Horizontal inequalities

The number of international students in American universities more than doubled in the last decade. Much of this increasing reliance on foreign enrollment, particularly by state universities, represents a response by higher education institutions to funding shortfalls. These students disproportionately attend colleges in small urban economies, where local housing markets largely depend on student demand. International students spend home country savings when consuming local goods and services, plausibly representing countercyclical income shocks to local economies. This study estimates the impact of international students on home prices, rents, and residential construction.

This paper introduces a novel lens through which we can view and understand the world, which is compositional inequality. Compositional inequality describes differences between rich and poor in terms of the labour share and capital share of their income.

This paper investigates how individuals weight income gaps between themselves and others in particular positions in a societal income distribution. This is crucial to understand how individuals form their fairness considerations and preferences for redistribution, as we know that people care about inequality both in absolute and in relative terms.

This paper asks what are the gaps in exposure between racial groups, and how have they evolved over time. It shows that the gap between the non-Hispanic white population and African Americans is narrowing over time, and investigates what is the specific contribution of the Clean Air Acts.‍

In the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market, encompassing 50 major cities in the US, this paper documents patterns of discrimination across US regions, and explores relationships between discrimination, segregation, and economic opportunity.

The importance of siblings and the quality of their bond for children's development have not been sufficiently explored, even though most children have at least one sibling. Policy has instead focused on stimulating interactions between parents and the target child. Understanding the role of siblings in the human capital formation process can provide another policy tool to tackle inequality.

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.

There is a wealth of evidence showing that young people’s attitudes change when they interact with people different from themselves, but little evidence for older, established professionals. This paper aims to understand the decisions of older, established professionals because these are often the people with the power to provide opportunities to others.

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.

This research uses lab experiments to find out whether common values, including equality, enhance cohesion in a society.

Using a database of four decades of research from 1960, this study finds that economics lags far behind the disciplines of sociology and political science in publishing research related to racial differences.