Inclusion
How Immigration is Changing the Black-White Earnings Gap
Rong Fu, Neeraj Kaushal & Felix Muchomba
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
We provide new evidence on earnings gaps between non-Hispanic White and three generations of Black workers in the United States during 1995-2024, using nationally representative data. Results reveal remarkable earnings advances among 2nd-generation Black immigrants, opposite to the well-documented widening in overall Black-White earnings gap. Among women, 2nd-generation Black workers have earnings higher than or equal to White women; among men, they earn 10% less at the median, but the gap vanishes at the top decile. The gap for 1st-generation Black men is shrinking, halving at the top decile; for 1st-generation Black women it shows initial widening then shrinking at the median. The native Black-White gap remains stubbornly high. Educational attainment largely drives 2nd-generation success, while residential patterns play a protective role for the 1st and 2nd generations. These findings provide critical data to set the record straight on the accomplishments of the highly successful and rising demography of Black immigrants and their US-born children.
Building Segregation: The Long-Run Neighborhood Effects of American Public Housing
Beau Bressler
University of California Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
This paper studies the long-term neighborhood effects of the American public housing program, one of the largest and most controversial American urban policies of the 20th century. I construct a new national dataset tracking the locations, completion dates, and characteristics of over 1 million public housing units built between 1935 and 1973, which I link to neighborhood-level data from 1930 to 2010. I first show that public housing projects were systematically targeted towards initially poorer, more populated neighborhoods with higher Black population shares, reflecting the program's slum clearance goals and racialized site selection politics. Using a stacked matched difference-in-differences approach, I estimate causal effects of public housing construction on neighborhood change by comparing treated neighborhoods to matched control areas within the same county based on pre-treatment characteristics that predict placement. Public housing neighborhoods experienced large, persistent increases in Black population and population shares and substantial declines in median incomes and rents. Geographic spillovers to nearby neighborhoods were limited: median incomes declined modestly, but demographic composition remained relatively stable on average. I find evidence consistent with neighborhood tipping dynamics: neighborhoods with initial Black shares in a plausible tipping range experienced substantial white population outflows in response to public housing construction. Linking to modern mobility data, I show that children from low-income families who grew up in public housing neighborhoods experienced significantly lower rates of upward mobility. These findings demonstrate that, despite intentions of slum clearance and neighborhood revitalization, mid-century public housing reinforced existing patterns of economic and racial segregation and reduced long-run economic opportunity, although effects were largely confined to project neighborhoods themselves.
Labor market sorting and the gender pay gap revisited
Anthony Strittmatter & Conny Wunsch
Journal of Population Economics, July 2025
Abstract:
This paper shows that gender segregation in the labor market has important implications for the estimation of gender pay gaps. Using Switzerland as an example, we provide evidence that there are sizable segments in the labor market with perfect sorting such that there are no comparable men and women. In these segments, covariate-adjusted gender pay gaps are not identified non-parametrically. Reliability of estimated pay gaps then requires correct functional forms for extrapolation or excluding segments of the labor market with perfect sorting from the analysis. We discuss different estimation choices within this trade-off and show how they affect estimates of unexplained gender pay gaps. We find that enforcing comparability ex ante, estimator choice and functional form restrictions matter greatly. Using a flexible semi-parametric estimator with moderate restrictions on ex ante comparability explains up to 38% more of the raw gender pay gap and results in estimated unexplained gender pay gaps that are up to 44% smaller than standard Blinder-Oaxaca estimates that account for the same wage determinants but ignore lack of overlap.
Public Financing and Racial Disparities: Does a Rising Tide Always Lift All Boats?
Tian Qiu
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025, Pages 331-353
Abstract:
This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of local government spending across racial groups. An exogenous increase in spending results in significant improvement in White, but not Black or Hispanic, labor market outcomes such as employment rate, weekly hours worked, and labor income. These effects on adults translate into their children's academic performance. White students show significant improvement in test scores, but Black or Hispanic students do not. Consequently, the achievement racial gap widens following an increase in local government spending. These results highlight the possibility that an increase in local government spending could unexpectedly increase intergenerational racial disparity.
