The wage gap between African-Americans and white Americans is substantial in the US and has slightly narrowed over the past 30 years. Today, blacks have almost achieved the same educational level as whites. There is reason to believe that discrimination driven by prejudice plays a part in...

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004-2007. Even after controlling for credit score and other key risk factors, African-American and Hispanic home buyers are 105 and 78 percent more likely to have high cost...

Card et al (2008a) formalize a model of ethnic residential segregation where an ethnically mixed neighborhood is dynamically stable until its minority share reaches a threshold (the tipping point). Once the neighborhood has surpassed the tipping point, it will experience massive white flight....

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of income inequality between racial groups (racial income inequality). I find that...

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 examine whether concerns about lenders' discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records, we...

It is almost universally assumed that race is an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But as race is most often self-reported by individuals who must weigh the costs and benefits of associating with minority groups, we ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic...

In 1988, comedian Eddie Murphy created quite a stir and considerable good fortune for himself with the movie “Coming to America,” which concerned an African emigrating to America. The title of this paper is a spoof on that movie because the paper inquires about prospects for Black Americans...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

This paper uses unique panel data covering over two million repeat-sales housing transactions from four metropolitan areas to test for the presence of racial price differentials in the housing market. Drawing on the strengths of these data, our research design controls carefully for unobserved...