Essays on the economics of law, crime and discrimination

This dissertation presents work empirically investigating various aspects of the criminal justice system. Chapter one, coauthored with Chris Rohlfs, examines the judicial bail-setting process and the defendant decision to pay bail. Optimal bail-setting rules must balance the tradeoffs between costs to defendants and costs to society. This chapter develops a model of optimal bail that incorporates the cost of jailing the defendant, the private cost to the defendant from being incarcerated, the cost of crime, and the costs that arise when defendants abscond. The model is empirically calibrated using data from a randomized experiment. The randomized experiment allows the use of defendants' bail posting decisions to estimate their subjective values of freedom. Our estimates suggest that high-risk defendants would be willing to pay $300 to $1,000 for 90 days of freedom. We find the socially optimal level of bail to be substantially lower than levels currently set by judges. Aggregating nationally, we find that the total social benefit of reform would be on the order of $10 billion per year. Chapter two, coauthored with Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, is a study of the impact of defendant race on interjudge sentencing disparity, which seeks to add to the knowledge of the role of race in the courtroom.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Abrams, David S

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael Greenstone and Sendhil Mullainathan.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34509
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34509

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34509