prisons and AIDS rates

Rucker Johnson and Steven Raphael (Berkeley) show that differences in male incarceration rates can explain much of the difference in acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) between different demographic segments in the U.S. From the abstract:

[They] find strong effects of male incarceration rates on male and female AIDS rates. ... The results reveal that higher incarceration rates among black males over this period [1982-96] explain the lion's share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection among women.

The paper was recently published in the Journal of Law and Economics. Download it here or here.

race and charitable giving

Christina M. Fong (Carnegie Mellon) and Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Harvard) run an experiment to test whether charitable giving to natural disaster victims depends on whether the donor is the same race as the victims. From their paper abstract:

We investigate the role of racial group loyalty on generosity in a broadly representative sample of the U.S. adult population. We use an audiovisual presentation to manipulate beliefs about the race, income, and worthiness of Hurricane Katrina victims. Respondents then decide how to divide $100 between themselves and Katrina victims. We find no effects of victims’ race on giving on average. However, respondents who report feeling close to their racial or ethnic group give substantially more when victims are of the same race rather than another race, while respondents who do not feel close to their group give substantially less.

This means that race does effect individual donations. However, on average, the effects cancel each other out, and no one is made significantly worse or better off from the biases.

The article is forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics. Download it here.

racial bias among NBA referees

Although this article made headlines a while back, I still want to include it on this blog. Joseph Price (BYU) and Justin Wolfers (Penn) find evidence of racial bias among NBA referees. They show that the number of expected fouls given to a player during a game depends on the player's race and the racial mix of the refereeing crew. They identify a own-race bias amongst the referees. A white refereeing crew, compared to a black refereeing crew, calls relatively fewer fouls on white players than on black players; and vice versa. Although the bias is small--small enough that it would not be noticed just by watching the games--it is large-enough to affect the outcome of a close game.

Why is this interesting? Because NBA referees are amongst the people we would expect to be least biased. If race influences the split-second decisions of the referees, then it probably also influences the split-second decisions of almost everyone else, even it we don't intend for it to.

read the article