Research Papers

We offered a comparison between the distributional Recentered Influence Function (RIF) and the conventional Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methods. Additionally, we compared the multi-year cross-sectional Survey of Consumer Finances with the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

We tested the hypothesis that inheritance receipt explains a larger portion of the black-white gaps in net worth compared to human capital, as measured by educational attainment.

The black-white wealth gap exhibits a surge in inequality across the percentiles of the net worth distribution. It is important to determine whether the decomposition at the mean yields different results compared to the decomposition at the median or over the entire distribution.

We explored the contributions of Black economists to research on major economic and social policy issues in the United States, focusing on education, poverty, economic mobility, and public finance to identify common themes.

We aimed to highlight the unique perspectives and critical engagement of Black economists on economic policy issues, examining both individual and structural explanations for economic outcomes.

Our findings underscore the significance of diverse viewpoints in economic research, emphasizing the impact of race and discrimination, and the need for inclusive frameworks in policy discussions.

We estimated the elasticity of consumption with respect to typical labor income shocks using firm-wide changes in monthly pay, and analyzed how this elasticity varies by wealth and race, using administrative bank account data.

We sought to understand the consumption responses to typical income fluctuations and explore how wealth and racial disparities affect consumption smoothing, addressing an open question about heterogeneity in consumption responses.

Our findings reveal significant racial disparities in consumption smoothing, with black and Hispanic households experiencing higher welfare costs from income volatility than white households, primarily due to differences in liquid wealth, offering insights into economic inequality and its impact on welfare.

We evaluated hypotheses about education’s impact on beliefs about racial inequality using cross-sectional, sibling, and panel models. Analyzing data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the 1994 Study of American Families, and the 2006–2010 GSS panels, we assessed whether education promotes structural explanations for racial disparities or if observed effects are superficial and influenced by unobserved factors.

We aimed to clarify conflicting perspectives on education’s influence on racial attitudes: whether it genuinely fosters more enlightened views or if associations are superficial and due to unobserved biases. By employing different models and datasets, we sought to disentangle these complexities and provide a nuanced understanding of education’s role in shaping beliefs about racial inequality.

Our findings suggest that while cross-sectional analyses indicate education promotes structural explanations for racial inequality, sibling and fixed-effects models suggest these effects may be superficial and inflated by unobserved factors. This challenges simplistic interpretations and underscores the need for careful methodological considerations in studying the relationship between education and racial attitudes.

We examined the impact of verbal ability on racial attitudes, including anti-black prejudice, beliefs about racial equality in principle, and support for racial policies.

We aimed to test competing theories about the role of cognitive abilities in shaping racial attitudes. Specifically, we assessed whether higher verbal ability fosters genuine racial tolerance and support for equality or merely facilitates a refined, yet ultimately supportive, ideology that maintains racial inequalities.

Our findings indicate that high-verbal-ability whites are less likely to hold prejudiced attitudes and more likely to support racial equality in principle. However, they are not more inclined to support policies aimed at addressing racial inequality, suggesting that while verbal ability contributes to ideological refinement that rejects overt prejudice, it does not translate into support for substantive policies.

We analyzed how education influences beliefs about racial stereotypes, discrimination awareness, and support for affirmative action policies among whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks.

We aimed to fill gaps in existing research that predominantly focuses on white attitudes toward blacks, neglecting other minority populations.

Our findings reveal that higher education levels among whites, Hispanics, and blacks are associated with rejecting negative stereotypes and increased awareness of discrimination against minorities. However, education does not uniformly increase support for affirmative action policies across all racial groups, highlighting complex dynamics influenced by racial hierarchy positions.

We investigated the observational implications of taste-based discrimination in racial profiling, considering how biases in law enforcement decisions may manifest in observed data.

We aimed to provide insights into the challenges of identifying and addressing taste-based discrimination in racial profiling through statistical and econometric analysis.

We contribute to the understanding of the complexities involved in studying and combating racial profiling, emphasizing the importance of careful empirical analysis.

We described a framework for meritocratic and affirmative action policies from the perspective of standard economic notions of efficiency in the context of admissions to public universities.

We wanted to explore the efficiency side of admissions policies and so address the presumption that admission policies should be justified by meritocratic admissions rules.

Affirmative action constitutes a redistribution of college slots toward minority students, particularly for more exclusive institutions, and it affects a large number of minority students.

We attempted to develop a framework for the overall evaluation of racial profiling as a public policy.

We took a new approach by focusing on ethical issues that arise when profiling occurs while considering the efficacy of racial profiling with respect to law enforcement goals in a context in which law enforcement objectives represent a subset of the desiderata for public policy.

Our goal was to explicitly address the full range of implications that racial profiling has for society.

Our paper is designed to consider some of the general issues that need to be addressed in evaluating racial profiling as a public policy question. Placing the discussion in the context of efficiency/equity trade-offs, this paper discusses profiling in the context of police traffic stops where the intent is to identify drug carriers.

While there is a growing body of theoretical and empirical work on profiling, relatively little attention has been paid to integrating efficiency and equity considerations in an overall assessment.

Racial profiling continues to be a contentious issue in American society. While official policing policies have in many places banned profiling, the impact of such regulations is unknown.