Research Projects

Working Papers:

Stereotypes and Strategic Discrimination (Working Paper, Slides)

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.

Exploitation Through Racialization (Working Paper)

When elites exploit workers, dividing those workers against each other allows the elites to extract more surplus than when workers find common cause. I formalize a strategy of 'racialization' wherein elites privilege individuals based on intrinsically irrelevant traits, promising those individuals additional rights that allow them to more effectively resist exploitation.  Elites use colour for this inter-generational record keeping of unequal promises because it is heritable, observable, and relatively immutable. These induced racial categories manifest as 'ancestry-based' systems or as an endogenous 'colour line' depending on the conditions facing the elite. This approach provides a unified explanation of phenomena of colourism, racial homophily, acceptance of the wealthy mixed-race into White society, passing, the 'psychological wage' of Jim Crow, and legal restrictions on manumission. I test this framework using contemporary and historical data from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, and a case study on South Africa.

Works in Progress:

A Structural Theory of Implicit Bias

Sinners and Saints: How Narratives Affect Moral Behaviour (with Gergely Hajdu)

Strategic Discrimination in the Lab (with Mallory Avery and Andreas Liebbrandt)