Director
is the Hazel C. Youngberg Distinguished Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University. His research ranges widely within applied microeconomics, emphasizing economic history and applied demography, with a focus on racial disparities in economic outcomes.
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October 17, 2025 - Conference
April 4, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
April 1, 2025 - Article
Proximity to a community college impacts college enrollment and degree completion, particularly for minority and low-income students. Consequently, disparities in geographic access to higher education contribute to educational attainment gaps across demographic groups. In Distance to Degrees: How...
Author(s) - Eric Zitzewitz
This paper examines the problem of a college affected by both a legal ban on affirmative action in admissions and pressure to raise enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), as exemplified by UCLA, which adopted a holistic admissions process in 2006 in response to protests over low URM...
We document substantial racial disparities in consumer bankruptcy outcomes and investigate the role of racial bias in contributing to these disparities. Using data on the near universe of US bankruptcy cases and self-reported and manually-identified measures of race, we show that minority filers are...
This paper studies consumer discrimination while taking into consideration the role of competition between firms, providing one of the first large-scale comprehensive analyses of consumer discrimination and market forces. We formally model consumer discrimination, where some majority-group members...
To what extent is a worker's relative rank within their workplace a determinant of health status, conditional on income? We provide the first US-based evidence on the relationship between relative workplace rank and health status for the near population of workers in one US state. Using a new...
We examine the social construction of race during the United States' Reconstruction Era, a critical juncture between slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We show that people with the same detailed skin tone, recorded by the Freedman's Bank (1865-1874), were more likely racialized as White or Mulatto by...
Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled in segregated units and received little formal training. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role...
This paper studies the effects of the largest residential racial desegregation initiative in U.S. history, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, Gautreaux moved thousands of Black families into predominantly white neighborhoods to support racial and economic...
We study racial differences in internal migration responses to one of the most severe climatic shocks in US historythe drought of the 1930s. Using data from the 1940 census on 65 million adults, we find that individuals exposed to more severe drought between 1935 and 1940 were more likely to make an...
One explanation of the gender wage gap is taste discrimination, as in Becker (1957). We test for taste discrimination by constructing a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. We findsurprisingly, in our viewthat misogyny is an...
We construct a framework that defines optimal outcomes in criminal courts, and we use this framework to interpret and organize the existing literature on racial disparities in pretrial detention, sentencing, and community corrections outcomes. Existing research indicates that some actors within...
In the presence of segregation and discrimination during the late 19th and early 20th century, many African American men changed their racial identity and passed for white. Previous studies have suggested that this activity was associated with increases in income and socioeconomic status despite the...
Author(s) - Jarod T. Apperson, A. Nayena Blankson, Francesina Jackson, Angelino Viceisza, Bruce Wade & Jimmeka Guillory Wright
Roughly 25 percent of first-year college students do not return for a second year. This has led to a range of policies and interventions aimed at increasing college performance, persistence, and graduation. In this article, we assess whether cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) has the potential to...
We study how preferences over the demographic composition of co-patrons affects income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish demographic preferences from tastes for other venue attributes, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: preferences for high...
We present new and rich evidence on intersectional discrimination in labor markets, focusing on wages in the traditional residual wage differential approach to discrimination. We interpret intersectional discrimination in the framework of interactions, in which discrimination along two intersecting...
In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting quasi-random...
How can we use the novel capacities of large language models (LLMs) in empirical research? And how can we do so while accounting for their limitations, which are themselves only poorly understood? We develop an econometric framework to answer this question that distinguishes between two types of...
The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with over seven million admissions to jails each year. Incarcerated individuals are the only group in the U.S. that have a constitutional right to receiving "reasonably adequate" health care. Yet, there is little oversight and funding...
Time Consistent Infrastructure Investments: Optimal Flood Protection Policies in Spatial Equilibrium
Place-based investments can have unintended general equilibrium effects and face challenges of time inconsistency. This paper simulates the granular impact of alternative spatial and temporal designs of such investments, using Quantitative Spatial Models where the strategy of the policymaker is...
Leveraging rich data on the universe of Texas high school graduates, we estimate how the relationship between geographic access to public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions and postsecondary outcomes varies across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We find that students are...
Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which...
Given the use of an individuals arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, policymakers have enacted criminal justice reform measures. This paper examines which officers are making convictionless arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty), and...
We study racial and gender disparities in entrepreneurial activity through the lens of a Roy model, focusing on the distinction between idea generation and execution. Using nationally representative sur-vey data, we find that Black and Hispanic individuals demonstrate higher entrepreneurial...
In the past two years, 25 states have enacted executive orders and legislation to reduce unnecessary degree requirements for public sector jobs, signaling a shift toward skill-based hiring. This paper examines the impact of these policy commitments on public perceptions, media coverage, and job...
