Related papers: Racial Disparities in Debt Collection

We develop a method suitable for detecting whether racial homophily is on the rise and also whether the economic divide (i.e., the gap between individuals with different education levels and thereby with different abilities to generate…

How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their…

While extensive, research on policing in America has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests -- less is known about patrolling and presence. We map the movements of over ten thousand police officers across twenty-one of…

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit self-preference bias when serving as judges, meaning they tend to favor their own responses over those generated by other models. Existing methods typically measure this bias by…

Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and address social…

There is active debate over whether to consider patient race and ethnicity when estimating disease risk. By accounting for race and ethnicity, it is possible to improve the accuracy of risk predictions, but there is concern that their use…

In the United States as in other countries, political and economic divisions cut along geographic and demographic lines. Richer people are more likely to vote for Republican candidates while poorer voters lean Democratic; this is consistent…

Fairness-aware classification models have gained increasing attention in recent years as concerns grow on discrimination against some demographic groups. Most existing models require full knowledge of the sensitive features, which can be…

The use of cash bail as a mechanism for detaining defendants pre-trial is an often-criticized system that many have argued violates the presumption of "innocent until proven guilty." Many studies have sought to understand both the long-term…

The Schelling model of segregation was introduced in economics to show how micro-motives can influence macro-behavior. Agents on a lattice have two colors and try to move to a different location if the number of their neighbors with a…

A common assumption in the literature is that the level of income inequality shapes individuals' beliefs about whether the income distribution is fair (``fairness views,'' for short). However, individuals do not directly observe income…

According to environmental justice, environmental degradation and benefits should not be disproportionately shared between communities. Identifying disparities in the spatial distribution of environmental degradation is therefore a…

Propensity score plays a central role in causal inference, but its use is not limited to causal comparisons. As a covariate balancing tool, propensity score can be used for controlled descriptive comparisons between groups whose memberships…

This work studies the impact of economic inequality on the evolution of intolerance through a reputation-based model of indirect reciprocity. Results show that economic inequality is a powerful enhancer of intolerance, inducing the…

This paper examines the effects of institutional quality on financing choice of individual using a large dataset of 137,160 people from 131 countries. We classify borrowing activities into three categories, including formal, constructive…

Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, because of the lack of robust…

Measuring average differences in an outcome across racial or ethnic groups is a crucial first step for equity assessments, but researchers often lack access to data on individuals' races and ethnicities to calculate them. A common solution…

Pretrial risk assessment tools are used in jurisdictions across the country to assess the likelihood of "pretrial failure," the event where defendants either fail to appear for court or reoffend. Judicial officers, in turn, use these…

Research documents that Black patients experience worse general surgery outcomes than white patients in the United States. In this paper, we focus on an important but less-examined category: the surgical treatment of emergency general…

In the last decades, there has been a deceleration in the rates of poverty reduction, suggesting that traditional redistributive approaches to poverty mitigation could be losing effectiveness, and alternative insights to advance the number…