Racial Bias in Bail Decisions

David Arnold, Will Dobbie and Crystal S. Yang

No 23421, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions – a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have a higher probability of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased against blacks. To test the model, we develop a new estimator that uses the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. We also find that both black and white judges are biased against black defendants. We argue that these results are consistent with bail judges making racially biased prediction errors, rather than being racially prejudiced per se.

JEL-codes: J15 J71 K14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-law and nep-ure
Note: LE LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as David Arnold & Will Dobbie & Crystal S Yang, 2018. "Racial Bias in Bail Decisions*," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 133(4), pages 1885-1932.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23421.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Racial Bias in Bail Decisions* (2018)
Working Paper: Racial Bias in Bail Decisions (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23421

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23421

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().