposure to natural disasters, I examine if defendants are more likely to default on their legal financial obligations. Constructing a novel dataset of defendants with traffic citations in Oklahoma, I find that natural disaster exposure increases the likelihood that the defendant defaults on their legal debt. The effect appears immediately after the disaster exposure and persists for more than 100 days following the natural disaster. I do not uncover significant heterogeneity in legal debt default likelihood by defendant characteristics, potentially due to a lack of statistical power. These estimates suggest that interventions designed to provide reprieve for legal debt repayment may alleviate defendants getting entangled in the criminal justice system, a phenomenon that is extremely costly economically and socially.

Suggested Citation

  • Singh, Tejendra Pratap, 2024. "The Marshalsea Underwater: Natural Disasters and Legal Debt Defaults," OSF Preprints mygch, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:mygch
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/mygch
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