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Working Paper
Granular Income Inequality and Mobility using IDDA: Exploring Patterns across Race and Ethnicity
We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2 recipients that we observe over a two-decade period (1998–2019). We find that income inequality and income growth patterns identified from administrative tax records differ in important ways from those that one might identify in public survey sources. The full set of statistics that we construct is ...
Report
Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students
We analyze letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates and document that letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. Female and Asian candidates are less likely to be recommended to top academic departments. Letter characteristics, especially a top recommendation, have meaningful effects on initial job placements and journal publications. The effect appears to be causal—we instrument for better letters and still estimate a meaningful impact ...