11:30 am–12:30 pm
Jones 303 5747 S. Ellis Ave.
Michael Sobel
Department of Statistics
Columbia University
Title: Measuring Public Institutions and their Agents: Disparities and Agreement, with Application to Asylum Decisions in the U.S. Immigration Courts
Abstract: Public institutions derive their legitimacy from the professionalism and impartiality of their agents. In order to maintain standards of conduct, the performance of an agent is often compared to the performance of her peers. But public institutions typically assign agents to different tasks, and as a result, naive comparisons may reflect the difficulty of the assignment and not an agent's. To address this concern, we develop measures of disparity and agreement that compare an agent's performance with the potential performance of randomly selected peers who could have been assigned the same set of tasks. We then give realistic conditions under which disparity is identified from the marginal distribution of each agent's actions. We also show how agreement, which is generally unidentified when agents are assigned to different tasks, can be bounded or estimated under sensitivity assumptions about the dependence between potential outcomes. Finally, we use a nonparametric Bayesian model to examine applications for asylum filed between 2007 and 2014 in the widely studied and often maligned U .S. immigration courts. Our results do not support the picture of widespread partiality asserted in previous empirical work. At both the judge and court level, we find limited disparity and substantial potential agreement.