We investigate the effect of skin tone on employment probabilities in a longitudinal data set. Using an objective measure of skin tone from a light-spectrometer and a self-reported measure of race we find that over time the effect of skin tone on employment has diminished. These results hold...

The wage gap between African-Americans and white Americans is substantial in the US and has slightly narrowed over the past 30 years. Today, blacks have almost achieved the same educational level as whites. There is reason to believe that discrimination driven by prejudice plays a part in...

According to Becker's (1957) theory of taste-based employer discrimination, pure economic rents are necessary for discrimination to be observed in the labor market. Increased competition and reduced rents in the market for final goods should therefore lead to reduced labor market discrimination....

How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new outgroup change the ingroup's perceptions of other outgroups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization, in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of other minorities as in- or...

Antman and Duncan (2014, 2015) document how racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. The main contribution of our work was to show that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. A coding error was recently brought to our attention that resulted in 0.55% of...

Using a representative longitudinal survey of U.S. teenagers, we investigate how peer racial composition in high school affects individual turnout of young adults. We exploit across-cohort, within-school differences in peer racial composition. One within-school standard deviation increase in the...

In this paper I demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that the interpretation of regression estimates of between-group differences in economic outcomes depends on the relative sizes of subpopulations under study. When the disadvantaged group is small, regression estimates are similar...

Many of the positive economic trends coming out of the Civil Rights Era for black men stagnated or reversed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These changes were concurrent with a rapid rise in import competition from Japan. We assess the impact of this trade shock on racial disparities...

We study racial bias and the persistence of first impressions in the context of education. Teachers who begin their careers in classrooms with large black-white score gaps carry negative views into evaluations of future cohorts of black students. Our evidence is based on novel data on blind...

This paper exploits quasi-random variation in the share of Black students across cohorts within US schools to investigate whether interracial contact in childhood impacts the residential choices of Whites in adulthood. We find that, 20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the...