We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2...

We measure health inequality during middle and old age by race, ethnicity, and gender and evaluate the extent to which it can explain inequalities in other key economic outcomes using the Health and Retirement Study data set. Our main measure of health is frailty, which is the fraction of one's...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

Tax relief for child care expenses, encompassing the Child Care Tax Credit and Dependent Care Assistance Plans, is the largest federal government program in the United States aimed at helping families with child care. We examine the distributional effects of these policies among families with...

"While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions...

This essay offers an economic-history perspective of the long struggle towards macroeconomic stability. The paper is a broad analytical overview of major exogenous shocks and shifts in macroeconomic policy and institutions in Israel since the 1977-1985 great inflation through the global...

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is remarkably interdisciplinary. Archives,...

This paper applies an interpretation of how globalization and governance (G&G) interact with convergence given Cape Verde and Mozambique's particular geographical and historical contexts. We hold that development success under globalization entails, necessarily but not exclusively, positive...

Several studies link modern economic performance to institutions transplanted by European colonizers and here we extend this line of research to Asia. Japan imposed its system of well-defined property rights in land on some of its Asian colonies, including Korea, Taiwan and Palau. In 1939 Japan...

This paper assesses the role of ideas in economic change, combining economic and historical analysis with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology. Belief systems shape the system of categories ("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions (confirmatory bias), and are themselves...