Do Black electoral victories impact White Americans’ racial bias? This paper examines changes in explicit racial attitudes and Implicit Association Test (IAT) scores following close local elections between Black and White candidates. I construct a novel dataset linking election outcomes to candidate race and implement a regression discontinuity design, supplemented by difference-in-differences approaches. Anti-Black bias among White respondents increases following narrow victories by Black candidates, relative to close losses. I discuss possible interpretations of this pattern and consider how these findings inform our understanding of racial attitudes in response to political change.

An earlier version circulated under the title "Effect of Black Electoral Victories on Racial Bias and Economic Gaps."

We study racial disparities in the U.S. mortgage market. Using new data from Hurtado and Sakong (2024), we present three findings. First, we document access disparities between minority and otherwise-identical White borrowers even within the same bank and loan officer. In contrast, cost disparities are nearly zero. Second, the use of automated underwriting algorithms is associated with smaller access disparities but slightly larger cost disparities. Third, individual factors do not seem to matter much. Our findings represent another step toward understanding the factors driving discriminatory forces in the mortgage market. Recent research suggests structural or organizational factors may also play a role and have been overlooked by previous studies (Hurtado and Sakong, 2024).

Previous research has shown that some people voluntarily use commitment contracts that restrict their own choice sets. We study how people divide money between two accounts: a liquid account that permits unrestricted withdrawals and a commitment account that is randomly assigned in a between-subject design to have either a 10% early withdrawal penalty, or a 20% early withdrawal penalty, or not to allow early withdrawals at all (i.e., an infinite penalty). When the liquid account and the commitment account pay the same interest rate, higher early-withdrawal penalties attract more commitment account deposits. This pattern is predicted by the hypothesis that some participants are partially- or fully-sophisticated present-biased agents. Such agents perceive that higher penalties generate greater scope for commitment by disincentivizing (penalized) early withdrawals. The experiment also shows that when the commitment account pays a higher interest rate than the liquid account, the positive empirical slope relating penalties and commitment deposits is flattened, suggesting that naïve present-biased agents or agents with standard exponential discounting are also in our sample. Across all of our experimental treatments, higher early withdrawal penalties on the commitment account sometimes increase and never reduce allocations to the commitment account.