Over the past 40 years, the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is very little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the behaviors and outcomes of black-white...

We develop a Roy model of social interactions in which individuals sort into peer groups based on comparative advantage. Two key results emerge: First, when comparative advantage is the guiding principle of peer group organization, the effect of moving a student into an environment with...

The extent to which discrimination can explain racial wage gaps is one of the most divisive subjects in the social sciences. Using a newly available dataset, this paper develops a simple empirical test which, under plausible conditions, provides a lower bound on the extent of discrimination in...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

In settings where there is imperfect information about an underlying state of nature, but where inferences are made sequentially and are publicly observable, information cascades can lead to rational herding. Cascade phenomena may be seen in a variety of areas including technology adoption,...