Research Papers

I offer a historical perspective on meritocracy, examining the long preindustrial era. I outline the intellectual origins of the idea that “the best” should rule, from ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance, focusing on continuities and discontitnuities in how meritocracy has been understood and applied.

Meritocracy is often seen as a hallmark of modern societites, but the belief that those best suited to the task should govern dates back to classical antiquity. However, practice rarely matched theory. The persistent gap between ideal and reality is worth revisiting since the experience of history can help us better understand our own world.

A clear trait d’union links high economic inequality and meritocracy. Medieval and Renaissance thinkers understood that inheritance lets wealth inequality survive across generations, corrupting institutions and frustrating meritocratic ideals. Historical experience predicted that growing inequality transforms democratic polities into oligarchic, unmeritocratic republics ruled by the wealthiest.

The history of meritocracy is traced back to the eighteenth century, sketching the debate between Mandeville and Kant, who made the case for meritocracy, and Rousseau, who worried about its negative social effects. I argue that Rousseau’s critiques were insufficiently considered by subsequennt champions of meritocracy, and conclude with a parallel debate among the American Founders.

Meritocracy has rightly received increasing attention among scholars in recent years, but relatively little has been written about its history. Recent critics trace meritocracy’s origins only to the nineteenth century, overlooking its deeper eighteenth-century past. Moreover, Rousseau’s critiques of meritocracy have been insufficiently considered by its subsequent champions.

This eighteenth-century debate can inform our deliberations today: are meritocracy and the inequality that follows from it inflexible founding social rules, or principles subject to being outweighed by other considerations? Rousseau argued that unequal societies let the rich deprive the poor of liberty, so government’s most important task is to prevent inequality of fortunes.

I operationalize two conceptions of merit: retrospective, which is static and grounds merit in past achievement or desert, and prospective, which functionally defines merit as contribution to a social planner’s objectives. Formal economic models of student-to-school and worker-to-job assignments are used to show where the two conceptions diverge and what each demands of a policymaker.

Meritocracy is essentially underdefined, and claims about its justice cannot be assessed until the objectives being pursued are specified. However, debates over meritocratic assignment rules often treat merit as self-evident. This underdefinition critique is answered by embedding rival definitions of merit within explicit formal environments, exposing their differing logics.

Retrospective and prospective meritocrats can produce very different policies from different conceptions of merit. Prospective meritocracy pursues efficiencies unavailable to retrospective meritocracy, but demands far more information about the socioeconomic environment, so its complete implementation is harder to achieve than critics of meritocracy often assume.

I examine the interplay between incentives and embeddedness—a classic problem in economic sociology. I develop a framework of socially attenuated incentives in which embeddedness raises the relational, reputational, and identity costs of acting on financial incentives. I illustrate this model across consumer transactions, tax migration among top earners, and labor supply responses to unemployment insurance.

Economic theory expects individuals to respond decisively to financial incentives, yet empirical evidence shows their effects are often surprisingly weak. Embeddedness is the social medium through which incentives operate, shaping how they are translated into action. Clarifying how embeddedness conditions incentives, therefore becomes a central empirical and theoretical task for understanding socio-economic behavior.

The three domains presented in this essay regarding embeddedness and incentives outline a research agenda for economic sociology focused on social conditions that attenuate or reshape the force of incentives in economic life. Incentives are real and consequential, but their force depends on the social medium they operate within. Small elasticities do not refute incentive theory so much as reveal its scope conditions.

We developed a new economic framework to study the relationship between how we spend our time and our well-being. Our key insight is that while we may pursue enjoyable activities, they do not all equally contribute to happiness. Moreover, even if we understand what we enjoy, we may not fully understand what makes us happy; we learn this over time.

We sense that (i) over the past decade or two we have developed a deep undercurrent of unhappiness in the United States, and (ii) this seems to be related to the increase in time we are spending on our phones and streaming content as well as the decrease in time we are spending together. We wanted to understand how these phenomena are related.

