In recent years, many states, including California, Texas, and Oregon, have changed admissions policies to increase access to public universities for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A key concern, however, is how these students will perform. This paper examines the relationship...

We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics' backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father's...

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges -- which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families -- increase the socioeconomic diversity of America's leaders by...

This chapter argues that parenting choices are a central force in the joint evolution of culture and economic outcomes. We present a framework in which parents-motivated by both their children's future success and their own normative beliefs-choose parenting styles and transmit cultural traits...

We construct new population-level linked administrative data to study households' access to credit in the United States. By age 25, Black adults, those who grew up in low-income families, and those raised in the Southeast or Appalachia already have significantly lower credit scores than other...

We study the role of the English Industrial Revolution in promoting social mobility and ending the society of orders: one based on rigid social categories and regulated by inherited characteristics. We combine two new datasets on individual wealth holdings before and after the Industrial...

We estimate growth rates of real incomes in the U.S. by quintiles using the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) post-tax, post-transfer data as basis for the period 1979-2011. We improve upon them by including only the present value of earnings that will accrue in retirement and excluding items...

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the link between economic, political, and social conditions and the global phenomenon of ISIS foreign fighters. We find that poor economic conditions do not drive participation in ISIS. In contrast, the number of ISIS foreign fighters is...

Does knowledge about antipoverty programs spread quickly within poor communities or are there significant frictions, such as due to social exclusion? We combine longitudinal and intra-household observations in estimating the direct knowledge gain from watching an information movie in rural...