IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v137y2022i1p49-113..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches have Efficiency Costs?

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin Feigenberg
  • Conrad Miller

Abstract

During traffic stops, police search black and Hispanic motorists more than twice as often as white motorists, yet those searches are no more likely to yield contraband. We ask whether equalizing search rates by motorist race would reduce contraband yield. We use unique administrative data from Texas to isolate variation in search behavior across and within highway patrol troopers and find that search rates are unrelated to the proportion of searches that yield contraband. We find that troopers can equalize search rates across racial groups, maintain the status quo search rate, and increase contraband yield. Troopers appear to be limited in their ability to discern between motorists who are more or less likely to carry contraband.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin Feigenberg & Conrad Miller, 2022. "Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches have Efficiency Costs?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 137(1), pages 49-113.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:1:p:49-113.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjab018
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Patrick Kline & Evan K Rose & Christopher R Walters, 2022. "Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers [“Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools,”]," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 137(4), pages 1963-2036.
    2. E. Jason Baron & Joseph J. Doyle Jr. & Natalia Emanuel & Peter Hull & Joseph Ryan, 2024. "Unwarranted Disparity in High-Stakes Decisions: Race Measurement and Policy Responses," NBER Chapters, in: Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Brendan O'Flaherty & Rajiv Sethi & Morgan Williams, 2024. "The nature, detection, and avoidance of harmful discrimination in criminal justice," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(1), pages 289-320, January.
    4. Patrick Kline & Evan K Rose & Christopher R Walters, 2023. "Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 137(4), pages 1963-2036.
    5. Pauline Grosjean & Federico Masera & Hasin Yousaf, 2023. "Inflammatory Political Campaigns and Racial Bias in Policing," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 138(1), pages 413-463.
    6. David C Chan & Matthew Gentzkow & Chuan Yu, 2022. "Selection with Variation in Diagnostic Skill: Evidence from Radiologists [The Determinants of Productivity in Medical Testing: Intensity and Allocation of Care]," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 137(2), pages 729-783.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:1:p:49-113.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.