It seems that we have a lot to learn about what makes us happy, and we hope this paper can help that process. The Easterlin paradox is indicative of our current state; we do not necessarily become happier when incomes rise. There are many other similarly fascinating empirical findings in the economics of happiness, and many of them are difficult to explain with our current models.

I distinguish retrospective meritocracy, which is static and backwards-looking grounding merit in past achievement or desert, from prospective meritocracy, which defines merit functionally as contribution to specified social objectives. Using formal social planner models, I analyze assignments of students to schools and workers to jobs, examining where these conceptions diverge and what each demands of policymakers.

Meritocracy remains underdefined, lacking specification of objectives and socioeconomic context. Yet debates over affirmative action and admissions continue invoking merit as self-evident. I answer Sen’s challenge by embedding alternative definitions of merit within explicit formal environments, revealing their differing logics, efficiency implications, and information requirements.

Alternate versions of meritocracy may or may not be socially efficient. Sequential meritocratic rules applied stage by stage across schooling can be individually reasonable yet collectively inefficient. Any claim that an assignment rule is meritocratic requires prior specification of both social objectives and the socioeconomic environment at stake.

We study the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership (BRHP) and its success helping Housing Choice Voucher recipients access opportunity neighborhoods. We document large changes in neighborhood and school characteristics for participants. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions highlight the importance of BRHP’s regional design, which allows access to all opportunity neighborhoods in metropolitan Baltimore.

The BRHP offers a model for public housing policy. Prior literature documents the benefits of counseling, housing search assistance, post-move support, and extended search times—much of it from the BRHP itself. We examine how the rental market’s supply side interacts with the program, focusing on eligible neighborhood scope, racial composition of opportunity neighborhoods, and durability of neighborhood changes.

Many cities in the United States exhibit concentrated poverty and residential segregation by race. If neighborhoods affect their residents, then this could represent an important source of inequality of opportunity. Housing mobility programs like the BRHP offer a policy for addressing this issue.

Using survey and qualitative data from Sub-Saharan Africa, we study women’s conversion to new Christian churches, leveraging this data to trace how conversion reshapes gender norms, shifts household bargaining dynamics, and redefines women’s roles within families and communities.

It remains unclear whether religious conversion reinforces or reshapes gender hierarchies. By focusing on women joining new Christian churches, this study isolates a setting where shifts in beliefs can be directly linked to changes in household roles and power.

If conversion expands women’s autonomy, religious change may quietly shift power within households even as broader social structures appear stable. These incremental shifts can accumulate, altering gender relations in ways that are uneven, contested, and not immediately visible.

We analyze intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship using microdata from seven former communist countries. By linking pre-communist business ownership of parents and grandfathers to post-communist self-employment and employer status, we measure persistence after decades when private enterprise was banned.

The mechanisms behind intergenerational entrepreneurship remain unclear because channels such as inheritance, wealth, and direct exposure typically operate together. By studying a context where these were largely absent under communism, this paper isolates whether persistence can still emerge through less visible forces like attitudes and informal family transmission.

Findings show strong persistence even without traditional channels, pointing to attitudes like risk-taking and informal family influence as key drivers. This shifts policy focus toward culture and skill formation, not just capital access, when promoting entrepreneurship and mobility.

We study residential segregation and public service access across 1.5 million neighborhoods in India. Linking census data to schools, clinics, water, and electricity, we measure how separated Muslims and Scheduled Castes are from other Indians and whether their neighborhoods have equal access. We systematically decompose disparities across various levels of government to identify where inequalities emerge.

Prior research examines inequality in large administrative units, but lack data on neighborhood-level segregation and service access. Aggregate analyses can’t reveal if people actually access services where they live. Qualitative studies suggested barriers, but systematic evidence remained unavailable. We build the first dataset linking neighborhood demographics to public facilities at scale in a developing country.

Affirmative action appears effective at district level—areas with more Scheduled Castes receive more facilities. But local allocation systematically diverts resources from marginalized neighborhoods, erasing higher-level progressivity. This creates a blind spot: policymakers using aggregate data see success while marginalized groups lack services where they live. As cities grow rapidly, these patterns may persist.