I propose a mechanism for partisan sorting and geographic polarization which is tested using the mass migration of African-Americans from New Orleans to Houston, Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to the Migration-Polarization (MP) Theory, diversity-increasing migration...

Low income high school graduates are less likely to enroll in four-year colleges than their more advantaged peers. When they do enroll, they are more likely to choose colleges with low graduation rates and higher costs, increasing their risk of leaving college without a degree and with...

We present a model of stereotypes in which a decision maker assessing a group recalls only that group?s most representative or distinctive types. Stereotypes highlight differences between groups, and are especially inaccurate (consisting of unlikely, extreme types) when groups are similar....

"Robust standard errors" are used in a vast array of scholarship to correct standard errors for model misspecification. However, when misspecification is bad enough to make classical and robust standard errors diverge, assuming that it is nevertheless not so bad as to bias everything else...

We establish five facts about the informal economy in developing countries.  First, it is huge, reaching about half of the total in the poorest countries.   Second, it has extremely low productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient, and run by...

Most policy changes generate winners and losers. Political economy and optimal policy suggest questions such as: Who wins, who loses? How much? Given a choice of welfare weights, what is the impact of the policy change on social welfare? This paper proposes a framework to empirically answer such...

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We present a model of judicial decision making in which the judge overweights the salient facts of the case. The context of the judicial decision, which is comparative by nature, shapes which aspects of the case stand out and draw the judge's attention. By focusing judicial attention on...

We show that endogenous firm selection provides a new welfare margin for heterogeneous firm models of trade (relative to homogeneous firm models). Under some parameter restrictions, the trade elasticity is constant and is a sufficient statistic for welfare, along with the domestic...