College attendance and completion in the U.S. are strongly correlated with race and socioeconomic background. Do public postsecondary institutions themselves exacerbate pre-college disparities, or reduce them? We address this question using longitudinal data linking the records of students at...

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is potentially endogenous because...

We empirically test whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) engages in ethnic prejudice against Chinese in its prosecutorial decisions under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996. Using data of EEA cases from November 1996 to June 2021, we conduct Becker's outcome test for evidence of ethnic...

I study how people understand and reason about trade and which factors shape their views on trade policy. I design and run large-scale surveys and experiments in the U.S. to elicit respondents' knowledge and understanding of trade. I also ask about their perceived economic gains and...

Networking and the giving and receiving of advice outside of one's own firm are important features of entrepreneurship and innovation. We study how immigrants and natives utilize the potential networking opportunities provided by CIC, formerly known as the Cambridge Innovation Center. CIC is...

The multi-decade growth and spatial dispersion of immigrant families in the United States has shifted the composition of US schools, reshaping the group of peers with whom students age through adolescence. US-born students are more likely to have foreign-born peers and foreign-born students are...

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among...

The racial and ethnic composition of home buyers varies across geographic locations. For example, Asians and Hispanics are much more likely to buy homes in California than Blacks and Blacks are more likely to buy homes in Georgia than other demographic groups. Home prices grow at different rates...

This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one's own group...