Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country's most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an in-person survey to nearly 3,000 urban youths,...

We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children's education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Viet Nam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Viet Nam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education attainment and cognitive ability. The gap in...

Inequalities between ethnic or racial groups, defined as horizontal inequalities, are pervasive and persistent. They persist due to cumulative and reinforcing inequalities arising from unequal access to different types of capital. Affirmative action policies can provide promising opportunities...

This paper investigates inequalities across the major black ethnic groups in South Africa, accounting for 80 per cent of the country's population. We demonstrate that there is an important ethnic gap in the poverty levels of the Xhosa and the Zulu with respect to the Sotho/Tswana. We also show...

We assess the relative importance of statistical residual-based measures of discrimination in determining indigenous Australians' perceptions of discrimination in the labour market. We find that statistical measures are largely unrelated to discrimination reports among males and negatively...

The business rights pillar of the Legal Empowerment of the Poor agenda is not preoccupied with equality of outcome; it concentrates instead on equality of opportunity. This paper addresses the lacuna in the business rights literature by 'bringing outcomes back in'. Certainly, equal outcomes are...

Affirmative action, or positive discrimination favouring the members of marginalized populations, is a key policy approach for addressing group-based inequalities along ethnic, religious, and racial lines (e.g. horizontal inequalities). It is adopted in dozens of countries around the world in...

Despite the good intentions behind affirmative action (AA) policies to mediate 'horizontal inequalities' between ethnic groups, the evidence on their effectiveness remains open to debate. In this study, we conduct a systematic review of the literature with global scope, to add new clarity on...