December 1, 2024 - Article
Affirmative action policies, which give preference in college admissions to students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups, have been a subject of debate and legal scrutiny in the US. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard...
We develop a model of discrimination that allows us to interpret observed differences in outcomes across groups, conditional on passing a screening test, as taste-based (employer,) statistical, or customer discrimination. We apply this framework to investigate the nature of non-white...
Author(s) - Christopher R. Knittel, Donald MacKenzie, Michiko Namazu, Bora Ozaltun, Dan Svirsky & Stephen Zoepf
We test whether more information about customers decreases racial bias. Our setting is the market for shared mobility services. Prior work by Ge et al. (2020) found that Uber drivers are two times more likely to cancel a ride if the passengers name is one used predominantly by African Americans. In...
Black children in the U.S. are twice as likely as white children to spend time in foster care. Such racial disparities raise concerns of discrimination, but might also reflect differences in the underlying need for intervention. This paper estimates unwarranted disparities (UDs)racial differences in...
This paper proposes some new measures of intergenerational persistence based on the idea of characterizing the memory of origin in the stochastic process that links the socioeconomic classes of parents and children. We introduce memory curves for all future generations given any initial condition of...
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of minimum wages on blacks, and on the relative impacts on blacks vs. whites. We study not only teenagers the focus of much of the minimum wage-employment literature but also other low-skill groups. We focus primarily on employment, which has been...
We study funding gaps on Kickstarter across multiple ethnic groups from 2009-2021. Scaling the concept of racially salient events, we quantify the close co-movement of minority funding gaps in crowd-funding to inflamed political rhetoric surrounding migration. The funding gap for minorities more...
Studies of racial discrimination often condition on endogenous measures of race or on earlier decisions that might themselves be affected by discrimination. We develop quasi-experimental tools for estimating the impact of racial misclassification on measures of unwarranted disparity, and for...
U.S. securities regulators have sought to protect investors in private markets by forcing issuers to fundraise via personal networks. Focusing on VC fund managers, we study a 2013 policy permitting public advertising in private markets (506(c)). Less well-networked and underrepresented managers...
In contrast to earlier United States policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the Indian Problem, the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually-titled plots of land rather than...
This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, and wealth by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 19792016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. Historically, the relationship...
Author(s) - Elizabeth Ananat
I discuss recent books offering differing explanations for persistent U.S. poverty. Desmond (2023) argues that aid to low-income Americans is captured by more powerful market actors. I contextualize this concern as about incidence and consider both policies for changing incidence (by changing...
The Perry Preschool Project, the longest-running experimental study of an early childhood education program, demonstrates how such interventions can yield long-term personal, societal, and intergenerational benefits for disadvantaged populations. The evidence is clear: investments in high-quality...
Author(s) - Christopher J. Ruhm
Increases in deaths of despair have been hypothesized to provide an important source of the adverse mortality experiences of some groups at the beginning of the 21st century. This study examines this possibility and uncovers the following primary findings. First, mental health deteriorated between...
This study examines the relationship between racial segregation and environmental equity in Pittsburgh from 1910 to 1940. Utilizing newly digitized historical data on the spatial distribution of air pollution in what was likely America's most polluted city, we analyze how racial disparities in...
One of the arguments increasingly made to support large minimum wage increases is that they decrease wage or earnings gaps for minorities or women (e.g., Derenoncourt and Montialoux, 2021). The argument is often made with particular reference to higher tipped minimum wages for restaurant workers,...
We quantify racial differences in the total rate of return on housing in a nationally representative sample of homeowners from 1974-2021. We develop a new method to estimate the rental value of each owner-occupied house, using a house's resale value to proxy for unobservable quality. Black and...
Black mothers with unscheduled deliveries are 25 percent more likely to deliver by C-section than non-Hispanic white mothers. The gap is highest for mothers with the lowest risk and is reduced by only four percentage points when controlling for observed medical risk factors, sociodemographic...
Author(s) - Taha Choukhmane, Jorge Colmenares, Cormac O'Dea, Jonathan L. Rothbaum & Lawrence D.W. Schmidt
U.S. employers and the federal government devote over 1.5% of GDP annually toward promoting defined contribution (DC) retirement saving. Using a new employer-employee linked dataset covering millions of Americans, we show that this system of saving incentives benefits White workers and those with...
Political discourse has often stoked racial and ethnic divisions, raising the possibility that individuals self-reported racial and ethnic identities may change in response to an increasingly hostile environment. We shed light on this question by measuring the impacts of local support for...
We examine new datasets of records linked between the 1940 and 1950 US censuses to characterize selection into military service during World War II and to analyze differences in veterans post-war educational and labor market outcomes relative to nonveterans. Motivated by potentially disparate...
This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the...
Author(s) - Christa N. Gibbs, Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Donghoon Lee, Scott T. Nelson, Wilbert H. van der Klaauw & Jialan Wang
Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to construct...
We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income...
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