In-group bias in the Indian judiciary: Evidence from 5.5 million criminal cases

We study judicial in-group bias in Indian criminal courts, collecting data on over 5 million criminal case records from 2010–2018. We exploit quasi-random assignment of judges and changes in judge cohorts to examine whether defendant outcomes are affected by being assigned to a judge with a similar identity. We estimate tight zero effects of in-group bias along gender and religious identity. We do find small amounts of in-group bias in some (but not all) settings where identity is particularly salient, but even here our confidence intervals reject effect sizes far smaller than much of the prior literature.