Research Papers

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 investigated the effects of merit aid scholarship programs on the migratory patterns and educational outcomes of skilled labor, using Census data on 24 to 32-year-olds in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010.

We aimed to understand whether subsidizing higher education through merit aid can retain high-achieving students in-state and influence their long-term residency and educational attainment.

Our findings suggest that while merit aid slightly increases the likelihood of state natives remaining in-state and extends in-state enrollment, it does not significantly change the share of a cohort living in-state with a BA, questioning the overall effectiveness of such programs in altering skilled labor migration.

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 investigated how the timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and if these effects differ by family income. Tracking 6,137 children from the PSID from childhood through adolescence, we used a structural nested mean model via two-stage regression with residuals to address the joint endogeneity of neighborhood context and family income.

We aimed to understand the nuanced effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on educational outcomes, considering that these effects might vary depending on the timing of exposure and family economic resources. By identifying critical periods and vulnerable populations, we sought to inform targeted interventions and policies to mitigate the negative impacts of disadvantaged neighborhoods on children’s education.

We find that exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods, especially during adolescence, negatively impacts high school graduation rates, particularly for children from poor families. This emphasizes the need for policy interventions addressing neighborhood disadvantage and economic support for families, particularly during critical developmental periods, to improve educational outcomes and promote social mobility.

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 effects of long-term exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation by following 4,154 children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measuring neighborhood context annually from age 1 to 17.

We aimed to address the gap in previous research that typically measures neighborhood context only once, failing to account for the duration of residence and understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage.

Our findings reveal that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods significantly reduces the probability of high school graduation, with impacts larger than previously reported. For black children, graduation rates drop from 96% to 76%, and for nonblack children, from 95% to 87%. These results highlight the importance of addressing long-term neighborhood disadvantage to improve educational outcomes.

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 survey the modern economics literature on the role of neighborhoods in influencing socioeconomic outcomes, covering a range of theoretical, econometric, and empirical topics.

Studies argue that geographic neighborhood influences are crucial for understanding inner city poverty. Methodological advances in economic theory now incorporate spillover effects into microeconomic models, similar to those in growth contexts. Additionally, analyzing neighborhood effects in game theory has become a significant research area.

Neighborhood effects have been analyzed in a range of theoretical and applied contexts and have proven to be of interest in understanding questions ranging from the asymptotic properties of various evolutionary games to explaining the persistence of poverty in inner cities.