Student loans can increase access to higher education, support college persistence and completion, and enable students to obtain high-earning jobs after college. But deciding whether and how much to borrow is a complicated endeavor filled with uncertainty...

Despite large returns to postsecondary education, disparities in degree attainment across racial-ethnic groups persist, leading policymakers to explore alternative strategies for increasing postsecondary access and success. Community College Baccalaureate (CCB...

Research shows that U.S. employers still exhibit racial biases against Black job seekers, and Black employees in predominantly white workplaces often experience higher turnover rates and fewer promotions than their counterparts. However, limited research has...

We study the impacts of a major “demand-driven” workforce development program for under- and unemployed job seekers in Chicago. The program, run by Skills for Chicagoland's Future, works with employers to understand their hiring needs, company culture, and...

Efforts to portray minority groups positively often prompts a backlash in the majority group. In this project, I seek to answer: (1) Are majority group members averse to these positive depictions or the processes that create them? (2) What are the...

The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) has partnered with Thread of Baltimore, Maryland to evaluate their high school mentorship program, an intervention designed to assist underperforming students at risk of dropping out of school. Students...

Individuals who earn degrees in STEM fields have better labor market outcomes on average. For some, a STEM education can be a pathway out of poverty, however; minoritized populations in the U.S. are less likely to earn degrees in STEM fields. In this project...

Recent events of police brutality have sparked policy demands to “reduce the scope of policing in our society.” However, the details of these demands are challenging to assess because of a lack of data and limited understanding about them. This project employs...

We designed a “blind charging” algorithm that automatically redacts race-related information from police incident reports to prevent racial bias from influencing prosecutorial charging decisions. After successful pilots with two district attorneys, new...

Community colleges have the potential to be powerful vehicles for economic mobility. However, the majority of students who enroll in community colleges do not earn a degree within three years. A growing research literature, including an RCT conducted by the...

This project focuses on workers’ perceptions of discrimination, specifically (1) providing evidence on the effectiveness of hiring and promotion mechanisms that could reduce perceptions of discrimination; (2) how perceived discrimination affects job...

Nearly a half century after the civil rights movement, racial inequity remains a defining feature of U.S. society. We formalize a model of structural racism and empirically test a central implication – that beliefs regarding racial discrimination in one system...

Racial disparities exist at every stage of the U.S. criminal justice system and are particularly prominent in the setting of bail. These racial disparities in bail are even larger for the sizeable youth population. In settings like Harris County, TX, a site in...

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been influential in shaping policy to address the stark racial and income disparities in criminal justice involvement. Yet crime-prevention experiments typically ignore the possibility of peer spillovers, which could...

Prior research has found that patient-doctor racial concordance is important for increasing the demand for preventive healthcare among low-income African American men, particularly for invasive services. Although results were consistent with better...

Reducing racial disparities in health outcomes is a major policy concern in the United States. Although there has been recent progress to close the gap, black men continue to experience earlier morbidity and mortality from preventable and manageable medical...