In-Group Bias in the Indian Judiciary: Evidence from 5 Million Criminal Cases

Elliott Ash, Sam Asher (samuel.asher@gmail.com), Aditi Bhowmick (bhowmick@devdatalab.org), Sandeep Bhupatiraju (sbhupatiraju@worldbank.org), Daniel Chen (daniel.chen@iast.fr), Tanaya Devi (tdevi@g.harvard.edu), Christoph Goessmann (christoph.goessmann@gess.ethz.ch), Paul Novosad (paul.novosad@dartmouth.edu) and Bilal Siddiqi
Additional contact information
Aditi Bhowmick: Development Data Lab
Sandeep Bhupatiraju: World Bank
Daniel Chen: Toulouse
Tanaya Devi: Harvard
Christoph Goessmann: ETH Zurich
Paul Novosad: Dartmouth College

No 637, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: We study judicial in-group bias in Indian criminal courts using a newly collected dataset on over 5 million criminal case records from 2010–2018. After detecting gender and religious identity using a neural-net classifier applied to judge and defendant names, we exploit quasi-random assignment of cases to judges to examine whether defendant outcomes are affected by assignment to a judge with a similar identity. In the aggregate, we estimate tight zero effects of in-group bias based on shared gender, religion, and last name (a proxy for caste). We do find limited in-group bias in some (but not all) settings where identity is salient—in particular, we find a small religious in-group bias during Ramadan, and we find shared-name in-group bias when judge and defendant match on a rare last name.

JEL-codes: J15 J16 K4 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2023-03-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/group-bias-india ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
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:cgd:wpaper:637

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager (publications@cgdev.org).