CarlyWill Sloan (Claremont Graduate University), https://carlywillsloan.com/sample-page/Racial Bias by Prosecutors: Evidence from Random AssignmentAbstract: There is much interest in understanding the extent to which racial bias drives the large racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. However, little is known about whether prosecutors exhibit racial bias, despite the widespread belief that prosecutors have more power and discretion than any other actor in the justice system. This paper uses data from New York County to test for racial bias in convictions by being the first to exploit the conditionally random assignment of prosecutors to cases. To overcome confounding factors associated with defendant and prosecutor race, I use a difference-in-differences to consider how much more black versus white defendants are convicted by white prosecutors, compared to the same difference for black prosecutors. Results indicate strong evidence of racial bias for property crimes, even after adjusting for multiple comparisons, but not for other crimes. Property crime results show white defendants have similar convic- tion rates regardless of prosecutor race. However, while prosecutors of both races convict black defendants at higher rates, the difference in conviction rates across white and black defendants is 5 percentage points (8 percent) higher for white prosecutors than black prosecutors. Additional results indicate this effect is driven by differences in dismissals and by defendants with no criminal history.CarlyWill Sloan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economic Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. Her research interests include labor economics, the economics of crime, and the economics of discriminationSelected publications:* Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls with Mark Hoekstra, revision requested at American Economic Review, 2020* Minimum Wage and Search Effort, with Camilla Adams and Jonathan Meer, NBER Working Paper 25218, 2018* The Effect of Risk Assessment Scores on Judicial Behavior and Defendant Outcomes, with George Naufal and Heather Caspers, IZA Discussion Paper No. 11948, 2018