Why Do Budgets Received By State Prosecutors Vary Across Districts In The United States?

This paper examines the determinants of the budgets that the severely resource constrained state prosecutors of the United States receive from mostly the local governments. In doing so, this paper contributes to the existing literature, which has so far treated prosecutorial budget as exogenously given. The theoretical model of this paper provides a framework to understand the key factors involved in determining the prosecutorial budgets and provides policy implications such as a more efficient way to reduce crime is to provide the prosecutors with right incentives to work for society's best interest than to provide them with more budgets. The main empirical results of the paper are as follows.