The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. In this essay, we focus on two main issues. We start by examining how Black College students perform across HBCUs and non-HBCUs by looking at...

Many small businesses have closed, lost revenues, or downsized as a response to health and economic disruptions caused by COVID-19. But, were economic losses in the pandemic disproportionately felt by businesses owned by people of color? This paper provides the first study of the impacts of...

Whether contemporary households consider the race of their neighbors when choosing a neighborhood is controversial. We study neighborhood choice using a novel research design that contrasts the move rate of homeowners who receive a new different-race neighbor nearby to that of homeowners who...

A growing literature has documented racial disparities in health care. We argue that racial disparities may be magnified when hospitals operate at capacity, when behavioral and structural conditions associated with poor patient outcomes - e.g., limited provider cognitive bandwidth or reliance on...

This paper documents that many black males experienced a change in racial classification to white in the United States, 1880 - 1940, while changes in racial classification were negligible for other races. We provide a rich set of descriptive evidence on the lives of black men "passing" for...

Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern blacks. The...

The rate at which racial gaps in pre-collegiate academic achievement can plausibly be expected to erode is a matter of great interest and much uncertainty. In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Supreme Court Justice O'Connor took a firm stand: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of...