Measuring and Decomposing Bias: Evidence from Corruption Complaints in Peru

(with Leonard Goff, Jonas Hjort, Dafne Murillo, and Gastón Pierri)

We use administrative data and a triage experiment with bureaucrats in Peru to study disparate treatment in the handling of citizen whistleblower allegations of corruption. We show that institutional decisions feature only limited disparate treatment, despite bureaucrats' preferences exhibiting bias against defendants with indigenous names. Through our triage experiment we are able to observe downstream outcomes of cases while experimentally manipulating bureaucrats' available information to decompose the sources of biases. We find that bureaucrats exhibit substantial preference-based bias against indigenous defendants, and that they statistically discriminate in favor of indigenous defendants, though not sufficiently to offset their preference-based bias, leading to an overall bias against indigenous defendants.