Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang

No 24615, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 non-blacks 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: H1 J15 J71 K0 K14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-law and nep-pol
Note: LE PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Alma Cohen & Crystal S. Yang, 2019. "Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol 11(1), pages 160-191.

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Journal Article: Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions (2019)
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