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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.

Can transport infrastructure promote long-term labor market opportunities and sever the occupational tie between parents and their children? Transport infrastructure arguably improves individuals’ economic opportunities by connecting them to employment possibilities that are farther away, and by creating better options locally.‍

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.

Recent empirical work documents significant long-run wealth-rank correlations. This is a puzzle, in that the standard macro models of wealth dynamics generate a realistic wealth distribution but cannot capture these patterns. This paper identifies identifying a parsimonious extension of the standard model of wealth dynamics to account for these novel facts on the long-run persistence of wealth-ranks as well as for the observed moments of the wealth distribution.

A determinant of aggregate productivity differences, both across countries and within countries over time, is how well resources such as capital and labour are allocated across firms. The importance of such resource misallocation for aggregate productivity is often inferred from the dispersion in average revenue products (revenues over inputs) in firm-level data. This paper proposes a methodology to correct estimates of misallocation for measurement error in revenue and inputs.

How rich are the richest Americans? A thorough answer to this question is necessary to address public concern over rising inequality, whether the distribution of resources is fair, and how policy ought to respond. This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States.

The use of machine learning in credit allocation should allow lenders to better extend credit, but the shift from traditional to machine learning lending models may have important distributional effects for consumers. This paper analyzes the effect of machine learning on mortgage lending in the US.

If disadvantaged groups move to better neighborhoods at scale, does this affect opportunity in those neighborhoods for future generations? This paper answers this question by studying the largest natural experiment in moving to opportunity in US history: the Great Migration – when 6 million southern African Americans migrated North between 1916 and 1970 to escape racial prejudice and a lack of economic opportunity in the US South.

A huge challenge for research and policy efforts to accelerate economic development is that firms in poor countries grow surprisingly slowly, making job creation in the “Global South” difficult to achieve. Why can't some firms access desirable markets?