Who drives social change - the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

We estimate the long-run effects of marginal admission to elite public high schools on students' labor supply in the context of Mexico City's centralized high school admission system. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we compare students whose placement exam scores are just above and...

We estimate the causal effect of attending elite schools in England, Scotland, and Wales on human capital and labor market outcomes for cohorts of children from the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study. For identification, we employ a nonparametric...

Did Southern elites' economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850-1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the...

European countries paved the way for modern economic growth in the 19th century with large-scale reforms facilitating human capital accumulation. The literature has looked at the role of elites in broad education investments, but less attention has been devoted to reforms promoting workers'...

Treating development as the ability to participate in complex, non-subsistence, globally comparable activities, this paper proposes participation in elite activities as an indicator of global development. Using standardized rankings from 1970 to 2025 across domains, including sports, chess,...

Die zunehmende Vermögensungleichheit wird sowohl in aktuellen politischen Debatten als auch in den Sozialwissenschaften diskutiert. Trotz des breiten Interesses an der Vermögenskonzentration wissen wir bislang jedoch nur wenig über die größten Privatvermögen. Daher untersuchen wir die...

Rising wealth inequality is both a topic in recent policy discussion and in the social sciences. Despite the general interest in wealth concentration, we know only little about the largest privately held fortunes. To help fill this gap we analyze the historical origins of Germany's 1,032 largest...

This thesis investigates the influence of elite supervisory board members on the performance of German firms. Following the transformation of the German business landscape post-reunification, elite board members, characterized by their exceptional social capital, continue to play a crucial role....

Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences - key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences using an incentivized lab experiment with a group of future elites - Ivy League MBA...

Economic inequality remains a persistent and widely studied issue in the social sciences. South Korea provides a striking example where the top 23 business groups, controlled by ultra-wealthy, family-owned conglomerates (chaebols), have maintained significant economic persistence and resisted...

The increasing concentration of income and wealth on the national and international level is a topic that has received increased attention both in social science research as well as public policy debates. While data availability is a well-known and often-lamented problem in wealth studies,...

Inequality in college attendance is a key driver of intergenerational mobility. We focus upstream to examine how elite high-schools - specifically UK private (feepaying) schools - shape university destinations across the achievement distribution. Using linked-administrative data, we show the...

Generative AI is transforming higher education, yet systematic evidence on student adoption remains limited. Using novel survey data from a selective U.S. college, we document over 80 percent of students using AI academically within two years of ChatGPT's release. Adoption varies across...

This study investigates the extent to which U.S. universities strategically use athletic admissions to shape the socioeconomic status (SES) of their student bodies. Using a novel dataset linking NCAA roster data to neighborhood characteristics, we document substantial SES segregation across...

The trade war with China has cost US producers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars since 2018. Yet relatively few US businesses took action to oppose it. This study reports the results of an elite survey experiment on business political activity toward trade policy. Researchers...

This article investigates the relationship between patterns of elite accumulation and conflict dynamics in Mozambique's natural-resource economy, with a specific focus on the gas-rich Cabo Delgado province. Utilizing the politics of anticipation and the accumulation by dispossession and...

In 2014, the People's Republic of China (PRC) strengthened local government responsibilities for environmental protection by amending the Environmental Protection Law and strengthening its associated performance management system. Considering the limitations and inefficiencies of the PRC's...

We analyze how deterministic political competition between the elites and the so-called creative class shapes economic outcomes in a stylized region. By deterministic, we mean a case where political power has shifted from the elites to the creative class with probability one. There are three...

We use data from the Istanbul court registers spanning from the 16th-19th centuries to establish, for the first time, long-term trends in intergenerational mobility in a major premodern city. The dataset contains information on over 270,000 individuals who appeared in court in various roles,...

We analyze how a permanent shift in political power in a region that is creative a la Richard Florida affects tax policy and economic outcomes. There are three groups of individuals in our region: laborers or workers, creative class members or entrepreneurs, and the elites. The elites initially...

Drawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and...

In the 1960s and 1970s elite studies formed an integral part of the research agenda on newly independent African states. Commentators sought to predict the likely political and economic paths of independent African states based on the social backgrounds and political orientations of existing...