A New Look at Racial Profiling: Evidence from the Boston Police Department

Kate Antonovics () and Brian Knight

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009, vol. 91, issue 1, 163-177

Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on racial profiling using information on the race of both motorists and officers. Extending the model of Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001), we develop a new test for distinguishing between preference-based and statistical discrimination. Our test is based on the notion that if search decisions are driven purely by statistical discrimination, then they should be independent of officer race. Our results, by contrast, demonstrate that officers are more likely to search if officer race and driver race differ. We then investigate and rule out two alternative explanations for our findings. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (106)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.91.1.163 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A New Look at Racial Profiling: Evidence from the Boston Police Department (2004)
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:tpr:restat:v:91:y:2009:i:1:p:163-177

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().