Studies of racial discrimination often condition on endogenous measures of race or on earlier decisions that might themselves be affected by discrimination. We develop quasi-experimental tools for estimating the impact of racial misclassification on measures of unwarranted disparity, and for designing policy responses to unwarranted disparity that account for discrimination in earlier decisions. We apply these tools to the setting of child protective services (CPS), where previous work in our context has found that Black children are placed into foster care at higher rates than white children with identical potential for future maltreatment. CPS investigators misclassify 8–9% of Black and white children relative to their self-reported race, and this misclassification obscures around 24% of unwarranted disparity in foster care placement decisions. Policies that use algorithmic recommendations to eliminate total unwarranted disparity in placement rates are also meaningfully affected by earlier discrimination in CPS call screening.
Authors
E. Jason Baron, Joseph J. Doyle Jr., Natalia Emanuel, Peter Hull, Joseph P. Ryan
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We thank Randall Akee, Lawrence Katz, Elizabeth Linos, Mark Loewenstein, and other participants in the Summer 2023 CRIW Pre-Conference and Spring 2024 CRIW Conference for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w33104
- Pages
- 34
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- 1
- Introduction 3
- Background 6
- The CPS Setting 6
- BDEHR Methods 7
- BDEHR Findings 10
- Race Measurement and Misclassification 11
- Race Measurement in CPS Data 11
- Racial Misclassification 12
- Algorithmic Policy Responses 19
- Conclusion 25
- Identification Strategy in BDEHR 27
- Race Misclassification Decomposition 28
