Background Reading

Publication Type
Networks

The principle of maximum entropy, developed more than six decades ago, provides a systematic approach to modeling inference, and data analysis grounded in the principles of information theory, Bayesian probability and constrained optimization.

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation.

Public policy in modern India features affirmative action programs intended to reduce inequality that stems from a centuries-old caste structure and history of disparate treatment by gender.

Understanding the exact connection between inequality and justice is important because justice is classically regarded as the first line of defense against self-interest and inequality.

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps caseworkers who represent children in Pennsylvania's child welfare system by recommending prospective families for adoption.

Importance: Children living in poverty generally perform poorly in school, with markedly lower standardized test scores and lower educational attainment. The longer children live in poverty, the greater their academic deficits.

We investigate how reduction of income inequality through tax policy affects economic growth. Taxation at different points of the income distribution has heterogeneous impacts on households' incentives to invest, work, and consume. Using U.S.

There is a large and growing literature on peer effects, but much less is known about the role of friendships and social relationships in student outcomes. The best evidence on the mechanisms behind aggregate peer effects suggests an important role for discipline and disruption.

The parenting gap is a big factor in the opportunity gap. The chances of upward social mobility are lower for children with parents struggling to do a good job - in terms of creating a supportive and stimulating home environment.

My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults.

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century.

Married men engage in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men, but it is not clear whether this reflects a causal relationship.

Recent decades have witnessed a double movement within the field of crime control characterized by the prison boom and intensive policing, on the one hand, and widespread implementation of new approaches that assign policing responsibilities to non-police actors, on the other.

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes.

Higher prior exposure to water-borne lead among male World War Two U.S. Army enlistees was associated with lower intelligence test scores. Exposure was proxied by urban residence and the water pH levels of the cities where enlistees lived in 1930.

We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households and with flexible housing supplies.

Combining statistical and ethnographic analyses, this article explores the prevalence and ramifications of eviction in the lives of the urban poor.

Socioeconomic disparities in childhood are associated with remarkable differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development during a time when dramatic changes are occurring in the brain.

Sociologists long have observed that the urban poor rely on kinship networks to survive economic destitution.

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime?

Wage ratios between different percentiles of the wage distribution have moved in parallel and then diverged in the U.S. in the last 50 years. In this paper, I study the theoretical response of wage ratios to skill-biased technical change and trade integration.

We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked, and 6%-9% have the same employer in adulthood.

We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked, and 6%-9% have the same employer in adulthood.

This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad cross-section of countries. We use the notion of “linguistic distances” and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results.

This article instead argues that information about inequalities in health across individuals as opposed to information about social group health differences is generally of little use to egalitarians.

Inequality is a contentious topic in economics, and its effects on individual welfare remains an open questions. We address it from the perspective of the economics of happiness. We draw from our research on the topic, based on new empirical evidence for Latin America.

This paper considers how identity, a person's sense of self, affects economic outcomes. We incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior.