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Identity in Journalism: Evidence from News Reporting of Violence Against Women

Does the identity of journalists shape the news, and through it, readers' behavior? I study this question in the context of reporting on violence against women in Italy. Using the universe of murders with female victims from 2006 to 2022 matched to …

Judging Disparities: Recidivism Risk, Image Motives, and In-Group Bias on Wisconsin Criminal Courts

This paper studies racial in-group disparities in Wisconsin, which has one of the highest Black-to-White incarceration rates among all U.S. states. The analysis is motivated by a model in which a judge may want to incarcerate more due to three …

Visual Justice: Racial Representation in Mugshot Coverage of U.S. Crime News

This paper studies the visual representation of crime in U.S. news and whether policies aimed at protecting the identity of arrested individuals affect crime reporting. We assemble 3.46 million crime articles published by 1,848 outlets between 2015 …

What's in a Name? The Effect of Judge-Defendant Name Similarity in Sentencing

This paper investigates how social proximity between judges and defendants influences sentencing outcomes in Wisconsin criminal courts. Moving beyond race and gender, we use name similarity as a novel measure of shared social background. We construct …