https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/cody-tuttle/Cody TuttleHugo -- gohugo.ioen-ushttps://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/racial-disparities-in-federal-sentencing-evidence-from-drug-mandatory-minimums/https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/racial-disparities-in-federal-sentencing-evidence-from-drug-mandatory-minimums/<p>This paper studies racial disparities in federal criminal sentencing by analyzing abnormal bunching in the distribution of crack-cocaine amounts recorded at sentencing. The identifying variation comes from the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) of 2010, which raised the 10-year mandatory minimum threshold for crack-cocaine from 50 grams to 280 grams. Because the new 280g threshold was set at a point with essentially zero pre-existing bunching, the author implements a difference-in-bunching design (following Kleven 2016) that compares the pre-2010 distribution of charged drug amounts — treated as the counterfactual — to the post-2010 distribution. The primary data are case-level records from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) covering all federal drug cases sentenced 1999–2015, restricted to crack-cocaine offenses (approximately 50,273 cases, of which 83.3% involve black defendants, 9.2% Hispanic, and 7.6% white).</p>