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When first implemented, affirmative action policies are temporary measures to help underrepresented groups close achievement gaps. Nevertheless, successive governments tend to keep them in place. This paper investigates why this tends to be the case.

The authors examine the effects of the Top Ten Percent policy, which guaranteed students in the top ten percent of their high school graduating class admission to Texas Public Universities, identifying the effects on the students who were newly admitted as a result of the policy change as well as the effects on those students who were pushed out as a result of the policy.‍

The authors ask how membership in exclusive social groups affects access to top positions in the economy and society and, if so, who can join.

Human development has many dimensions that are important for life course outcomes, including cognitive abilities and socio-emotional skills. These different skills are correlated across generations and this plays an important (although not exclusive) role in the intergenerational transmission of inequality. The evidence on the intergenerational transmission of different types of skills is still scarce.

The informal sector accounts for a large part of the economy in most developing countries, comprising between 20-80 percent of the labour force and an equally large share of firms. Yet, we still know little about the overall labour market and welfare effects of trade liberalisation in settings characterised by extensive labour market regulation, weak enforcement, and informality, which characterize many developing economies. This research fills this gap by developing a structural equilibrium model of trade and informality.

The authors devise a method to simulate the impact of COVID-19 triggered lockdowns on the profits of formal-sector firms, using available corporate tax records. They focus on ten lower-income countries, for which data is typically scarcer.

This paper studies the intergenerational mobility of the children of immigrants over 130 years of US history and answers two related questions: (1) Are children of immigrants more likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of natives from similar economic backgrounds? (2) Are children of contemporary immigrants more or less likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of immigrants from 100 years ago?

How does technological change affect wealth accumulation and inequality of total (i.e. labour and capital) income over time? This paper focuses on automation – a capital intensive form of technological change.

A rapidly growing number of US cities have decided to set local minimum wages. Are minimum wages set at city level a good idea? This study examines the main trade-offs emerging from the local variation in minimum wage policies.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, housing is an important source of collateral for business loans. This paper explores the implications of changes in house prices for this sort of borrowing and for firm-level outcomes.