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Class, Wealth, & Social Mobility

Class, Wealth, & Social Mobility

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.

Team Members

Research & Publications

front of bank

Adding stress in banking: Stress tests and risk-taking sentiments

Authors: Raffi E. GarcĂ­a, Jyothsna G. Harithsa, and Abena Owusu Journal: Journal of Corporate Finance…

Black woman holding two stacks of differing coins

Setting the Record Straight on Racial Wealth Inequality

Authors: Fenaba R. Addo, William A. Darity Jr., and Samuel L. Myers Jr. Journal: AEA…

W. E. B. Du Bois

Book chapter – Redress or Socialism? W. E. B. Du Bois’s Silence on Black American Reparations

Chapter Authors: James B. Stewart and William A. Darity, Jr. Book: The Oxford Handbook of…

Beyond Implicit Bias

Authors: Thomas D. Albright, William A. Darity Jr., Diana Dunn, Rayid Ghani, Deena Hayes-Greene, Tanya…

Aftermath of the Greenwood community following the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Racial Disparities in Family Income, Assets, and Liabilities: A Century After the 1921 Tulsa Massacre

Title: Racial Disparities in Family Income, Assets, and Liabilities: A Century After the 1921 Tulsa…

Teacher Recruitment and Retention Trends Across North Carolina and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Authors: Lauren Fox, Sara Howell, Ashley Kazouh, Elizabeth Paul, and Jessica Peacock Research Advisors: Keisha…

children in a line sitting outside on the grass

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children’s and adults’ racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces

Authors: Analia F. Albuja, Mercedes Muñoz, Katherine Kinzler, Amanda Woodward, and Sarah E. Gaither Abstract:…

downtown area of a city looking downhill with a body of water and bridge in the background

Reframing the Asian American Wealth Narrative: An Examination of the Racial Wealth Gap in the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color Survey

Authors: Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Darrick Hamilton, William A. Darity Jr.  Abstract: The National Asset…