Highlighted Publications




 

Goldman, Gracie, and Porter (2026) examine whether residential segregation helps explain why Americans rarely marry outside their racial or economic class groups. They use linked federal tax records, U.S. Census data, and neighborhood information covering millions of Americans. They find that greater exposure to people from different economic backgrounds substantially increases interclass marriage, while greater interracial exposure has little causal effect on interracial mar

Durlauf, Kim, Lee, and Song (forthcoming) examine how Black-White differences in occupational mobility have changed since the Civil War. They combine linked U.S. census records and 10 large surveys covering 1850–2021 to track occupations across generations. They find especially large gains for Black men born in 1940–1950, with changes in mobility explaining more than 80% of their shift toward non-manual work. Barriers to moving from manual to non-manual occupations also fell

Singh and Venkataramani (2026) ask whether growing hospital resource scarcity increases racial disparities in patient care and mortality. They analyze 107,224 inpatient admissions from two large teaching hospitals in the southeastern United States between 2015 and 2018, using hourly hospital occupancy to measure capacity strain. They find that as hospitals become crowded, mortality rises for Black patients but not White patients. At the highest strain level, Black patients we

Hegde, Ljungqvist, and Raj (2026) ask whether racial disparities persist in workplace promotions when employees meet objective, formula-based promotion standards. They examine administrative records for 13,721 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiners from 2001–2015, including promotion eligibility, job performance, pay, and career progression. They find that promotion-eligible Black examiners were about 20% less likely than comparable White examiners to receive timely promo

Chyn, Haggag, and Stuart (2026) examine the Reconstruction era, the decades after the Civil War when the federal government sought to expand the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans. They ask whether the Freedmen’s Bureau increased Black political progress and whether that progress triggered racial backlash. Using county-level data on Bureau offices, elections, voter registration, Black officeholders, lynchings, attacks on Black schools, executions, and later Ku Klux K

Rittenhouse, Putnam-Hornstein, and Vaithianathan (2026) ask whether introducing a predictive risk algorithm changes racial disparities in child protection decisions. They examine administrative data on child maltreatment referrals to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, from 2010 to 2020, including screening decisions, algorithmic risk scores, child demographics, and foster care removals. They find that the Allegheny Family Screening Tool reduced Black-White disparities in investi

El Khoury (2026) asks which students are most responsible for gender bias in online professor evaluations. She combines RateMyProfessor data from business and economics instructors at Arizona State University and several other large public universities with a randomized experiment involving 288 students. Students evaluated identical teaching content delivered with either a male or female voice. Female professors received online quality ratings 0.13 to 0.17 points lower on a 1

Egede et al. (2026) examined whether African American or Black race, historic redlining, and contemporary structural racism are associated with diabetes prevalence in U.S. neighborhoods and what pathways explain those relationships. They analyzed data from 15,190 census tracts across 157 counties using CDC diabetes prevalence estimates, census data, historical redlining maps, and a multidimensional measure of contemporary structural racism. They found that contemporary struct

Sacerdote, Staiger, and Tine (2025) examined whether test-optional college admissions policies help or harm high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. They analyzed admissions and enrollment data from Dartmouth College covering more than 99,000 applicants across test-required and test-optional years. Their primary question was whether withholding SAT or ACT scores affects admission outcomes. They found that high-achieving disadvantaged students often failed to

Lofstrom, Martin, and Susanto (2026) examined whether racial disparities in law enforcement stops in California narrowed between 2019 and 2023. They analyzed more than 15 million traffic and pedestrian stops reported by California’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA). They found that overall stops declined sharply after the pandemic, remaining about one million below pre-pandemic levels by 2023. The Black-white gap in police

Cordova-Ramos et al. (2026) examine how U.S. preterm birth rates vary over time by household income and whether racial and ethnic disparities persist across income groups. They analyze nationally representative Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) data covering 411,469 mother–infant dyads from 2011–2021. They find that preterm birth rates increased among households below 200% of the federal poverty level but remained stable among higher-income households. Overa

Bloom, Dahl, and Rooth (2025) examine whether the post-pandemic rise in working from home causally increased employment for people with physical disabilities. They ask whether expanded access to remote work explains the sharp increase in disability employment after COVID-19. They use U.S. Current Population Survey data from 2018–2019 and 2022–2024, combined with occupation-level measures of work from home. They find that a 1 percentage point increase in work from home raises

Dahl and Knepper (2025) examine why workplace sexual harassment is frequently underreported and whether fear of employer retaliation plays a central role. They use administrative data on sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1995 to 2016, combined with county-level unemployment data and major reductions in unemployment insurance benefits, especially in North Carolina. They find that weaker labor market conditions discourage repo

Papanicolas et al. (2025) study how premature mortality varies by race across U.S. states and what that implies for unrealized Medicare benefits. They ask whether Black and White adults differ in mortality before age 65. They use CDC Vital Statistics and CDC WONDER population data linked with Medicare Beneficiary Summary Files for 2012 and 2022. They find that premature mortality rose 27.2% overall (243 to 309 deaths per 100,000). Black adults had higher rates in both years,

Brouillette, Jones, and Klenow (2024) examine how large the Black–White welfare gap is in the United States when welfare is measured across multiple life dimensions. They analyze life expectancy, incarceration, consumption, leisure, and inequality using CDC mortality data, BJS incarceration statistics, CEX consumption data, and CPS labor data from 1984–2022. They find that Black welfare was about 40% of White welfare in 1984 and 59% in 2022, showing progress but leaving a lar

Benson, Li, and Shue (2025) study whether subjective “potential” ratings help explain why women are promoted less often than men. They use personnel data from 29,809 management-track employees in a large North American retail firm and track performance, potential ratings, promotions, and turnover. They find that women receive higher performance ratings but lower potential ratings, and that potential ratings predict promotions more strongly than performance ratings. Difference

Carpenter, Feir, Pendakur, and Warman (2025) examine whether nonbinary and transgender people experience earnings penalties compared to cisgender workers, and what explains those gaps. They use restricted 2021 Canadian Census data linked to tax records, covering earnings from 2019–2020 for adults ages 25–59. They find large earnings disparities relative to cisgender men. Nonbinary people assigned female at birth earn about 44–49 percent less in basic models and about 27 perce

Bucher-Koenen, Hackethal, Koenen, and Laudenbach (2024) examine whether financial advisors treat male and female clients differently when providing investment advice. They ask whether client gender affects fees and product recommendations, independent of actual client characteristics. Using administrative data from nearly 27,000 advisor–client meetings at a large German bank, along with client surveys, advisor surveys, and experiments, they find systematic gender differences.

Dupas et al. (2025) examine whether men and women are treated differently when presenting research in economics seminars. They ask whether presenter gender affects how often and how negatively audience members interrupt speakers. They analyze detailed data on thousands of seminars, job talks, and conference presentations, combining human-coded observations with machine learning analysis of audio recordings. The authors find that women receive about 10–20 percent more interrup

Uzzi et al. (2025) examine whether neighborhood conditions shaped by past redlining and present-day racialized economic segregation are associated with fatal opioid overdose deaths. They analyze census-tract–level data from Chicago, combining Cook County Medical Examiner overdose records with historical redlining maps and contemporary census data from 2017–2019 and 2020–2022. They find that neighborhoods experiencing high levels of disadvantage in the past and/or present had