This paper develops a theory of political behavior in which moral values are a luxury good: the relative weight that voters place on moral rather than material considerations increases in income. This idea both generates new testable implications and ties together a broad set of empirical...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of interest groups in terms of voter representation and the interest group's campaign contributions to politicians. We uncover a robust hump-shaped relationship between the voting share of an interest group and its contributions to a...

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children...

Foster care placement is strongly associated with crime--for example, close to one fifth of the prison population in the United States is comprised of former foster children--yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of child...

Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S....

I study the selection and economic outcomes of Italians in Argentina and the US, the two largest destinations during the age of mass migration. Prior cross-sectional work finds that Italians had faster assimilation in Argentina, but it is inconclusive on whether this was due to differences in...

This paper provides the first nationally representative estimates of vulnerability to severe com-plications from COVID-19 overall and across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the prevalence of specific health condi-tions...

Disease spread is in part a function of individual behavior. We examine the factors predicting individual behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States using novel data collected by Belot et al. (2020). Among other factors, we show that people with lower income, less flexible work...

Wealth varies considerably across the population and changes significantly over the lifecycle. In this paper, we trace out trajectories of wealth across several key life milestones, including marriage, homeownership, childbirth, divorce, disability, health shocks, retirement and widowhood using...

This paper uses monthly zip code-level data on electricity disconnections to document the socioeconomic correlates of extreme economic distress among 5 million customers in Illinois. In 2018-2019, customers in Black and Hispanic zip codes were about 4 times more likely to be disconnected for...