Minority groups are far more likely to come into contact with the federal criminal justice system (CJS) than whites. A voluminous body of research further shows sentencing outcomes also vary tremendously for such groups. The research challenge lies in establishing whether these sentencing differentials are driven by unobserved heterogeneity correlated to defendant race/ethnicity, or whether they reflect discrimination. We add to the debate by examining the robustness of racial/ethnic sentencing gaps, by gender, when allowing for selection on unobservables (SoU). We use the Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences (MFCS) data, covering federal court cases. Three features make it amenable to examining the robustness of sentencing differentials to SoU.1First, the data covers over 270,000 federal criminal cases up for sentencing between 1998 and 2003. This allows black-white and Hispanic-white differentials to be studied. It covers cases from all 90 mainland US districts, defendants of all ages, genders, and all types of criminal offense. Second, the data contains rich information for each criminal case: defendant demographics include their age, highesteducation level, marital status, and number of dependents. Legal controls include the type of defense counsel and the federal court district of sentencing. Offense details allow us to classify offenses into 31 types. Third, sentencing guidelines are in place in the federal CJS in our study period. Such guidelines provide for determinate sentencing, mapping combinations of the offense severity and the defendant's criminal history into a specific sentencing range, as shown in Table Al. The MCFS data records which of the 258 guideline cells is recommended to the judge pre-sentencing. This effectively proxies case-specific factors the prosecution and legal counsel deem judges should factor into sentencing.
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