工作条件对生产率的影响：来自美国公设辩护体系的证据

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 defenders 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 mechanisms 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.