NBER Working Papers by Shamena Anwar

This paper uses data from over 700 felony trials in Sarasota and Lake Counties in Florida from 2000-2010 to examine the role of age in jury selection and trial outcomes. The results of the analysis imply that prosecutors are more likely to use their peremptory challenges to exclude younger members of the jury pool, while defense attorneys exclude older potential jurors. Having established that age has an important role in jury selection, the paper employs a research design that isolates the effect of the random variation in the age composition of the pool of eligible jurors called for jury duty to examine the causal impact of age on trial outcomes. Consistent with the jury selection patterns, the empirical evidence implies that older jurors are indeed more likely to convict. These results ...

We propose and empirically implement a test for the presence of racial prejudice among emergency department (ED) physicians based on the bounceback rates of the patients who were discharged after receiving diagnostic tests during their initial ED visits. A bounceback is defined as a return to the ED within 72 hours of being initially discharged. Based on a plausible model of physician behavior, we show that differential bounceback rates across patients of different racial groups who are discharged after receiving diagnostic tests from their ED visits are informative of the racial prejudice of the physicians. Applying the test to administrative data of ED visits from California and New Jersey, we do not find evidence of prejudice against black and Hispanic patients. Our finding suggests tha...

This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique data set of felony trials in Florida between 2000 and 2010. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random variation in the composition of the seated jury, finding evidence that: (i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member. The impact of jury race is much greater than what a simple correlation of the race of the seated jury and conviction rates would suggest. These findings imply that the application of justice ...

We propose a simple model of trooper behavior to design empirical tests for whether troopers of different races are monolithic in their search behavior, and whether they exhibit relative racial prejudice in motor vehicle searches. Our test of relative racial prejudice provides a partial solution to the well-known infra-marginality and omitted variables problems associated with outcome tests. When applied to a unique data set from Florida, our tests soundly reject the hypothesis that troopers of different races are monolithic in their search behavior, but fail to reject the hypothesis that troopers of different races do not exhibit relative racial prejudice.