Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions / Alma Cohen, Crystal Yang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Alma.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Yang, Crystal.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24615.

NBER working paper series no. w24615

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2018.