Past Events

Linh Tô is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Boston University. Ling's research focus is on topics in labor, public, and behavioral economics.

Winnie Van Dijk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard. Winnie's study topics are in labor, public, and urban economics, focusing on the design and evaluation of social policies.

Diane Schazenbach is a Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern. Diane's research focuses on Child, Adolescent and Family Studies, Education Policy, Performance Measurement and Rewards, Quantitative Methods for Policy Research, Social Disparities and Health.

David Deming is a Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. David's research focus is on education, skill development, and economic inequality.

Aurelie Ouss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Aurelie's research examines how good design of criminal justice institutions and policies can make law enforcement fairer and more efficient.

Isaac Sorkin is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford.

Kjell Salvanes is a Research Professor at the Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics.

Robert Metcalfe is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. Robert Metcalfe's research focuses on using field experimental methods to understand human behavior in consumer markets and within organizations.

Benjamin Scuderi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. In 2023, He will join the University of Michigan's Economics Department as an Assistant Professor.

Gordon B. Dahl is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Gordon Dahl's research interests are in labor economics and applied microeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from how income affects child achievement, to peer effects among coworkers and family members, to the impact of incarceration on recidivism and employment, to intergenerational links in welfare use.

Niha Singh is currently a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University, and will join the economics department at University of Notre Dame starting in Fall 2023.

Thomas Le Barbanchon is a visiting Associate Professor of Economics at Princeton University, in the Industrial Relations Section. His research interests focus on labor economics, public finance and econometrics.

Peter Kuhn is a visiting Professor of Economics at Princeton University, in the Industrial Relations Section. Peter Kuhn is a Labor and Personnel Economist with recent research interests in discrimination, turnover costs, China's labor markets, and the role of the internet as a labor market matchmaker.

Abstract This paper studies the long-run impact of racially oppressive institutions---from slavery to Jim Crow---on Black American families until today. To do so, we link decades of U.S. census and administrative records and develop new methods to measure how long a family's ancestors were enslaved and how intensively they experienced Jim Crow after slavery. We find that a family's long-run economic progress critically depends on the location in which they were freed. Black families who were freed in states with more intensive Jim Crow institutions made less economic progress after slavery. In a border discontinuity design, we show that families freed just inside of states with a strong Jim Crow regime fared far worse than those freed just outside of those states. These gaps did not exist before Jim Crow and did not arise for white Americans. We also provide evidence that limiting Black children's access to education was a key channel.