Related papers: Racial Disparities in Debt Collection
Conducting disparity assessments at regular time intervals is critical for surfacing potential biases in decision-making and improving outcomes across demographic groups. Because disparity assessments fundamentally depend on the…
This study analyzes tract-level real estate ownership patterns in New York State (NYS) and New York City (NYC) to uncover racial disparities. We use an advanced race/ethnicity imputation model (LSTM+Geo with XGBoost filtering, validated at…
Debt aversion can have severe adverse effects on financial decision-making. We propose a model of debt aversion, and design an experiment involving real debt and saving contracts, to elicit and jointly estimate debt aversion with…
The increasing usage of new data sources and machine learning (ML) technology in credit modeling raises concerns with regards to potentially unfair decision-making that rely on protected characteristics (e.g., race, sex, age) or other…
U.S. metropolitan areas, particularly in the industrial Midwest and Northeast, are well-known for high levels of racial segregation. This is especially true where core cities end and suburbs begin; often crossing the street can lead to…
This literature review elucidates the implications of behavioral biases, particularly those stemming from overconfidence and framing, on the intertemporal choices made by students on their underline demand preferences for student loans. A…
Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee fairness. These debates rarely engage with how racial identity is embedded in our social…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
This addendum shows that a demographic grade gap is best understood using a course deficit model rather than the more common student deficit model. Students from a concepts-first class took the same final exam as the three other classes…
In a recent study by Ginther et al., the probability of receiving a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) RO1 award was related to the applicant's race/ethnicity. The results indicate black/African-American applicants were 10% less…
I generalize state-of-the-art approaches that decompose differences in the distribution of a variable of interest between two groups into a portion explained by covariates and a residual portion. The method that I propose relaxes the…
Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from millions of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S.…
Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions. Yet these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their…
Unfairness in mortgage lending has created generational inequality among racial and ethnic groups in the US. Many studies address this problem, but most existing work focuses on correlation-based techniques. In our work, we use the…
This paper aims to clarify the relationship between monetary policy shocks and wage inequality. We emphasize the relevance of within and between wage group inequalities in explaining total wage inequality in the United States. Relying on…
Racial residential segregation is interconnected with several other phenomena such as income inequalities, property values inequalities, and racial disparities in health and in education. Furthermore, recent literature suggests the…
Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central question in sociological research and education policy. However, previous investigations…
Income inequality between different races in the U.S. is especially large. This difference is even larger when gender is involved. In a complementary study, we have developed a dynamic microeconomic model accurately describing the evolution…
Recent research on the geographic locations of bank branches in the United States has identified thresholds below which a given area can be considered to be a "banking desert." Thus far, most analyses of the country as a whole have tended…
Financial institutions increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) for high-stakes decision-making. However, these models risk perpetuating harmful biases if deployed without careful oversight. This paper investigates racial bias in…