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Since 1974, the American Economic Association Summer Training Program has provided training and mentoring to students from disadvantaged backgrounds in economics. The aim of the program is to encourage and prepare these students to apply to PhD programs in economics and ultimately to increase diversity in the profession. The program has been hosted by different universities over the years. This paper provides insights and lessons learned from the program's tenure at Michigan State University from 2016 to 2020. In addition to discussing the structure and outcomes of the program, we provide advice to students, faculty, and potential hosts who may be interested in the AEA Summer Program or similar programs.

Recent studies have examined the effect of political conflict and domestic terrorism on economic and political outcomes. This paper uses the rise in mass violence between 1870 and 1940 as an historical experiment for determining the impact of ethnic and political violence on economic activity, namely patenting. I find that violent acts account for more than 1,100 missing patents compared to 726 actual patents among African American inventors over this period. Valuable patents decline in response to major riots and segregation laws. Absence of the rule of law covaries with declines in patent productivity for white and black inventors, but this decline is significant only for African American inventors. Patenting responds positively to declines in violence. These findings imply that ethnic and political conflict may affect the level, direction, and quality of invention and economic growth over time.

The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has yet to be extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Because Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional urban measures of racial segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. Earlier analysis has analyzed the relationship between lynching and racial proportions, a poor proxy for racial segregation. We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2017) that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition to estimate the correlation between racial segregation and lynching in the southern counties of the United States. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching but uncorrelated with white lynching. These results extend the analysis of racial/ethnic conflict into the past and show that the effects of social interactions and interracial proximity in rural areas are as important as those in urban areas.

Barriers to entering the field of invention have led to negative outcomes for individuals and for the economy. We built a vibrant middle class in the post-war era because we started to tear down many of the barriers that had kept women of all races and men of color from contributing their full talents. A quarter of the growth in aggregate output from 1960 to 2010 can be explained by improved allocation of talent. We didn't finish the work. We allowed barriers to opportunity to return, or new ones to grow up. This turned out to be a tragedy, not only for those people who lost their livelihoods, but also for the economy. Policy can make a difference. The Civil Rights Act really did make a huge difference in the opportunities and gains for Black Americans and for women. Subsequent advancements in automation and trade, which left a lot of workers behind, were not accompanied by changes in policy to help those workers adapt. One thing that we know is that, especially in laboratories or patent teams where people are working together, equality of opportunity is much more than just getting things like as many job interviews. Women and underrepresented minorities are not pulled in and kept in the same way as others. We may, in fact, as a society be underinvesting in the people who could be creating the companies that would be creating the jobs that put those people to better use. A key concern now is that this could be a recession that would harm pathways to the middle class for a long time.

To review the evidence of changes in segregation over time, we use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition (Logan and Parman 2017). This household measure of segregation reveals high levels of segregation in the South and rising levels of segregation in both cities and rural communities over the first half of the 20th century. We review new evidence that this segregation was highly correlated with interracial violence in the form or lynchings. We conclude with a discussion of the interaction between residential segregation, racial animosity, and violence.

We assess the role of race in loans made through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP program, created by the U.S. government as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, provides loans to small businesses so they can keep employees on their payroll. We argue that the historical record and PPP program design choices made it likely that many Black-owned businesses received smaller PPP loans than White-owned businesses. Using newly released data on the PPP program, we find that Black-owned businesses received loans that were approximately 50% lower than observationally similar White-owned businesses. The effect is marginally smaller in areas with more bank competition and disappeared over time as changes to the PPP program were implemented allowing for entry by fintechs and other nontraditional lenders. We find that Black-owned businesses received loans through the Paycheck Protection Program that were approximately 50 percent lower than White-owned businesses with similar characteristics. However, this difference in loan size shrank over time as more non-bank lenders such as fintechs were allowed to participate in the program and began approving PPP loans. Loan size differences were also slightly smaller in zip codes containing a larger number of bank branches. These results are consistent with prior research which shows lending discrimination by commercial banks against Black borrowers. It is also consistent with studies showing that greater access to and competition among banks and other lenders can reduce discrimination. In light of these results we recommend that policy makers account for existing racial inequalities within banking or other systems in their program design to produce more equitable outcomes.

This paper exploits recently available data on African economic growth to understand whether policy reform (\"management\") or the recent commodity boom (\"metals\") better explains Africa's recent growth experience. Results suggest that both factors have contributed to Africa's recent reversal of fortune. These findings are broadly consistent with those in the related empirical literature. This study is timely and important. Commodity booms are typically followed by commodity busts, as demonstrated by the IMF (2006). IF better economic management has played any positive role, it may be critical for protecting gains in growth outcomes and higher living standards when commodity prices eventually fall.

From professional baseball to legal services, discrimination against sellers became widespread in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This article examines the means by which African American inventor-entrepreneurs overcame discrimination against them by consumers. It makes use of data from the advertising records of Garrett Morgan, who invented the modern gas mask and the traffic light. Both the deliberate use of measures, such as disguises and surrogates, and serendipity (the result of the racial neutrality of patents) were critical in facilitating sellers' anonymity and in promoting desirable economic outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic radically and rapidly changed the world, including the world of business economists. Eight NABE members employed in a wide variety of fields discuss how their lives and work were transformed.