This paper develops a new test for identifying racial bias in the context of bail decisions – a high-stakes setting with large disparities between white and black defendants. We motivate our analysis using Becker's (1957) model of racial bias, which predicts that rates of pre-trial misconduct...

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to understand algorithmic discrimination and build non-discriminatory algorithms when the outcome of interest is only selectively observed. These tools are applied in the context of pretrial bail decisions, where conventional algorithmic predictions are...