Working Papers:
The Economics of Implicit Bias: Theory and Evidence (Working Paper, Slides)
I study the economic origins of implicit bias in a segregated society. I develop a model where boundedly-rational individuals follow impulses to discriminate when decision-making is costly. These biases evolve in response to what individuals experience: bad experiences worsen implicit biases while good experiences reduce them. Hence, an individual’s social environment shapes what biases they hold. If they learn exclusively from their own experiences, gradual learning yields approximately optimal behaviour: agents hold implicit biases only when discriminating improves their welfare. However, this approximate optimality is fragile. When agents learn implicit associations secondhand through stories shared by others or the media, they can arrive at an implicit prejudice, despite their personal experiences. Segregation amplifies this error by replacing personal interactions with secondhand information. Using a decade of Implicit Association Test data, I find that residential racial segregation can statistically explain 25\% of White Americans anti-Black implicit bias. Additionally, I provide evidence that cognitive effort mitigates the effect of racial segregation, whereas exposure to distorted media images of Black Americans amplifies bias.
Stereotypes and Strategic Discrimination (Working Paper) - Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of the European Economic Association
Stereotypes arise when individuals interact. Even when group differences are intrinsically meaningless and there is no inherent animosity between groups, strategic incentives lead agents to believe that visible differences mark differences in ability. Agents discriminate based on these beliefs, which collectively benefits these agents at the expense of the stereotyped, representing strategic discrimination. In environments of congestion, negative stereotypes cause crowding out of the stereotyped group, whereas in environments of public goods, positive stereotypes yield free riding. In equilibrium, the holders of the stereotypes incorrectly think these beliefs are commonly held, but in truth, the stereotyped group rejects their accuracy. Nevertheless, the gains these beliefs produce give an incentive for the holders to maintain their prejudices, even though strategic discrimination is costly to aggregate welfare.
Legitimizing Myths (Working Paper)
Differing beliefs about the causes of inequality need not represent differences in facts or evidence, but differences in ideology. When people care about fair allocations, narratives that claim some are less deserving legitimizes the inequality, reducing demand for a policy response. Although not everyone benefits from these narratives, all face incentives to align their beliefs with the dominant ideology. This presents a unified theory of ideology, explaining persistent disagreement about economic inequality, stereotypes of social groups, the allocation of common goods, generalized trust, and preferences for judicial punitiveness. Finally, I demonstrate that policy persistence and ideological constraint both arise as special cases of narrative credibility constraints.
Publications:
Exploitation Through Racialization (Link) - Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 140(2), May 2025. pp. 1581-1631.
I develop a model of the social construction of race. Racial categories emerge from labour conflict when elites privilege intrinsically irrelevant traits to divide workers against each other and extract workers’ surplus. I show that elites use colour to grant unequal rights and track these rights across generations because it is heritable, observable, and relatively immutable. Depending on the demographic conditions the elites face, the system of racialization manifests either as `ancestry-based’ or `colour-based’ categories. This approach to the social construction of race provides a unified explanation of skin tone inequality, racial homophily in marriage, the social status of mixed-race people, the `psychological wage' of Jim Crow, and legal restrictions on manumission. I test for historical variations in racial boundaries using census data from the United States and Brazil and for differential patterns of skin tone inequality between ancestry-based and colour-based systems using survey data from across the Americas.
Works in Progress:
Sinners and Saints: How Narratives Affect Moral Behaviour (with Gergely Hajdu)
Strategic Discrimination in the Lab (with Mallory Avery and Andreas Liebbrandt)