Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2019, vol. 11, issue 1, 160-91

Abstract: This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap and 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap, respectively. These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.

JEL-codes: D72 J15 J16 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170329
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

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