Disparate Treatment: Theories and Evidence

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Racial and gender disparities have been at the forefront of social and cultural discourse in the US for over half a century. This research has two distinct projects that contribute to a deeper understanding of the sources of disparate treatment and how to remedy it. The first project studies disparate treatment in the context of law enforcement. Previous research on law enforcement focuses on explaining discrimination based on observable characteristics, but this project shows that disparities in treatment need not be related to observable differences. The research develops a theoretical model in which minimizing crime may require a subgroup be policed more intensely within a group of observably identical individuals. The analysis suggests that the identity of individuals subjected to more intense policing may be rotated over time, so that over time the overall impact of policing is distributed equally. This theory can help achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the trade-off between fairness and efficiency. The analysis is also applicable to other settings such as tax auditing, and it affords comparative-statics results. The theory is used to analyze data on highway speeding and to compute the benefit, in terms of lives saved, of a marginal increase in police resources. The modeling methods developed as part of this project and the estimates produce will be useful for analyzing the effectiveness of policies that reduce unsafe driving and therefore accidents. The second project concerns match complementarities, mentoring and role model effects. These effects are often used to provide a rationale for affirmative action (itself a form of disparate treatment). While there has been much discussion in education, sociology, economics and psychology about mentoring and role model effects, these effects have proved difficult to demonstrate quantitatively partly to lack of detailed data to control for the endogenous nature of the matching process. This project will study matching effects in the context of higher education. A data set is constructed that allows estimation of the benefit of pairing students and instructors by race, ethnicity and gender. The estimation approach takes advantage of randomization in the process by which students are assigned to instructors. By gathering comprehensive data on the types of interactions that take place between students and instructors, the project also provides insights into the channels through which mentoring and role model effects take place. The goal of this second project is to establish the notion of mentoring and role model effects on a firm experimental basis. This research will provide a better understanding of the effects of disparate treatment.