This note seeks the socioeconomic roots of racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality, using county-level mortality, economic, and demographic data from 3,140 counties. For all minorities, the minority's population share is strongly correlated with total COVID-19 deaths. For Hispanic/Latino and...

This paper measures the housing market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s using household-level and census-tract data. State-level fair-housing' laws attempted to bar discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin in the sale, rental, and financing of...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We follow the recent sociology literature and interpret culture as a \repertoire", which allows rich cultural responses to changes in the environment and shifts in political power. Specifically, we...

We study immigrant entrepreneurship and firm ownership in 2007 and 2012 using the Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The survival and growth of immigrant-owned businesses over time relative to native-founded companies is evaluated by linking the 2007 SBO to the Longitudinal Business Database...

Asian Americans are the only non-white US racial group to experience long-term, institutional discrimination and subsequently exhibit high income. I re-examine this puzzle in California, where most Asians settled historically. Asians achieved extraordinary upward mobility relative to blacks and...

We examine racial discrimination in the New Deal by examining access to work relief. The Federal Government prohibited racial discrimination in work relief programs. However, eligibility was determined by local and state administrators. We estimate Black-white gaps in work relief access...

We quantify racial differences in the total rate of return on housing in a nationally representative sample of homeowners from 1974-2021. We develop a new method to estimate the rental value of each owner-occupied house, using a house's resale value to proxy for unobservable quality. Black and...