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We investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture, defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms, values, and attitudes. Using survey data for 76 countries, we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values, yet that within-group variation in culture trumps between-group variation. Thus, in contrast to a commonly held view, ethnic and cultural diversity are unrelated. Although only a small portion of a country’s overall cultural heterogeneity occurs between groups, we find that various political economy outcomes (such as civil conflict and public goods provision) worsen when there is greater overlap between ethnicity and culture.

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized communities with many small groups, as measured by national language use at home, intermarriage, and children’s name choices. However, in polarized communities with a few large groups, ethnic attachment increases and integration declines. Residential segregation dampens these effects. Social capital, public goods, and ethnic conflict follow similar patterns. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of localized contact in shaping identity.

Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities' attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as \"résumé whitening.\" Interviews with racial minority university students reveal that while some minority job seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use a variety of whitening techniques. Building on the qualitative findings, we conduct a lab study to examine how racial minority job seekers change their résumés in response to different job postings. Results show that when targeting an employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, minority job applicants engage in relatively little résumé whitening and thus submit more racially transparent résumés. Yet our audit study of how employers respond to whitened and unwhitened résumés shows that organizational diversity statements are not actually associated with reduced discrimination against unwhitened résumés. Taken together, these findings suggest a paradox: minorities may be particularly likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality.

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) versus environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children’s chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents’ socioeconomic class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are 10 times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist even among children with similar math test scores in early childhood—which are highly predictive of innovation rates—suggesting that the gaps may be driven by differences in environment rather than abilities to innovate. We directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children’s propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology class and gender specific. Children who grow up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class. Girls are more likely to invent in a particular class if they grow up in an area with more women (but not men) who invent in that class. These gender- and technology class–specific exposure effects are more likely to be driven by narrow mechanisms, such as role-model or network effects, than factors that only affect general human capital accumulation, such as the quality of schools. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as underrepresented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many “lost Einsteins”—individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families.

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity inequality for a large sample of countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the homelands of ethnolinguistic groups, we construct measures of ethnic inequality. Second, we uncover a strong inverse association between ethnic inequality and contemporary development above and beyond its relationship with cross-region and cross–administrative unit inequality. Third, we establish that differences in geographic endowments across ethnic homelands explain a sizable fraction of the variation in economic disparities across groups. Fourth, we show that inequality in geographic endowments across ethnic homelands is a negative correlate of development.

We test for racial discrimination in the prices charged by mortgage lenders. We construct a unique data set from which we observe the three dimensions of a mortgage’s price: the interest rate, discount points, and fees. Although we find statistically significant gaps by race and ethnicity in interest rates, these gaps are offset by differences in discount points. We trace out point-rate schedules and show that minorities and whites face identical schedules, but sort to different locations on the schedule. Such sorting may reflect systematic differences in liquidity or preferences. Finally, we find no differences in total fees by race or ethnicity.

Municipalities are mandated to follow the principles of democracy, accountability, and good governance. This is evident in the delivery of basic services. Municipalities are directly responsible for ensuring that communities have water, sanitation, and so on, and that community members have a voice that affects their existence. This is, however, not the case in most South African communities, where squalor and sordid conditions prevail. In 2021, it was reported that 64 municipalities were dysfunctional and that the dysfunction was attributed to “poor governance, weak institutional capacity, poor financial management, corruption, and political instability”. A Code of Conduct is available in the South African public sector, governing the behavior and work ethic of public officials, councillors, and the like. Yet corruption and maladministration at the local government level prevail. Therefore, the Local Government Ethical Leadership Initiative was launched in 2020 with the view of devising another code focused on ethical governance in South African local government by October 2023. The research question that this article addresses is centered on whether a new code of conduct is needed and whether the problem with the existing code does not lie with its enforcement or the ethnicity of the public officials in leadership positions and their view on how to conduct business. The article employed a qualitative research approach where secondary sources of information, constituting document analysis, premised around disruption and ethnic leadership as well as the legislative framework in relation to the Code of Conduct governing South African local government in particular and anti-corrupt behavior in general, were explored. Four provinces were purposefully selected to partake in the study. Extracts from the AG’s report formed the locus of the study. It was found that one cannot explicitly say that ethnicity plays a role in how municipalities are governed. However, governance in selected provinces was marred by poor governance practices and inadequate leadership. The Code of Conduct for Public Servants is generally not adhered to. Further research around ethnic leadership in the South African public sector is called for.

The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, relative both to the overall population and to other academic disciplines. This underrepresentation within the field of economics is present at the undergraduate level, continues into the ranks of the academy, and is barely improving over time. It likely hampers the discipline, constraining the range of issues addressed and limiting our collective ability to understand familiar issues from new and innovative perspectives. In this paper, we first present data on the numbers of women and underrepresented minority groups in the profession. We then offer an overview of current research on the reasons for the underrepresentation, highlighting evidence that may be less familiar to economists. We argue that implicit attitudes and institutional practices may be contributing to the underrepresentation of women and minorities at all stages of the pipeline, calling for new types of research and initiatives to attack the problem. We then review evidence on how diversity affects productivity and propose remedial interventions as well as findings on effectiveness. We identify several promising practices, programs, and areas for future research.

We provide measures of ethnic and racial segregation in urban consumption. Using Yelp reviews, we estimate how spatial and social frictions influence restaurant visits within New York City. Transit time plays a first-order role in consumption choices, so consumption segregation partly reflects residential segregation. Social frictions also affect restaurant choices: individuals are less likely to visit venues in neighborhoods demographically different from their own. While spatial and social frictions jointly produce significant levels of consumption segregation, we find that restaurant consumption is only about half as segregated as residences. Consumption segregation owes more to social than spatial frictions.