New England Study Group Seminar at Boston FED

     

Last week, on Tuesday, May 8th, I have attended the New England Study Group seminar hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's Research Department. Crystal S. Yang from Harvard Law School presented her research with the title "Racial Bias in Bail Decisions".

This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions – a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. Yang motivates her analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct will be identical for marginal white and marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially unbiased. In contrast, marginal white defendants will have a higher probability of misconduct than marginal black defendants if bail judges are racially biased against blacks. To test the model, Yang develops a new estimator that uses the release tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to identify the relevant race-specific misconduct rates. Estimates from Miami and Philadelphia show that bail judges are racially biased against black defendants, with substantially more racial bias among both inexperienced and part-time judges. Yang also finds that both black and white judges are biased against black defendants. Yang argues that these results are consistent with bail judges making racially biased prediction errors, rather than being racially prejudiced per se.