Research Papers

Our goal is to call attention to how complexity science can add to our understanding of inequality and aid in the development of policies and interventions that might reduce it. To explore what complexity has added or can add to our understanding of inequality, we argue that the economics profession has become more expansive in the types of assumptions it makes about how people act and how the world works.

Compounded disadvantages create system of system effects where each disadvantage reinforces others, making inequality a pressing issue that nations have struggled to reduce. Given that some economic phenomena require moving in the direction of complexity economics, the failure to think systemically may produce ineffective policies and lead to misleading inferences.

Viewing inequality as resulting from interacting complex systems offers insights into its causes and solutions. A complexity lens can identify system features for lasting interventions. Adopting a complex adaptive systems perspective highlights the need to coordinate interventions across interdependent systems, deepening understanding and creating more effective policies

I outline ways to think about meritocracy, which I interpret as a set of claims about who deserves positions in schools, firms, and government. My goal is to show challenges in evaluating meritocracy. I explore how different concepts of merit can lead to different policies and consider equality/efficiency tradeoffs that arise under meritocratic rules.

Beyond its current salience, meritocracy has long been controversial among scholars. The notion of merit is contestable in ways that lead to different meritocratic rules, so an abstract belief in meritocracy may offer little concrete guidance. Meritocracy can also lead to enhanced inequality, highlighting how its pursuit can result in dysfunction or conflict with other ideals.

Claims about meritocracy are integral to policy debates and often involve claims of efficiency. Historically, meritocratic employment rules have helped individuals maximize potential, making societies more productive. However, recent critiques argue meritocracy causes social harm. Well-intended policies may falter if their implementation relies on flawed empirical or normative stances.

We examined differences in the elementary schools attended by students from high- versus- low-poverty neighborhoods and analyzed whether disparities in academic achievement are linked to these differences.

Persistent disparities in academic achievement between students from high- and low-poverty neighborhoods are widely attributed to differences in school quality. We wanted to empirically evaluate this common belief.

By 3rd grade, students from high-poverty neighborhoods show academic disadvantages compared to peers from low-poverty areas. Students from neighborhoods with poverty rates over 20% score about half a standard deviation lower on standardized reading and math tests. This gap is equal to ~5 months of lost learning. Understanding the etiology of these disparities is central to reducing them.

We analyzed textbooks from public, religious private, and home schools using computational and AI tools to measure how people, topics, and values are presented across school types.

With growing public funding for religious schools, we sought to understand what these schools teach and how curricula differ across educational settings.

Our findings reveal important differences—such as gender and racial representation—alongside shared omissions, offering insight into how education shapes values and collective memory.

We conducted a multidisciplinary analysis of Guilluy’s concept of “peripheral France” and applied polarization indices to income data at the postal code level across France’s 36,000 municipalities.

We aimed to empirically capture the territorial dimension of inequality and social unrest, particularly as it relates to the emergence of the yellow jackets movement.

Our findings highlight how income polarization aligns with the geography of poverty, offering a deeper understanding of the socio-economic roots of discontent in peripheral France.

We conducted an analysis of language acquisition behavior among minority agents in an economy with a dominant majority language and multiple minority groups. Unlike previous studies, we highlight role of conformity concerns as a key factor in shaping the language acquisition decisions of minority agents and assesses individuals’ incentives to learn another language through a cost-benefit analysis.

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language show significant variation in majority language acquisition. Data from Brock et al. (2024) show many immigrants to English-speaking countries attain only intermediate proficiency. We depart from the binary model and allow choices among full, partial, or no acquisition, each with different communicative benefits and costs.

Our findings offer insights into effective language policies in economics where multiple levels of language acquisition are present. This is significant for policy considerations, as small adjustments in language acquisition costs may unpredictably influence language acquisition patterns across minority groups.

We used the Current Population Survey and a synthetic control method to examine the impact of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend on employment and part-time work.

We aimed to assess whether the annual cash dividend influenced overall employment levels and part-time work, providing insights into the economic effects of universal cash transfers.

Our findings suggest that a universal and permanent cash transfer can stimulate the local economy without significantly decreasing aggregate employment, offering valuable evidence for policymakers considering similar programs.

We conducted a 2-year randomized clinical trial involving 4834 employees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to evaluate the effects of a comprehensive workplace wellness program on health, health beliefs, and medical use.

We aimed to determine whether such programs improve employee health and reduce medical costs, as randomized evaluations of workplace wellness program efficacy are rare.

Our study provides evidence that while the program did not significantly impact clinical health outcomes or medical use, it positively influenced health beliefs and increased the number of employees reporting having a primary care physician, offering insights for employers considering similar initiatives.

We investigated the impact of the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) on employment decisions of older Americans using a differences-in-differences design.

We aimed to understand how the AET, which reduces benefits for earnings above a certain amount, affects employment rates among older Americans nearing retirement age.

Our findings indicate that the AET significantly decreases employment rates among those aged 63-64, providing critical insights for policymakers on the labor market effects of Social Security policies.

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.