Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

By Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan

American Economic Review, September 2004

We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more...

Federalism and the Democratic Transition: Lessons from South Africa

By Robert P. Inman and Daniel L. Rubinfeld

American Economic Review, May 2005

Health and Wealth among the Poor: India and South Africa Compared

By Anne Case and Angus Deaton

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2005

The rise of Western Europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean and with substantial trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia via the Atlantic. This trade and the associated colonialism affected Europe not o...

Skin-Tone Effects among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality

By Joni Hersch

American Economic Review, May 2006

Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Todd Schoellman and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, May 2006

Asian Growth and African Development

By Marcos de Carvalho Chamon and Michael R. Kremer

American Economic Review, May 2006

Markets: Continuity and Change in the International Diamond Market

By Debora L. Spar

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

The international diamond cartel, which presides over the production side of the industry, may be the most successful and longest-lasting cartel in the world. The dominant company in the industry, DeBeers, has been around since 1880 and has been controlle...

Empathy or Antipathy? The Impact of Diversity

By Johanne Boisjoly, Greg J. Duncan, Michael Kremer, Dan M. Levy, and Jacque Eccles

American Economic Review, December 2006

Mixing across racial and ethnic lines could spur understanding or inflame tensions between groups. We find that white students at a large state university randomly assigned African American roommates in their first year were more likely to endorse affirma...

The Economic Lives of the Poor

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about th...

Markets: Cartel Behavior and Amateurism in College Sports

By Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007

This paper studies intercollegiate athletics in the context of the theory of cartels. Some point to the explicit attempts by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to restrict output and payments for factors of production as evidence of carte...

The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police

By Justin McCrary

American Economic Review, March 2007

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action...

African American and White Differences in the Impacts of Monetary Policy on the Duration of Unemployment

By William M. Rodgers

American Economic Review, May 2008

Credit Elasticities in Less-Developed Economies: Implications for Microfinance

By Dean S. Karlan and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Review, June 2008

Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainabilit...

Labor Supply Responses to Large Social Transfers: Longitudinal Evidence from South Africa

By Cally Ardington, Anne Case, and Victoria Hosegood

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

We quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged adults to the presence of pensioners in their households, using longitudinal data collected in South Africa. We compare households and individuals before and after pension receipt and pension loss, w...

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

By Elise Huillery

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

To what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early c...

Metals or Management? Explaining Africa's Recent Economic Growth Performance

By Laura N. Beny and Lisa D. Cook

American Economic Review, May 2009

South Africa's Post-apartheid Two-Step: Social Demands versus Macro Stability

By Brahima Coulibaly and Trevon D. Logan

American Economic Review, May 2009

Disability Screening and Labor Supply: Evidence from South Africa

By Sophie Mitra

American Economic Review, May 2009

Can the West Save Africa?

By William Easterly

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2009

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort toward Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts ...