Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African-American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white...

We present estimates of home ownership for African-American and white households from 1870 to 2007. The estimates pertain to a sample of households headed by adult men participating in the labor force but the substantive findings are unchanged if the analysis is extended to all households. Over...

In a world of imperfect information, reputations often guide the sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider two-player situations where the players meet but once. One player - the truster - decides whether to trust, and the other player - the temptee - has a temptation to...

This paper uses CPS data to analyze gender differences in black-white annual earnings trends over the 1970s and 1980s. We find that in at least two respects black women fared better than men over this period. First, due to decreasing relative annual time inputs for black males, but not black...

Black entrepreneurship has been unsuccessful in the U.S. The fraction of employed blacks that work in their own businesses is about one-third that of whites. Other measures of success such as net income, number of employees, and form of organization show large differences between blacks and...

In this paper we estimate the effects of industrial shifts in the 1970s and 1980s on the wages and employment of black and white males. We use micro Census data for 52 MSAs, and estimate effects separately by age and education group. The results show that industrial shifts did reduce demand for...

Between 1950 and 1970 the labor force participation rate of southern black males aged 16-19 declined by 27 percentage points. This decline has been attributed to two demand-side shocks: the mechanization of cotton agriculture in the 1950s and extensions in the coverage of the federal minimum...

After decades of narrowing, the achievement gap between black and white school children widened in the 1990s - a period when the labor market rewards for education were increasing. This presents an important puzzle for economists. In this chapter, I investigate the extent to which economic...

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to...