Unwarranted Disparity in High-Stakes Decisions: Race Measurement and Policy Responses

E. Jason Baron, Joseph J. Doyle, Natalia Emanuel, Peter Hull and Joseph P. Ryan

No 33104, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Studies of racial discrimination often condition on endogenous measures of race or on earlier decisions that might themselves be affected by discrimination. We develop quasi-experimental tools for estimating the impact of racial misclassification on measures of unwarranted disparity, and for designing policy responses to unwarranted disparity that account for discrimination in earlier decisions. We apply these tools to the setting of child protective services (CPS), where previous work in our context has found that Black children are placed into foster care at higher rates than white children with identical potential for future maltreatment. CPS investigators misclassify 8–9% of Black and white children relative to their self-reported race, and this misclassification obscures around 24% of unwarranted disparity in foster care placement decisions. Policies that use algorithmic recommendations to eliminate total unwarranted disparity in placement rates are also meaningfully affected by earlier discrimination in CPS call screening.

JEL-codes: C26 I31 J13 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
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Forthcoming: Unwarranted Disparity in High-Stakes Decisions: Race Measurement and Policy Responses , E. Jason Baron, Joseph J. Doyle Jr., Natalia Emanuel, Peter Hull, Joseph Ryan. in Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century , Akee, Katz, and Loewenstein. 2024

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