Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care--twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to...

In many market-design applications, a new mechanism is introduced to reform an existing institution. Compared to the design of a mechanism in isolation, the presence of a status-quo system introduces both challenges and opportunities for the designer. We study this problem in the context of...