Can the exposure to civil war make people more motivated to pay taxes and (re)build the state? Our project examines this question in the context of Africa, a region where civil wars have frequently undermined state capacity. We move from the popular Tillian view of war-making as state-making to...

We present evidence for taste-based discrimination against Chinese first authors in economic citations. We utilize a gravity model of citations and interpret the bias as a negative effect of "cultural distance". After controlling for quality as well as author-, paper-, and journal-specific...

In this study, we conduct an email correspondence test to examine ethnic discrimination against males with different immigration backgrounds (Serbian, Turkish/Muslim and Syrian/Muslim) in the Austrian rental housing market. In particular, we investigate the effect that immigrant generation has...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) disproportionately burdens racial and ethnic minority populations, yet the extent to which US clinical trials reflect this burden remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic review of all 88 completed US-based Phase III AD drug trials between 1997 and 2023, using...

South Africa's education system remains shaped by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid, with persistent racial disparities in attainment despite multiple post-1994 reforms. Using wave 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study, this paper examines intergenerational education mobility across...

Effective policy implementation is foundational to development and depends crucially on a competent and committed bureaucracy. Bureaucratic failures can arise from both imperfect capabilities and incentive misalignment-dimensions of state capacity that often coexist and shape policy outcomes...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) disproportionately burdens racial and ethnic minority populations, yet the extent to which US clinical trials reflect this burden remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic review of all 88 completed US-based Phase III AD drug trials between 1997 and 2023, using...

Engineering remains a highly gendered and racialised profession in South Africa, shaped by enduring historical inequalities and the imprint of institutionalised exclusion that structures women's experiences of belonging and professional legitimacy. While women's underrepresentation in STEM is...

Decision-makers often rely on earlier actors but fail to correct for their biases. We model and measure two mechanisms: underestimating upstream bias and treating subjective information as ground truth. We link an original survey of 203 North Carolina prosecutors to their 505,787 cases....

Housing is the largest capital asset for most families. While the intergenerational mobility literature has extensively studied the income distribution, it has devoted less attention to housing, in part due to data limitations. We document 3 features of intergenerational mobility by comparing...

This paper estimates the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on household consumption, with additional analysis of labor market and income responses, disaggregated by gender and race. I find that contractionary monetary policy reduces consumption more for black than white households, with...

Empirical studies of racial wage disparities typically rely on self-reported race and treat racial categories as fixed. This paper shows that racial classification in the labor market is produced by social perception, and that modeling this perception process is essential for measuring wage...

Is income inequality in the United States primarily driven by disparities between ethnic groups or within them? The evidence reveals a striking pattern: 96% of U.S. income inequality arises from variation within groups sharing common ancestral origins, far overshadowing the comparatively small...

Using 1979-2019 Current Population Survey data, we study the effect of state and federal minimum wage policies on gender, race, and ethnic inequality. We find that minimum wages substantially reduce intergroup wage inequality at least up to the 20th wage percentile, with no evidence of adverse...

To date, there is little evidence about the extent to which teacher and principal diversity is related to the advancement of applicants to teacher and principal jobs through the hiring pipeline. We investigate this issue using novel job application and hiring data from a wide range of school...

This paper investigates the extent to which the historical legacy of apartheid laws explains contemporary misallocation and firm productivity in South Africa. During the apartheid era (1948-1994), job reservations, closed-shop agreements, and minimum-wage policies were implemented to restrict...

This paper examines how attitudes among supervisors, co-workers, and customers contribute to discrimination against sexual minorities in the workplace. A large, nationally representative sample in Chile was recruited in collaboration with a local firm. The survey employs a series of double list...

This paper addresses the conceptual gap between the expected benefits of federalism in managing ethnicity-based conflict and its actual governance outcomes in the African context. One of the main reasons for this gap is the conflation of federalism with decentralization. In response, we develop...

This paper examines the relationship between labor market power and employer discrimination, providing new causal evidence on when and where discriminatory outcomes arise. We leverage mass layoffs and firm closures as a source of exogenous job search and combine this with an exact matching...

Racial disparities within the criminal justice system continue to be a pressing issue in the U.S. In this paper, we analyze data for almost four million stops by California's fifteen largest law enforcement agencies in 2019, examining the extent to which people of color experience searches,...

This study uses survey data on small business loans granted 2022 -2023 to explore racial disparities in the terms of loans to small firms. Similar data has not been available since the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF). We find that for Hispanic-, Asian American- and Black-owned...

This report investigates the computational reproducibility and robustness of the paper "Seeing Racial Avoidance on New York City Streets" (Dietrich and Sands 2023). These reproduction efforts are part of the mass reproduction initiative for articles published in Nature Human Behaviour (NHB),...

This paper presents the first rigorous evaluation of school-based interventions aimed at reducing LGBTphobia. We focus on a classroom intervention that addresses the issue of LGBT harassment through perspective-taking and narrative exchange. Using a field experiment in France with more than...

This study examines racial and ethnic disparities in mortgage-lending outcomes across different lender types-large banks, fintech lenders, non-bank lenders, small banks, and credit unions-using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data from 2018 to 2023. By analyzing approval rates, rate spreads,...

In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting...

This study investigates the main effects and the interaction effects of race and education on entrepreneurial intentions in the pre-startup phase, using logistic regression analysis on a sample of 967 respondents from Florida. Blacks and Other Nonwhites are compared to Whites in the logistic...