Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches have Efficiency Costs?

During traffic stops, police search black and Hispanic motorists more than twice as often as white motorists, yet those searches are no more likely to yield contraband. We ask whether equalizing search rates by motorist race would reduce contraband yield. We use unique administrative data from Texas to isolate variation in search behavior across and within highway patrol troopers and find that search rates are unrelated to the proportion of searches that yield contraband. We find that troopers can equalize search rates across racial groups, maintain the status quo search rate, and increase contraband yield. Troopers appear to be limited in their ability to discern between motorists that are more or less likely to carry contraband. JEL Codes: J15, K42. ∗We thank the editors, Larry Katz and Stefanie Stantcheva, five anonymous referees, Ian Ayres, Felipe Goncalves, Peter Hull, Patrick Kline, Jonathan Leonard, David Levine, Dan O’Flaherty, Steven Rivkin, Evan Rose, Yotam Shem-Tov, Chris Walters, and seminar participants at USC, University of Illinois, Chicago, the Online Economics of Crime seminar, the Online Economics of Racism seminar, NBER Summer Institute, Yale SOM, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT for helpful comments. We thank researchers at the Stanford Open Policing Project for providing data on Texas Highway Patrol stops. We thank the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at Haas for providing computing resources.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Quarterly Journal of Economics

• Publication date

  2021-05-21

• Fields of study

  Economics, Political Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/QJE/QJAB018
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• What Marginal Outcome Tests Can Tell Us About Racially Biased Decision-Making

  2021cited by this paper
• An Absolute Test of Racial Prejudice

  2021cited by this paper
• Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing

  2020cited by this paper
• An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force: A Comment

  2020cited by this paper
• Measuring Racial Discrimination in Bail Decisions.

  2020cited by this paper
• Who Gets a Second Chance? Effectiveness and Equity in Supervision of Criminal Offenders*

  2020cited by this paper
• A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States

  2020influential reference
• Not So Black and White: Uncovering Racial Bias from Systematically Masked Police Reports

  2019cited by this paper
• The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

  2019cited by this paper
• Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

  2019cited by this paper
• Measuring Housing Stability With Consumer Reference Data

  2019cited by this paper
• Judging Judge Fixed Effects

  2019cited by this paper
• On Binscatter

  2019cited by this paper
• Selection with Variation in Diagnostic Skill: Evidence from Radiologists.

  2019cited by this paper
• Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops

  2019cited by this paper
• Suspect Citizens

  2018cited by this paper
• Racial Bias in Bail Decisions ⇤

  2018influential reference
• Nber Working Paper Series Human Decisions and Machine Predictions Human Decisions and Machine Predictions

  2017cited by this paper
• A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing

  2017cited by this paper
• The Problem of Infra-marginality in Outcome Tests for Discrimination

  2016cited by this paper
• Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

  2016cited by this paper
• How Dark Is Dark? Bright Lights, Big City, Racial Profiling

  2016cited by this paper
• Racial Bias in Police Investigations

  2015cited by this paper
• Heaping-Induced Bias in Regression-Discontinuity Designs

  2011cited by this paper
• A New Look at Racial Profiling: Evidence from the Boston Police Department

  2009cited by this paper
• The Economics of Discrimination

  2009cited by this paper
• Racial Profiling, Statistical Discrimination, and the Effect of a Colorblind Policy on the Crime Rate

  2007cited by this paper
• Searching for Efficient Enforcement: Officer Characteristics and Racially Biased Policing

  2007cited by this paper
• Testing for Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops From Behind a Veil of Darkness

  2006cited by this paper
• Assessing Racial Profiling

  2006cited by this paper
• Crime Minimization and Racial Bias: What Can We Learn From Police Search Data?

