We study differences in economic outcomes by perceived skin tone among African Americans using full-count U.S. decennial census data from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Comparing children coded as "Black" or "Mulatto" by census enumerators and linking these children across population...

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes. Using new micro-data on the political affiliation of business owners and private-sector workers in Brazil over the 2002-2019 period, we first document the presence of political assortative matching: business...

Stronger enforcement of discrimination laws can help to reduce disparities in economic outcomes with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States. However, the data necessary to detect possible discrimination and to act to counter it is not publicly available - in particular, data...

We examine the impact of local racial demonstrations, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, and the subsequent racial justice movement following the death of George Floyd on racial disparities in Paycheck Protection Program loan disbursements to small businesses. Using...

We characterize the conditions under which the wage distributions for two groups are consistent with a general model of statistical discrimination. We adapt this theoretical characterization to develop a novel empirical test, the rejection of which we interpret as evidence of taste-based...

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by...

Economic frictions pervade the founding, financing, growing, and exiting of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. This article considers one friction that currently affects a small, but important, set of entrepreneurs: racial and gender discrimination. I first collect facts from a large empirical...

We explore the labor market for Hispanic high school graduates in the United States by age using information from the US Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and three laboratory experiments. We find, in general, that the differences in outcomes for Hispanic and...

The U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system operates as a federal-state partnership, where states have considerable autonomy to decide on specific UI rules. This has allowed for systematically stricter rules in states with a larger Black population. We study how these differences in state rules...

Correspondence studies have found evidence of age discrimination in callback rates for older workers, but less is known about whether job advertisements can themselves shape the age composition of the applicant pool. We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard...