The Supreme Court has held repeatedly that race-based preferences in public university admissions are constitutional. But debates over the wisdom of affirmative action continue. Opponents of these policies argue that preferences are detrimental to minority students -- that by placing these...

An important criticism of race-based higher education admission preferences is that they may hurt minority students who attend more selective schools than they would in the absence of such preferences. We categorize the non-experimental research designs available for the study of so-called...

Affirmative action bans can reduce black enrollment not only by reducing black admission advantages (contracting demand) but also by reducing applications (contracting supply) from black students who can still gain admission but prefer alternative schools that still practice affirmative action....

What is inequality in health? Are economists' standard tools for measuring income inequality relevant or useful for measuring it? Does income protect health and does income inequality endanger it? I discuss two different concepts of health inequality and relate each of them to the literature on...

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to identify parents' preferences for investing in their children. The experiment exogenously varied the short-run returns to educational investments to identify how much parents care about maximizing total household earnings, minimizing cross-sibling...

We analyze how separations responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages at a large U.S. retailer. Regression-discontinuity estimates imply large causal effects of own wages on separations, and on quits in particular. However, this own-wage response could reflect comparisons either to...

Life annuities can be a valuable component of the decumulation stage of wealth during retirement. While economists argue that most retirees should annuitize, actual demand in the marketplace is low. We analyze data from two studies to determine how measurable individual differences among...

In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness (e.g., equal opportunity versus equal outcomes). In a laboratory experiment, the most common behavioral pattern is for subjects to select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante, and switch to the ex post...

We study how reelection concerns affect reciprocity by elected leaders to the voters who elected them. If showing kindness to past voters reduces the chances of reelection, will an elected leader reduce or eliminate such intrinsic reciprocity? We present a signalling model of candidate behavior,...