Related papers: Racial Disparities in Debt Collection
Preliminary research indicated that an increasing number of young adults end up in debt collection. Yet, debt collection agencies (DCAs) are still lacking knowledge on how to approach these consumers. A large-scale mixed-methods survey of…
The criminalization of poverty has been widely denounced as a collective bias against the most vulnerable. NGOs and international organizations claim that the poor are blamed for their situation, are more often associated with criminal…
In many domains, it is difficult to obtain the race data that is required to estimate racial disparity. To address this problem, practitioners have adopted the use of proxy methods which predict race using non-protected covariates. However,…
Algorithmic fairness in lending today relies on group fairness metrics for monitoring statistical parity across protected groups. This approach is vulnerable to subgroup discrimination by proxy, carrying significant risks of legal and…
This paper tests for discrimination against immigrant defendants in the criminal justice system in Chile using a decade of nationwide administrative records on pretrial detentions. Observational benchmark regressions show that immigrant…
Many households in developing countries lack formal financial histories, making it difficult for firms to extend credit, and for potential borrowers to receive it. However, many of these households have mobile phones, which generate rich…
Income inequality is a distributional phenomenon. This paper examines the impact of U.S governor's party allegiance (Republican vs Democrat) on ethnic wage gap. A descriptive analysis of the distribution of yearly earnings of Whites and…
Major disasters such as extreme weather events can magnify and exacerbate pre-existing social disparities, with disadvantaged populations bearing disproportionate costs. Despite the implications for equity and emergency planning, we lack a…
I study labor markets in which firms hire via referrals. I develop an employment model showing that--despite initial equality in ability, employment, wages, and network structure--minorities receive fewer jobs through referral and lower…
Fairness in deep learning models trained with high-dimensional inputs and subjective labels remains a complex and understudied area. Facial emotion recognition, a domain where datasets are often racially imbalanced, can lead to models that…
Assessing the fairness of a decision making system with respect to a protected class, such as gender or race, is challenging when class membership labels are unavailable. Probabilistic models for predicting the protected class based on…
Ethnic achievement gaps are often explained in terms of student and school factors. The decomposition of these gaps into their within- and between-school components has therefore been applied as a strategy to quantify the overall influence…
Americans across demographic groups tend to have low financial literacy, with low-income people and minorities at highest risk. This opens the door to the exploitation of unbanked low-income families through high-interest alternative…
In observational studies of discrimination, the most common statistical approaches consider either the rate at which decisions are made (benchmark tests) or the success rate of those decisions (outcome tests). Both tests, however, have…
Recent attempts to achieve fairness in predictive models focus on the balance between fairness and accuracy. In sensitive applications such as healthcare or criminal justice, this trade-off is often undesirable as any increase in prediction…
We extend our model of wealth segregation to incorporate migration and study the tendencies towards dual segregation - segregation due to identity (migrants vs. residents) and segregation due to wealth. We find a sharp, non-linear…
The general population systematically overestimates the size of minority groups, yet how these misperceptions vary across racial groups and geographical scales remains poorly understood. Using a purpose-built survey of the U.S. population,…
Today, there is no clear legal test for regulating the use of variables that proxy for race and other protected classes and classifications. This Article develops such a test. Decision tools that use proxies are narrowly tailored when they…
In previous work we analyzed databases for 95 classes to show that the percent grade scale was correlated with a much higher student fail rate than the 4.0 grade scale. This paper builds on this work and investigates equity gaps occurring…
Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…