Missing Rich Offenders: Traffic Accidents and the Impartiality of Justice
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Madina Kurmangaliyeva
- Source
- BASE-Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
- Subject
- China
Inequality
Wealth and power
media_common.quotation_subject
Racial bias
Girls
Control (management)
Corporate advantage
Impartiality
Growth
Criminology
Institutions
Power (social and political)
Race (biology)
Judicial disparities
0502 economics and business
Defense
050602 political science & public administration
Justice (ethics)
050207 economics
Prosecution
media_common
Estimation
Traffic accidents
05 social sciences
0506 political science
Psychology
Buy justice
Law
General Economics, Econometrics and Finance
Criminal justice
- Language
- ISSN
- 1555-5879
Published online: 22 February 2018 This paper estimates the effect that wealth and power have on criminal justice outcomes by exploiting the random matching of drivers to pedestrians in traffic accidents. If justice is impartial, we should observe the same share of rich offenders both for poor and rich victims, conditional on location and time. Rich victims act as a control group to estimate the proportion of missing rich offenders whose victims are less powerful. I use this estimation approach on data from Russia, and find that its justice system is not impartial. The same approach can be applied not only to other countries but also to other characteristics that should be irrelevant to judicial outcomes in an impartial legal system, such as race and gender. Russian Science foundation [17-18-01618]