Black-Owned Firms, Financial Constraints, and the Firm Size Gap

By J. David Brown, John S. Earle, Mee Jung Kim, Kyung Min Lee, and Jared Wold

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We document the smaller average employment size and lower financial access of Black-owned businesses compared to White-owned businesses. Controlling for other characteristics, we find that observed differences in finance account for 60 percent of the 11.3...

The 2021 Paycheck Protection Program Reboot: Loan Disbursement to Employer and Nonemployer Businesses in Minority Communities

By Robert Fairlie and Frank M. Fossen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We analyze how Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds were disbursed to minority communities in the $278 billion rebooted program in January 2021. Using administrative microdata covering all PPP loans, we find strong positive relationships between PPP lo...

States and Power in Africa by Jeffrey I. Herbst: A Review Essay

By James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

Herbst argues that Africa is plagued by "state failure" to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement, and infrastructure. Herbst has provided a bold, historically informed theoretical analysis, essential...

Easier to Start, Harder to Succeed: Barriers to Black Entrepreneurship since the Great Recession

By Pedro Bento and Sunju Hwang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We use a structural framework to interpret trends related to Black entrepreneurship, and infer how race-specific barriers faced by Black entrepreneurs have changed since the Great Recession. While all barriers declined consistently before the Recession, w...

Using Technology to Tackle Discrimination in Lending: The Role of Fintechs in the Paycheck Protection Program

By Rachel M.B. Atkins, Lisa Cook, and Robert Seamans

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We assess the role of fintech firms in loans made through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a US government policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic that provided loans to small businesses. We argue that fintech firms' reliance on technology rather t...

Self-Reporting Race in Small Business Loans: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Evidence from PPP Loans in Durham, NC

By Raffi E. García and William A. Darity Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using hand-collected race information about small business owners that concealed their race in Paycheck Protection Program applications, we find evidence that not disclosing race information in loan applications pays off significantly. Our results show th...

Inequality in the Effects of Primary School Closures Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from the Netherlands

By Carla Haelermans, Madelon Jacobs, Rolf van der Velden, Lynn van Vugt, and Sanne van Wetten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using a large dataset of around 500,000 students from about 1,900 schools, this paper shows the effect of two school closures and 1.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic on standardized learning growth for mathematics, reading, and spelling in Dutch primary ed...

More than Shelter: The Effect of Rental Eviction Moratoria on Household Well-Being

By Xudong An, Stuart A. Gabriel, and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We investigate the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 rental eviction moratoria on household well-being. Analysis of new panel data indicates that eviction moratoria reduced evictions and resulted in redirection of scarce household financial resources to immedia...

COVID-19 and Its Impact on Minority-Owned Banks

By Salvador Contreras and Amit Ghosh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we examine the effect of COVID-19 on various performance metrics of minority-owned banks relative to peer banks. We find little evidence of worsening performance of minority-owned banks, except for Asian-ow...

Identity during a Crisis: COVID-19 and Ethnic Divisions in the United States

By Jakina Debnam Guzman, Marie Christelle Mabeu, and Roland Pongou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

During a crisis, does ethnic composition influence policy efficiency? How do the effects of ethnic divisions differ from those of ethnic diversity? Using the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that ethnic divisions, rather than diversity, significantl...

Laissez-Faire, Social Networks, and Race in a Pandemic

By Roland Pongou, Guy Tchuente, and Jean-Baptiste Tondji

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We study the effects of race, network centrality, and policies that tolerate some level of virus spread (laissez-faire) on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes in the United States. Our analysis uses unique data on nursing home networks and calibration-based ...

Fixing Errors in a SNAP: Addressing SNAP Underreporting to Evaluate Poverty

By Liana Fox, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Kathryn Shantz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Since 1969, the official poverty measure has remained largely unchanged, despite substantial changes in the social safety net. This paper proposes a methodology for creating a buildable replacement to the official poverty measure, starting with market-bas...

Building a Consumption Poverty Measure: Initial Results Following Recommendations of a Federal Interagency Working Group

By Grayson Armstrong, Caleb Cho, Thesia I. Garner, Brett Matsumoto, Juan Munoz, and Jake Schild

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Consumption is a well-being measure that is determined by a combination of resources (e.g., income, in-kind benefits, assets, debt, time) available to households, their circumstances, and their preferences. In this study, we derive consumption poverty sta...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

Income Declines during COVID-19

By Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 recession caused regressive market income changes in the United States, with large losses more frequent than during the Great Recession and more concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. Progressive taxes and transfers, especially from ...

The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 among Single-Parent Families

By Kevin Corinth, Bruce D. Meyer, and Derek Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing the recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. ...

The Racial Wealth Gap and the Role of Firm Ownership

By Avi Lipton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that isolates the impact of the US racial wealth gap in 1962 on the long-run dynamics of wealth. The model predicts that one component of the initial gap, firm ownership, coupled with the intergeneratio...

Measuring Changes in Disparity Gaps: An Application to Health Insurance

By Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Karen Jiang, Zirui Song, and Jacob Wallace

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We propose a method for reporting how program evaluations reduce gaps between groups, such as the gender or Black-White gap. We first show that the reduction in disparities between groups can be written as the difference in conditional average treatment e...

Self-Employment and Migration: Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro Gutierrez-Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Mexico has one of the highest self-employment rates in the OECD. I study the relationship between business ownership and migration from Mexico to the United States using longitudinal data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). I find that the self-empl...

How Do Federal Policy Shocks to State Spending Impact Returns to Primary and Secondary Education?

By Miesha Jamell Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using NIPA and IPEDS data from 2000 to 2017, this research employs a panel event-study VAR to determine the recursive impact of federal education policy on college enrollment and state spending on education. Specifically, this project focuses on race and ...