On September 3 at 4pm, join O-Lab and Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)  for a discussion with Michael Lens of UCLA about his new book examining how Black neighborh...

Abstract Affirmative action programs in public sector agencies are a canonical example of race-conscious remedial policy. While these regimes increase public sector diversity, they may also generate p...

The divide between high- and low-opportunity places is more visible than ever, perpetuating long-run inequities and drawing the attention of policymakers. This presentation to review the evidence on r...

Million dollar settlements to regain federal funding? Rising tuition, but layoffs and course cuts? We're here to help.

On September 3 at 4pm, join O-Lab and Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)  for a discussion with Michael Lens of UCLA about his new book examining how Black neighborh...

Health policy expert Will Dow breaks down the risks—and potential state-level response.

Sociologists use the concept of narrative as an analytical tool and theoretical concept to understand the stories that people tell and their role in social and cultural life. A key tenet of prior rese...

Abstract The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the largest federal climate legislation in the United States so far. The breadth and complexity of IRA’s energy and climate provisions raise new questions...

Many countries are considering introducing or reforming their wealth tax policies. This column studies the effects of a French wealth tax reform, which reduced reporting requirements, on taxpayer behaviour. The scaling back of reporting requirements had large negative effects on tax compliance, with 35% of wealth taxpayers missing in affected brackets and evading 10% of their total wealth tax payments each year. The findings indicate that taxpayers are more likely to under-report the value of less easily verifiable assets such as housing, whereas financial assets are more transparent and thus harder to manipulate.

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Alice Schmitz is a fourth-year PhD student in UC Berkeley's Economics Department who is investigating the physical and economic damages from natural disasters. For the last two years, she has also ser...

Americans across the political spectrum like Medicaid and think it should get more funding, not less, according to a new poll from health research organization KFF.

Women earn 5 percent less than men, on average, at employers that bargain individually

YouTube video by Brookings Institution

In recent decades, America has seen economic opportunities concentrated in superstar cities. Manufacturing boosters hope reshoring factories could help change that. We look at the theory and evidence.

YouTube video by Commonwealth Club World Affairs (CCWA)

53% of students receiving CalFresh as seniors in high school will lose access within two years of graduation, study finds. Here’s why.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that many of the major Medicaid policies would account for $625 billion in savings, though the CBO didn’t calculate the impacts of all provisions.

In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act initiated the development of the US interstate system — which would span 43,000 miles to connect major US cities. While the effort was lauded at the time as a majo...

Castro, E. L., Brawn, M., Graves, D., Mayorga, O., Page, J. & Slater, A. (2015). Higher education in an era of mass incarceration: Possibility under constraint. Journal of Critical Studies of Higher Education and Student Affairs, 1(2), 13-33. https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol1/iss1/2

Joe LaBriola writes about how house prices rising 75% over the last four decades has widen the wealth gap between white and Black households.

On May 21st, join the Opportunity Lab for our second annual Applied Microeconomics Conference on Economic Opportunity. Building on the success of last year's inaugural event , which brought toget...

Economic disparities have long been suspected to be a root cause of environmental inequality. But is this really the case? This column links data on income and wealth with data on air pollution exposure over 40 years to provide new evidence on the relationship between economic wellbeing and environmental quality in the US. The authors find that (1) the relationship between income, wealth, and pollution exposure is relatively weak, (2) non-Hispanic Black individuals face significantly higher pollution exposure than non-Hispanic white individuals at every income percentile of the distribution, and (3) large income windfalls lead to modest, though persistent, reductions in pollution exposure. The findings challenge the notion that reducing income inequality alone would significantly reduce environmental inequality.