Testing Economic Models of Discrimination in Criminal Justice

What Marginal Outcome Tests Can Tell Us About Racially Biased Decision-Making

“…Proposition 3 shows that the converse also holds: when the race-specific MTE frontiers µ(m, r) are increasing in the treated share m, there exists an information set {R i , S i } that can rationalize the judge as acting on accurate predictions of Y * i . 6 To my knowledge this converse is novel to the recent literature on interpreting such tests, though Marx (2018), Canay et al (2020), andGelbach (2021) prove related results on how canonical taste-based discrimination yields monotone MTE functions. 7 Table 1 summarizes the possible characterizations of judge behavior from knowledge of both the slope of µ(m, r) and β.…”

“…1 As discussed below, this relates to results in Marx (2018), Canay et al (2020), andGelbach (2021).…”

What Marginal Outcome Tests Can Tell Us About Racially Biased Decision-Making

“…Proposition 3 shows that the converse also holds: when the race-specific MTE frontiers µ(m, r) are increasing in the treated share m, there exists an information set {R i , S i } that can rationalize the judge as acting on accurate predictions of Y * i . 6 To my knowledge this converse is novel to the recent literature on interpreting such tests, though Marx (2018), Canay et al (2020), andGelbach (2021) prove related results on how canonical taste-based discrimination yields monotone MTE functions. 7 Table 1 summarizes the possible characterizations of judge behavior from knowledge of both the slope of µ(m, r) and β.…”

“…1 As discussed below, this relates to results in Marx (2018), Canay et al (2020), andGelbach (2021).…”

The US Pretrial System: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Interests

“…In the context of pretrial decisions, the idea is that marginal White defendants will have higher rates of pretrial misconduct than marginal Black defendants if bail judges are racially biased against Black defendants. Recent work has clarified that outcomes can vary across groups at the margin due to Becker taste-based discrimination, inaccurate racial stereotypes (such as those modeled by Bordalo et al 2016), and potentially other form of racial bias (Arnold, Dobbie, and Yang 2018;Hull 2021;Gelbach 2021). The outcome test also captures de facto racial bias that might arise though seemingly race-neutral characteristics such as type of crime and neighborhood by allowing non-race characteristics to differ for marginal White and marginal Black defendants.…”