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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper examines the impact of racial concordance between mothers and healthcare providers on childbirth practices and health outcomes in Brazilian public hospitals. Using a novel dataset linking patients and providers across 15 million births, we compare deliveries where providers and...

This study investigates whether employers in an online hiring experiment exhibit discrimination based on workers' accents that indicate English is not their primary language. To assess accent bias, we implement a randomized treatment design in which participants acting as employers are assigned...

This paper examines the Black-White pay gap in the United States from 1989 to 2024 using quarterly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts. Building on existing political economy research, which suggests that personal debt reduces...

The sentiment among refugees in Germany has changed significantly: Using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data from 2016 to 2023, it can be seen that refugees have been feeling increasingly unwelcome since 2018, while their concerns about xenophobia have grown since 2019. In addition, cross-sectional...

We incorporate the endogenous feedback loop at the core of the seminal Schelling (1969) model of segregation into a dynamic model of neighborhood choice and use it to study the forces that shaped racial and income segregation in the San Francisco Bay area from 1990 to 2004. Such an analysis...

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...

Drawing on data from Rounds 7-10 of the Afrobarometer survey, conducted in Morocco between 2018 and 2024 (n = 4,800), this study examines the relationship between lived poverty and attitudes toward immigrants and foreign workers. Lived poverty is measured using an index that combines the...