Class, Wealth, & Social Mobility
The researchers of the Cook Center are documenting the magnitude of racial and ethnic disparities in wealth in the United States, particularly in the aftermath the Great Recession.
The 2018 report from the Center, What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, outlines many of these present disparities: Black Americans, who constitute roughly thirteen percent of the country, possess less than three percent of the nation’s wealth. While the median white household living at the poverty line has $18,000 in wealth, the corresponding black household typically has nothing. Conversely, white households account for a whopping ninety-six percent of the nation’s wealthiest; black households make up just two percent of this elite club. These persistent disparities, along with many others the Cook Center has uncovered in recent years, provide an impetus and justification for the continued efforts of the Center’s researchers in combating these inequities.
Among other goals, they work to:
- Identify sources of unequal wealth accumulation across populations, using data from sources such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics;
- Resolve whether differences in net worth are due primarily to differences in behavior (savings and portfolio management), differences in income, or differences in patterns of inheritance;
- Establish the most effective means of addressing intergroup inequality in wealth;
- And assess and compare the effectiveness of financial literacy programs, individual development accounts, child trust accounts, and community wide asset-building initiatives.
Working Group
The Social Mobility Working Group seeks to identify mechanisms that are driving (or slowing) social mobility and to track their connections with levels of well-being, state types, national policies, structural inequalities, and other societal features (including networks, norms, and practices).
Objectives
- Develop a network of scholars across disciplines, bringing different perspectives to the study of social mobility
- Jointly review existing studies from different parts of the world and diverse methodologies and disciplinary approaches
- Identify important gaps and potential opportunities for pushing this research frontier
- Work toward the formation of collaborative research groups, as well as design and undertake research projects in different parts of the world
The Cook Center aims to design effective procedures for preventing or mitigating the effects of employment discrimination.
The longstanding racial inequities of American society are reflected in the job market: For decades, the unemployment rate for black Americans has long hovered at twice that of whites, and at every level of educational attainment, blacks are more likely than whites to be unemployed. More extreme examples—like the fact that black men with no criminal records face lower odds of a callback for a job than do white men with a criminal record—only heighten one’s understanding of the disparities in play.
But for myriad reasons, discrimination in employment proves difficult to accurately measure. Self-reports of discrimination are subject to respondent self-censorship, cognitive dissonance or error; systematic comparisons have shown blacks to substantially underreport their exposure to discrimination in employment while whites substantially overreport. Furthermore, group distinctions based exclusively on self-reports of race or ethnicity complicate these calculations. For example, Latinos, regardless of skin shade, report their race as white at high rates and rarely report their race as black, which leads to inaccurate estimates of the magnitude of discrimination. Therefore, data sets that enable researchers to make distinctions based upon skin shade will prove more useful in locating evidence of discrimination than data sets reliant solely on self-reported race.
The Cook Center researchers will aim to first understand how historical methods—the self-report, statistical decomposition, and field experiment—perform at a common set of geographical locations, in order to assess the consistency of measurement of discrimination generated by each. From there, these researchers will develop a context-specific protocol for detection of discrimination in employment. Additionally, they will design a way to measure the magnitude of discrimination directed against people with multiple stigmatized identities—in short, determining whether possessing multiple identities has an adverse effect on earnings and employment outcomes.
Employment
The Cook Center aims to design effective procedures for preventing or mitigating the effects of employment discrimination.
The longstanding racial inequities of American society are reflected in the job market: For decades, the unemployment rate for black Americans has long hovered at twice that of whites, and at every level of educational attainment, blacks are more likely than whites to be unemployed. More extreme examples—like the fact that black men with no criminal records face lower odds of a callback for a job than do white men with a criminal record—only heighten one’s understanding of the disparities in play.
But for myriad reasons, discrimination in employment proves difficult to accurately measure. Self-reports of discrimination are subject to respondent self-censorship, cognitive dissonance or error; systematic comparisons have shown blacks to substantially underreport their exposure to discrimination in employment while whites substantially overreport. Furthermore, group distinctions based exclusively on self-reports of race or ethnicity complicate these calculations. For example, Latinos, regardless of skin shade, report their race as white at high rates and rarely report their race as black, which leads to inaccurate estimates of the magnitude of discrimination. Therefore, data sets that enable researchers to make distinctions based upon skin shade will prove more useful in locating evidence of discrimination than data sets reliant solely on self-reported race.
The Cook Center researchers will aim to first understand how historical methods—the self-report, statistical decomposition, and field experiment—perform at a common set of geographical locations, in order to assess the consistency of measurement of discrimination generated by each. From there, these researchers will develop a context-specific protocol for detection of discrimination in employment. Additionally, they will design a way to measure the magnitude of discrimination directed against people with multiple stigmatized identities—in short, determining whether possessing multiple identities has an adverse effect on earnings and employment outcomes.
