Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay higher underwriting fees to issue tax-exempt bonds, compared to similar non-HBCUs. This appears to reflect higher costs of finding willing buyers: the effect is three times larger in the far Deep South, where racial animus remains the most...

In the racially tense late 1960s, Kinloch Missouri was a politically autonomous Black community of nearly 10,000 residents, composed of African-Americans who were free to plan and conduct their own municipal affairs by whatever means they chose to try and improve their conditions. The town was...

Assessing rent discounts implied by rent regulation is challenging because the counterfactual rents of regulated units in the unregulated market are not observed. We estimate these counterfactual rents and predict the quality-adjusted rent discount for each rent-stabilized unit in New York City...

Rent stabilization is valuable to occupying tenants because it limits rent growth. Assessing the rent discount implied by this policy is challenging because the counterfactual rents that rent-stabilized units would command in the unregulated market are unobservable. Using novel data from 2002 to...

During late 2019, reports emerge that a mysterious coronavirus is resulting in high contagion and many deaths in Wuhan, China. In just a few weeks, cases are rising quickly in Seattle, have spread to California, and the first case is reported in New York (from Iran) on March 1, 2020. Apparent...

Given the critical role of neurocognitive development in early life, this study assesses how racial differences in early-life circumstances are collectively and individually associated with racial disparities in late-life cognition. Leveraging uniquely rich information on life history from the...

Given the critical role of neurocognitive development in early life, this study assesses how racial differences in early-life circumstances are collectively and individually associated with racial disparities in late-life cognition. Leveraging uniquely rich information on life history from the...

Randomized field experiments designed to better understand the production of human capital have increased exponentially over the past several decades. This chapter summarizes what we have learned about various partial derivatives of the human capital production function, what important partial...

Education has long stood at the epicenter of the battle for civil rights. More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated schools unlawful in Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunity and achievement gaps based on race, national origin, class, and...

In this paper, I study the impact of immigrant concentration in primary schools on educational outcomes of native and migrant students in a major Austrian city between 1980-2001. The outcome measures of interest are track attendance after primary education and grade repetition. Using variation...