The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in Gifted and Talented Education
Dante Dixson et al.
AERA Open, October 2025
Abstract:
The current study leveraged comprehensive data from a large school district to better understand the degree to which disproportional representation in gifted education can be explained by mean assessment score differences across racial and socioeconomic (SES) groups. The findings indicate that after controlling for nonverbal ability, cognitive ability, math achievement, reading achievement, and teacher ratings of gifted behaviors, Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds are 1.3x to 5.4x more likely to be identified for gifted services than their similarly scoring Asian American or higher-SES peers. These results were found despite Black, Hispanic, and low-income students still being underrepresented within the gifted student population. This study has important implications for understanding and improving the equitable delivery of advanced learning opportunities.
Exposure to successful women and racial minorities who defy stereotypes about their groups leads to inflated perceptions of diversity in organizations
Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, Shai Davidai & Asher Lawson
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The presence of historically underrepresented minority employees who defy negative stereotypes can have widespread organizational benefits. For example, hiring highly successful women and racial minority employees can reduce stereotypes about their groups, set a precedent for more inclusive norms, and create role models for members of stereotyped groups. Yet, defying stereotypes also makes these employees particularly salient, as their success in organizations conflicts with stereotyped expectations regarding their career outcomes. By integrating insights from the stereotype content model and the process of attribute substitution from dual process theory, we argue that the salience of highly successful women and racial minority employees can ironically have negative secondary consequences for the groups from which they hail. Specifically, we propose that exposure to successful women and racial minorities can lead to inflated perceptions of gender and racial diversity, as the salience of such stereotype defiers is used to evaluate their groups' prevalence. We further suggest that such inflated diversity perceptions can significantly hinder organizational efforts to advance the interests of the historically underrepresented minority groups in question. We test our predictions across four complementary studies: three experiments (including stimuli generated with real data for gender diversity in organizations in the United States) and a study that combines real gender diversity and gender pay gap data from organizations in the United Kingdom with experimental data on diversity perceptions.
Career track or college bound? Parental incarceration, race, and teachers' career or college program referrals
Erin McCauley
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parental incarceration is a common childhood experience with potential consequences for education, yet causal evidence of its effect in classrooms remains scarce. Using a vignette experiment with 1419 U.S. secondary teachers, I examine how parental incarceration, student race, and the interaction between the two shape teachers' perceptions and referrals for college bound programs. While parental incarceration has little effect on teachers' perceptions of programs, student race does -- teachers rate college programs as less and career programs as more appropriate when the student has a Black associated name relative to that of a White associated name. When examining stated referral decisions, evidence of teachers' differential behavior due to parental incarceration emerges. If the student has a White associated name, the college track program referral rate drops by over 50 percent when the student has an incarcerated parent relative to not having one. When the student has a Black associated name, the odds of college program referral remain low regardless of parental incarceration. Moreover, teachers are just as likely to refer the White student with an incarcerated parent to college as the Black student without an incarcerated parent. Students with incarcerated parents face differential treatment, the effect is racialized, and it should be considered a factor contributing to educational inequity.
Nudges to encourage female and racial minority students to enroll in additional economics courses
Lucienne Karszen, Seth Richard Gitter & Melissa Groves
Economic Inquiry, October 2025, Pages 1386-1408
Abstract:
This paper replicates studies on alumni visits and email interventions in Economics Principles courses to address diversity among students majoring in economics. Using a new, racially diverse sample reflecting national demographics, we find that two 15-min visits from female alumnae, mostly African American, or an encouraging email can increase enrollment in upper-level economics courses, but combining these interventions is potentially less effective. Alumnae visits increased upper-level economics course completion among Black and Latinx students by almost 12 percentage points more than they increased completion among white students. Our results suggest that alumni visits can increase racial diversity at a relatively low cost.