Old school workplace feminization

We investigate whether consequential decisions made by judges are impacted by the gender composition of these judges’ peer group. Using the universe of decisions on juvenile defendants in each courthouse in a Southern state over 15 years, we estimate two-way fixed effects models leveraging random assignment of cases to judges and variations in judge peer composition generated by judicial turnover. The results show that an increase in the proportion of female peers in the courthouse causes a rise in individual judges’ propensity to incarcerate, and an increase in prison time. This effect is driven by the behavior of female judges. We examine the sensitivity of our findings to heterogeneous-robust difference-in-differences estimators for continuous and nonabsorbing treatments.

Here is the full article by Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, tekl.