Search Results
Working Paper
Civil Liberties and Social Structure
Governments use coercion to aggregate distributed information relevant to governmental objectives—from the prosecution of regime-stability threats to terrorism or epidemics. A cohesive social structure facilitates this task, as reliable information will often come from friends and acquaintances. A cohesive citizenry can more easily exercise collective action to resist such intrusions, however. We present an equilibrium theory where this tension mediates the joint determination of social structure and civil liberties. We show that segregation and unequal treatment sustain each other as ...
Briefing
Recent Trends in Residential Segregation in New England
Residential segregation in Boston has drawn considerable attention in recent years, but much less notice has been given to the issue with respect to the rest of New England. This regional brief focuses on residential segregation between all minority groups and non-Hispanic white residents in metro areas throughout the region. New England’s population is predominately non-Hispanic white; however, the region has diversified considerably since 1990, as most of the population growth has occurred among minority groups. Residential segregation by race/ethnicity declined over that same period in ...
Working Paper
Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation
Prior research suggests that statewide affirmative action bans reduce minority enrollment at selective colleges while leaving overall minority college enrollment unchanged. However, the effect of these bans on across-college racial segregation has not yet been estimated. This effect is theoretically ambiguous due to a U-shaped relationship across colleges between minority enrollment and college selectivity. This paper uses variation in the timing of affirmative action bans across states to estimate their effects on racial segregation as measured by standard exposure and dissimilarity indexes, ...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps on Place-Based Measures of Economic Opportunity and Socioeconomic Success
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps on census tract-level measures of socioeconomic status and economic opportunity from the Opportunity Atlas (Chetty et al. 2018). We use two identification strategies to identify the long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first compares cross-boundary differences along actual HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach uses a statistical model to identify boundaries ...
Working Paper
Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions
This paper studies one of the largest spatially targeted redevelopment efforts implemented in the United States: public housing demolitions sponsored by the HOPE VI program. Focusing on Chicago, we study welfare and racial disparities in the impacts of demolitions using a structural model that features a rich set of equilibrium responses. Our results indicate that demolitions had notably heterogeneous effects where welfare decreased for low-income minority households and increased for White households. Counterfactual simulations explore how housing policy mitigates negative effects of ...
Report
Racial and Socioeconomic Test-Score Gaps in New England Metropolitan Areas: State School Aid and Poverty Segregation
Test-score data show that both low-income and racial-minority children score lower, on average, on states’ elementary-school accountability tests compared with higher-income children or white children. While different levels of scholastic achievement depend on a host of influences, such test-score gaps point toward unequal educational opportunity as a potentially important contributor. This report explores the relationship between racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps in New England metropolitan areas and two factors associated with unequal opportunity in education: state equalizing ...
Working Paper
A Racial Inequality Trap
Why has the U.S. black/white earnings gap remained around 40 percent for nearly 40 years? This paper''s answer consists of a model of skill accumulation and neighborhood formation featuring a trap: Initial racial inequality and racial preferences induce racial segregation and asymmetric skill accumulation choices that perpetuate racial inequality. Calibrated to match the U.S. distribution of race, house prices and earnings across neighborhoods, the model produces one-half of the observed racial earnings gap. Moving the economy from the trap to a racially integrated steady state implies a 15.6 ...
Working Paper
Did Racially Motivated Labor Policy Reverse Equality Gains for Everyone?
Labor protection policies in the 1950s and 1960s helped many low- and middle-wage white workers in the United States achieve the American Dream. This coincided with historically low levels of inequality across income deciles. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, policies that had previously helped build the white middle class reversed, especially in states with a larger Black population. Calibrating a labor search model to match minimum wages, unemployment benefits, and bargaining power before and after the Civil Rights Act, I find declining labor protections explain half of the rise in 90/10 ...
Working Paper
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Segregation in Higher Education
This descriptive paper documents how segregation between blacks and whites across colleges in the United States has evolved since the 1960s. It also explores potential channels through which changes are occurring, and it uses recent data to study the issue of segregation within colleges. The main findings are as follows: (1) White exposure to blacks has been rising since the 1960s, whereas black exposure to whites increased sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has fluctuated since then. Meanwhile, black-white dissimilarity and the Theil index fell sharply in the late 1960s and early ...
Newsletter
Examining Racial Wealth Inequality
The March 2022 issue of Page One Economics covers the topics of income and wealth through the lens of racial inequality. Learn the difference between income and wealth, how the racial wealth gap has endured over time, and the reasons that certain groups have been limited in their wealth-building potential.