Xiongfei Li
Xiongfei Li recently received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California. His research focuses on the intersection between inequality and the labor market, especially in the context of China. He has conducted research on topics including gender inequalities, educational return and inequality, and environmental policy biases. Prior to USC, he received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s degree from Nankai University. He will join the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University as a postdoctoral associate in August 2023.
William A. Darity, Jr. (“Sandy”)
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics, and Business at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization’s highest honor, and has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals.
Will Damron
Will is a postdoctoral associate at the Cook Center. His research focuses on the economic history of the American South. Prior to joining the Cook Center, he completed a PhD in economics at Yale University and a BS at Davidson College.
Wenran Fan
Wenran is an applied economist with research interest focus on environmental policy and environmental justice. Her research aims to use survey data to explore the potential discrepancies in recreational benefits among different socioeconomic groups. She is currently a PhD candidate in economics at Iowa State University, received her Master’s degree from Boston University and her Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University.
Sungmee Kim
Sungmee is an applied microeconomist specializing in education and health policy for K-12 students and young adults in the United States and South Korea. With a focus on closing the gap between diverse groups, Sungmee conducts quantitative research to integrate educational and health outcomes to inform policy decisions.
Her recent work provides a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting trends and potential mechanisms behind disparities in academic performance throughout the period of school closures and the subsequent return to in-person learning. Her ongoing research includes examining the impact of the ACA Medicaid expansion on closing the “coverage gap” for low-income young adults and investigating how variations in primary learning modalities during the pandemic influenced trends in child maltreatment allegations and foster care placements.
Sungmee holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgia State University, where she worked as a graduate research assistant at the Metro Atlanta Policy Lab for Education (MAPLE) of the Georgia Policy Labs.
Raffi E. García
Prof. Raffi E. García is an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests are in financial economics, empirical industrial organization, and gender and personnel economics. His research focuses on measuring and understanding the effects of regulations and unexpected events or shocks on a firm and individual behavior, strategy, and performance. Prof. García received his Ph.D. in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University in 2018. He also holds a master’s degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Boston College. Prof. Garcia is currently a visiting professor at The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.
Pak Hung Lam
Pak Hung is an applied economist whose research interests center on development, education, environmental, and health economics. He is particularly interested in critical issues related to population health, economic development in Africa and Asia, and global environmental health and justice issues. Prior to joining Duke, he earned his Ph.D. in Social Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and served as a Visiting Ph.D. student at the Yale School of Public Health. His website can be found here.
Monica Garcia-Perez
Dr. García-Pérez is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at Fayetteville State University at the Broadwell College of Business and Economics. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland-College Park and an MSc in Economics from the University College London. Her research concentrates on health economics, immigration, and labor economics. She is also working on wealth inequality across race/ethnicity and the impact of health shocks. Her research also looks at the intergenerational effects of barriers to access to health care and health coverage. She has published her research in journals such as Demography, American Economic Review P&P, The Journal of Economic Education, International Education Planning, Review of Black Political Economy, Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy.
Prof. Garcia-Perez teaches several courses connected to health, labor, and immigration. She teaches Econometrics (undergraduate and graduate), Economics of Immigration, Economics of Health Disparities, Health Economics, and Labor Economics. She also enjoys teaching Principles of Microeconomics and mentoring students in economics. Prof. Garcia-Perez has an active mentor role. She has mentored undergraduate and graduate students in programs like the AEA Summer Program, the AEA Mentoring Program (previously called The Pipeline Mentoring Program), and the PreDoc Mentoring Workshop organized by TAMU and the American Society of Hispanic Economists.
Further, Prof. Garcia-Perez was an influential member in the collaborative process between SCSU and CentraCare System to create the Center for Health Outcome Policy Research (CHOPR). She has written several reports on the St. Cloud residents’ local opinions about immigration, well-being, and childhood obesity. She has also evaluated educational and health programs in the area of St. Cloud. She holds a data clearance to work with U.S. Census Bureau sensitive administrative data. She is the 2020 past-President of the American Society of Hispanic Economists (ASHE), the Director of the Faculty Research Group of Immigrants in Minnesota, a Research Scholar at the Roy Wilkins Center, the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and a Senior Research Associate at The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, Duke University, a selected participant of the Reinventing Our Communities (ROC) Program organized by the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia for Central Minnesota, and a past Co-Director of the SCSU Survey Center. She also serves as a board member of the local non-profit research organization Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER).
