The Nigerian banking system was in crisis for much of the 1990's and early 2000's. The reforms of 2005 were ambitious in simultaneously attempting to address safety, soundness, and accessibility. This paper uses published and new survey data through 2008 to investigate whether bank consolidation...

Recent research shows the negative impact of discrimination not only on the targets of discrimination but also on the economy as a whole. Racial and gender inequality can limit the entire economy's productive capacity and innovation outcomes. Using new data from NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates...

Jim Crow segregated African Americans and whites by law and practice. The causes and implications of the associated de jure and de facto residential segregation have received substantial attention from scholars, but there has been little empirical research on racial discrimination in public...

This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman 2014), we analyze...

Previous studies have found large gender and racial differences in commercialization of invention. Using novel data that permit enhanced identification of women and African American inventors, we find that gender and racial differences in commercial activity related to invention are lower than...

The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has not been extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain hypotheses about...

We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm the...

We analyze determinants of access to venture capital for Black founders of high-growth startups. We combine image- and name-processing algorithms with clerical review to identify race for over 100,000 startup founders "at risk" for venture funding. Black founders raise roughly one-third as much...