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This paper studies whether higher within-firm pay inequality is driven by managerial talent or managerial rent extraction and whether, ultimately, firms with larger pay disparities have lower valuations.

Racial disparities are pervasive in many stages of the criminal justice system, but are often challenging to interpret. This paper shows how the quasi-random assignment of bail judges can be used to isolate release disparities among defendants with identical misconduct potential, a discrimination measure broadly linked to legal theories of disparate impact.

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.‍

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 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.

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

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?

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.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crises (GFC), the GDP of most countries failed to recover and catch up with its previous trend. This paper studies the cause of the boom that preceded the crisis and ask whether it was sustainable, or even desirable in the first place.