Past research on law school mismatch has been hampered by the absence of school-specific data, thus requiring scholars to estimate individual levels of mismatch through various indirect techniques. In this paper, the authors use data on nearly four thousand students at three law schools to...

Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines; some portion is caused by purely racial factors, such as preferences about the racial composition of one’s neighborhood or...

In this project, we examine the mobility choices of black households between 1960 and 2000. We use household-level Decennial Census data geocoded down to the census tract level. Our results indicate that, for black households, one’s status as an intermetropolitan migrant – especially from an...

This paper examines how peer quality within distinct college majors affects graduation rates and major persistence. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for school-specific fixed effects, as well as very flexible application-admissions pattern fixed effects. Non-science peer quality...

One of the panels at the 2014 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law's Symposium on Educational Equity and the Constitution in the Twenty-First Century dealt with “Preferences, the Mismatch Question, and Improving the Racial Pipeline.” The four participants decided to skip...

This paper examines how the competitiveness of distinct college majors at a student’s college affects her major choice and other college outcomes. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for very flexible application-admissions pattern fixed effects to account for student unobservables,...

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) is one of the most celebrated decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Nevertheless, some have argued that it was largely superfluous, because blacks lacked the capacity to enforce their rights and white neighborhoods and institutions had other...

This paper examines whether California's Proposition 209, which led to the 1998 ban on the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of California (UC) system, lowered the value that underrepresented minorities placed on attending UC schools. In particular, we look for evidence...