American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy
ISSN 1945-7731 (Print) | ISSN 1945-774X (Online)
Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
vol. 11,
no. 1, February 2019
(pp. 160–91)
(Complimentary)
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 nonblacks 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.Citation
Cohen, Alma, and Crystal S. Yang. 2019. "Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 11 (1): 160–91. DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170329Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- K41 Litigation Process
- K42 Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
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