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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 14.
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Journal Article
The Consequences of Exposure to Violence during Early Childhood
We investigate the impact that exposure to violence in childhood has on an individual?s propensity to engage in risky behaviors later in life and their probability of dying young. We document that black young males in the United States are exposed to much more violence in early childhood than their white counterparts. We also show that exposure to violence has a strong relationship with a host of undesirable later outcomes, and that relationship tends to be the same regardless of race, household income, mother?s educational attainment, or family structure.
Journal Article
The Racial Wealth Gap and Access to Opportunity Neighborhoods
Some Black households live in neighborhoods with lower incomes, as well as higher unemployment rates and lower educational attainment, than their own incomes might suggest, and this may impede their economic mobility. We investigate reasons for the neighborhood sorting patterns we observe and find that differences in financial factors such as income, wealth, or housing costs between Black and white households do not explain racial distributions across neighborhoods. Our findings suggest other factors are at work, including discrimination in the housing market, ongoing racial hostility, or ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood Dynamics and the Distribution of Opportunity
Wilson (1987) argued that policies ending racial discrimination would not equalize opportunity without addressing residential sorting and neighborhood externalities. This paper studies related counterfactual policies using an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of their child?s human capital. The return on parents? investment is determined in part by the child?s ability and in part by an externality determined ...
Journal Article
How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Economic Inclusion in the United States
The pandemic brought unusually large and novel changes to the US labor market. Some sectors lost half or nearly half of their employment; others moved their workforces to home settings. Some workers lost their jobs, some left their jobs temporarily, and some left the workforce altogether. These changes have affected different demographic groups differently. We investigate how the pandemic affected workers of different ages, racial or ethnic backgrounds, and gender and the degree to which these effects have persisted after a year of recovery.
Journal Article
Why Worry about Financial Exclusion?
Should policymakers aim to expand access to bank accounts? When financial exclusion is due to frictions that prevent banking from operating efficiently, intervention may be justified. Applying simple economic principles, we highlight possible frictions that may give rise to inefficient exclusion in the United States, and we assess their importance using insights from data and the academic and policy literature.
Journal Article
Racial Differences in Returns on Business Ownership
In this Commentary, we document entrepreneurial income and investments for households of different racial backgrounds and provide estimates of investment yields. We find that an average Black household engaged in entrepreneurial activity has a higher rate of return on its business followed by Hispanic households and white households, a circumstance which makes low entrepreneurship rates among Black and Hispanic communities appear all the more puzzling.
Speech
Why I Want You to Study Economics: Increasing Diversity, Inclusion, and Opportunity in Economics; 04-04-18; Central State University College of Business, Wilberforce, OH
Part of the Leaders, Executives, Entrepreneurs, and Directors (LEED) Program. At the Federal Reserve, we are proud of the fact that while the first two attempts at central banks in the U.S. lasted only 20 years each, the Fed is in its 105th year. But Central State is even older. Founded in 1887, the university recently celebrated its 131st birthday. Central State?s designation as a historically black college and its focus on providing a high-quality academic experience to all students are things to be proud of. They make this university a very good place for me to speak about the benefits of ...
Journal Article
Universal CSAs in Illinois: Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap
In Angela Glover Blackwell?s essay in What It?s Worth, she talks about her childhood and how she was fortunate to have access to community assets that provide ?ladders for success.? While these assets created a pathway to financial security that included college for many in her community, she acknowledges that similar ?communities of opportunity? are not the reality for many families of color. In Illinois, there are significant disparities in opportunity between majority white communities and communities of color. According to the 2016 Illinois Poverty Report, poverty rates are two to three ...
Working Paper
A Comment on 'Wealth Inequality and Endogenous Growth' by Byoungchan Lee
How does wealth inequality affect economic growth? Byoungchan Lee answers this question by developing a heterogeneous-agent model and augmenting it with endogenous firm innovation. The novel channel is that rising wealth concentration reduces aggregate demand, which gives firms a disincentive to spend on R&D and therefore leads to slower productivity growth. In this discussion, we first explain the difference in calibration strategy between Lee’s approach and the common approach in the literature, and then discuss its quantitative implications for the effect of rising inequality on ...
Journal Article
Income Inequality Matters, but Mobility Is Just as Important
Concerns about rising income inequality are based on comparing income distributions over time. It is important to remember that such distributions are snapshots of a single year, and that the same households do not necessarily appear year after year in the same quintile of the distribution. Paying attention to mobility, as well as inequality, gives us a richer picture of the income possibilities for households over time. We document changes in a measure of income mobility over the past 40 years, a period in which income inequality has increased. We find a modest level of movement through the ...