Equality can multiply due to the complementarity between wage determination and welfare spending. A more equal wage distribution fuels welfare generosity via political competition. A more generous welfare state fuels wage equality further via its support to weak groups in the labor market....

This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...

Older Americans have experienced dramatic gains in life expectancy in recent decades, but an emerging literature reveals that these gains are accumulating mostly to those at the top of the income distribution. We explore how growing inequality in life expectancy affects lifetime benefits from...

This study examines the ethnic identity of authors in over 2.5 million scientific papers written by US-based authors from 1985 to 2008, a period in which the frequency of English and European names among authors fell relative to the frequency of names from China and other developing countries....

Increasing the diversity of policy committees has taken center stage worldwide, but whether and why diverse committees are more effective is still unclear. In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy...

We study the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams. We exploit a unique dataset of MBA students who participated in a required course to propose and start a real micro-business that allows us to examine horizontal diversity (i.e., within the team) as well as vertical...

This paper examines the problem of a college affected by both a legal ban on affirmative action in admissions and pressure to raise enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), as exemplified by UCLA, which adopted a holistic admissions process in 2006 in response to protests over low URM...

In 2017, "The Big Three" institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led American corporations to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016. Firms increased diversity by...

This paper measures diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) using proprietary data on survey responses used to compile the Best Companies to Work For list. We identify 13 of the 58 questions as being related to DEI, and aggregate the responses to form our DEI measure. This variable has low...

Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...