Research Papers

We developed a nonparametric model to study intergenerational income mobility, allowing for nonlinearities and interactions among factors like race, education, and parental age. Using PSID data, we analyzed how these dynamics affect children’s economic outcomes.

Standard models often overlook complex interactions in mobility. Our approach captures how race and parental education shape opportunities, offering a more nuanced understanding of barriers to economic mobility.

Our findings reveal how interactions between parental income, race, and education create mobility bottlenecks, providing insights for policies aimed at reducing economic inequality and promoting upward mobility.

We developed new measures of intergenerational persistence using “memory curves” to track how socioeconomic origins influence mobility across generations. Using U.S. data, we analyzed how initial conditions shape transitions between occupational classes and aggregated insights to describe mobility trends in the population.

Understanding intergenerational mobility requires tools that capture the long-term influence of socioeconomic origins. By modeling these dynamics as “memory,” we aim to better explain how class persistence varies and uncover patterns missed by traditional metrics.

Our findings show that class origins often fade within three generations, but mobility varies significantly by occupational background. These insights help inform policies aimed at addressing inequality and promoting equal opportunities across diverse socioeconomic contexts.

We analyzed a generalized mobility model using administrative data from Denmark to examine the roles of family selection and locational characteristics in generating spatial heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility across nearly 300 larger and 2,000 smaller neighborhoods.

We aimed to understand why intergenerational mobility varies across neighborhoods, an essential issue for shaping economic and social policies.

Understanding the mechanisms behind spatial differences in mobility helps policymakers target interventions to improve equality of opportunity across different neighborhoods.

The article reviews two significant 2022 works on economic growth, How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, and Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong, analyzing their approaches to understanding modern economic development.

We aimed to assess how these books contribute to the understanding of economic growth by integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence with historical reasoning, offering a deeper insight into growth mechanisms.

Understanding economic growth through these complementary works helps clarify the historical contingencies that shaped modern growth, offering valuable perspectives beyond formal models.

We investigated the impact of “shall-issue” right-to-carry laws, which guarantee concealed carry permits to qualified applicants, on violent and property crime rates.

Our findings can inform policy decisions on gun control and potential consequences of changes to gun laws.

We contribute to ongoing debates about gun violence and provide nuanced evidence on the complex relationship between gun laws and crime rates.

We critically examined Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” and its arguments about rising wealth inequality.

We wanted to provide an alternative perspective on wealth inequality and assess the validity of Piketty’s claims and policy prescriptions.

We offer a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about wealth inequality and challenges some of Piketty’s central arguments.

We introduced and analyzed linear social interactions models, which capture how individual decisions are influenced by the behavior of others in their social networks.

Our goal was to understand the dynamics of social interactions and their impact on economic phenomena like cultural diffusion and collective behavior.

We provide a powerful tool for analyzing social interactions and their consequences for various economic and social issues.

We explored the limitations of dynamic policy analysis, which uses models to evaluate the long-term effects of policy changes.

We aimed to understand the challenges of using models for long-term forecasting and policy planning in a complex and evolving economic environment.

We raise important concerns about the limitations of models and emphasize the need for caution in relying on them for long-term policy decisions.

We provide a systematic analysis of identification in linear social interactions models. We develop an incomplete information game that describes individual choices in the presence of social interactions.

The theoretical models used to study social interactions are distinct from the econometric environments in which identification is studied, while empirical work generally does not systematically exploit the implications of theory and econometrics for formulating data analyses. This paper aims to facilitate the integration of the theoretical, econometric, and empirical sides of the social interactions literature.

While the proposition that individuals are subject to social influence states the obvious, the study of social influences on individual behavior in economics is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the last two decades, however, a rich theoretical, econometric, and empirical literature in social economics, has emerged.

We investigated the mixed empirical evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment and potential explanations for these inconsistencies.

Our findings can contribute to the ongoing debate about capital punishment and inform policy decisions regarding its use as a criminal deterrent.

We shed light on the complexities of measuring deterrence and highlight the need for careful consideration of various factors before drawing conclusions about capital punishment’s effectiveness.