This column studies the long-run effects of #slavery , and the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial #segregation following the Civil War, on Black Americans’ #economic outcomes.
Lukas Althoff Lukas Althoff Stanford University, Hugo Reichardt Hugo Reichardt LSE
ow.ly/6zXs50R6vtM

🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
What an incredible honor! The work continues. Apply here to join our team studying regional patterns and drivers of racial wealth inequality: tinyurl.com/y68st2p8

'Between 1950 and today, Black women’s household incomes have remained 25 percent or more below those of white women across the distribution.' - Lukas Althoff 🤯

📢Call for Papers: Working on causal inference problems with spatial data? Join us for our workshop, 26–27 September 2024.
👉Keynotes: Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal, Daniel Sturm, Hans Koster (@VUamsterdam) and Yanos Zylberberg (@BristolUniEcon)
ℹ️More details: rwi-essen.de/forschung-bera…

'In the current policy-making power structure, economists are super influential. But ironically, the people who are driven by questions of social justice end up steered away from economics.' bit.ly/3OPtb8h

If you want one graph only, perhaps this is it.

My paper on global income distribution 1820-2020.
(Open access.)
The Three Eras of Global Inequality
stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/research/the-t…

Building in part on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, visiting scholar Lukas Althoff studies how institutions as varied as Jim Crow and the GI Bill have worked for or against racial equality in America. Read our Q&A about what he studies and why: bit.ly/465jEkc

🧵NEW WP ALERT! #EconTwitter
In the 4th millennium BC, distant lands from the Nile to Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley experienced a revolutionary change: states, writing, mega-cities, and unprecedented socioeconomic disparities emerged for the first time. Why? 🤔

What we found surprised us.

On average, across the countries in our sample, the wealthiest tend to live in places with higher levels of ambient pollution. This is the opposite of what we observe in the U.S. and the opposite of what we expected to find.

What drives this?

(6/n)

Amazing contribution published in the JPE today!

The paper compares college graduate quality in 48 countries and finds that graduates from the richest countries have much more human capital 🎓

Migration (i.e. brain drain) plays a key role! 🧠🏃‍♀️‍➡️

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.10…

So, I have said this before, but this time it is REALLY the LAST NBER ECONOMIC MOBILITY Conference 9/27/2024!

A great conference on economic mobility, broadly defined. All fields welcome, and Jr. folks should definitely apply!

Submissions due 7/18.
nber.org/calls-papers-a….

'School Shootings Increase NRA Donations' is now out in Science Advances. In this paper, I provide causal evidence for substantial and lasting increases in total NRA donations and donor numbers in affected counties after school shootings. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… (1/n)

Out now - new WP w/ Manuel Hoffmann & Yanuo Zhou. We measure the value open source software contributes to the world's economy w/ data on the most widely used OSS packages at millions of global companies. TLDR: If OSS didn't exist, companies would spend 3.5 times more on software

🚨Submit your papers to the “Market Failures and Public Policy” session at SITE

Organizers are Ignacio Cuesta, Liran Einav, Gaston Illanes, Pietro Tebaldi, and me.

cc Stanford Economics Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Details below 👇

This course looks really good and everyone in Econ and finance should read through it, even if you’re a solid programmer

I have gotten to know Olaf as an extremely talented and driven student. He will be an excellent research assistant to anyone looking for strong coding & data analysis skills and an enthusiasm for research in economics.

📢I am excited to present first results of our big new project 'Budgets and Geopolitics, 1870-2022' at the Munich Security Conference. We show: Military spending in G7 countries has fallen to historic lows, while social spending has risen. We clearly live in an 'age of butter,' not guns👇1/4

I suspect that Westerners who care about equality feel uncomfortable with the celebration of money-making.

But consider the converse:

In patriarchal societies, girls are encouraged to aspire for marriage & motherhood.

That suppresses employment!