  2005cited by this paper
• Controlling Street-Level Police Discretion

  2004cited by this paper
• Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique of the Economics, Civil Liberties, and Constitutional Literature, and of Criminal Profiling More Generally

  2003cited by this paper
• Outcome Tests of Racial Disparities in Police Practices

  2002cited by this paper
• Racial Profiling, Fairness, and Effectiveness of Policing

  2002cited by this paper
• Nobel Lecture: The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior

  1993influential reference
• Theory and Evidence

  1993cited by this paper
• Parametric Empirical Bayes Inference: Theory and Applications

  1983cited by this paper
• Utilitarianism and beyond: On some difficulties of the utilitarian economist

  1982cited by this paper
• Utilitarianism and Welfarism

  1979cited by this paper
• Police Discretion: The Ideal Versus the Real*

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Contagion Effects of Local Government Debt Risks: An Event Study Based on the Default of LGFV's Non‐Standard Debt

  2025cites this paper
• Selection Bias and Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force

  2025cites this paper
• Algorithmic fairness with monotone likelihood ratios

  2025cites this paper
• Network Effects in Household Consumption Patterns: Evidence From Northern Ghana

  2025cites this paper
• Prosecutor‐driven reform and racial disparities

  2025cites this paper
• Turning on A Virtuous Cycle across Corporations: The Diversity Spillover Effect through Female Leadership Exposure

  2025cites this paper
• Intercropping can enhance long-term farm economic performance: Evidence from Swedish agriculture 2001–2018

  2025cites this paper
• Class Disparities and Discrimination in Traffic Stops and Searches

  2025cites this paper
• Sustainability Effects of the Uptake of More Grass‐Based Feeding Practices: Evidence From Sweden

  2025cites this paper
• Racial Discrimination in Asset Prices: Evidence From Horse Betting

  2025cites this paper
• A simple, statistically robust test of discrimination

  2024cites this paper
• Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System: Shadows of Doubt and Beyond

  2024cites this paper
• Studying Understudied Populations’ Travel Behaviors with a Machine Learning Approach: A Focus on Hispanic and Latinx Households

  2024cites this paper
• The Effect of a Pre-Arraignment Legal Representation Pilot on Pretrial Release and Criminal Case Outcomes

  2024cites this paper
• How do parole boards respond to large, societal shocks? Evidence from the 9/11 terrorist attacks

  2024cites this paper
• The nature, detection, and avoidance of harmful discrimination in criminal justice

  2023cites this paper
• The Problem Has Existed over Endless Years: Racialized Difference in Commuting, 1980–2019

  2023cites this paper
• Is There Racial Bias in the Enforcement of Primary Seat Belt Laws? Evidence from Veil of Darkness Tests

  2023cites this paper
• State recreational cannabis laws and racial disparities in the criminal justice system∗

  2023cites this paper
• Racial Discrimination in Child Protection

  2023cites this paper
• Police Discretion and Public Safety

  2023cites this paper
• Consent searches: Evaluating the usefulness of a common and highly discretionary police practice

  2023cites this paper
• Should the Punishment Fit the Crime? Discretion and Deterrence in Law Enforcement∗

  2022influential citation
• DETERRENCE, INCOME SUPPORT AND OPTIMAL CRIME POLICY

  2022cites this paper
• Racial Isolation and Marginalization of Economic Research on Race and Crime

  2022cites this paper
• An Algorithmic Assessment of Parole Decisions

  2022cites this paper
• Not so black and white : uncovering racial bias through systematically misreported trooper reports ∗

  2022cites this paper
• Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers

  2021cites this paper
• Algorithm Design: A Fairness-Accuracy Frontier

  2021cites this paper
• Separate and Unequal: Race and the Geography of the American Housing Market∗

  2021cites this paper
• Measuring Racial Discrimination in Bail Decisions.

  2020cites this paper
• The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

  2019cites this paper
• Selection with Variation in Diagnostic Skill: Evidence from Radiologists.

  2019cites this paper
• Racial Disparities in Traffic Stops

  year unknowncites this paper
• Penn Carey Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Penn Carey Law: Legal Scholarship Repository

  year unknowncites this paper
• DISPARATE TREATMENT AND OUTCOMES IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS: EVIDENCE FROM FLORIDA

  year unknowncites this paper