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This essay demonstrates the necessity of formally incorporating identity group stratification as a pillar alongside economic and political understandings of any political economy framework. We make our case by juxtaposing mutual inadequacies and myopic limitations associated with two influential but polar political economy frameworks-Marxian and public choice theory-since neither framework formally incorporates an identity group stratification lens beyond class reductionism. Finally, in addition to presenting an identity group stratification lens to economic thought, we present an Inclusive Economic Rights policy framework as a critical baseline component of human rights, foregrounding political economic tendencies toward identity group stratifications as a pathway forward to achieve a “moral political economy.”

This article introduces the core constructs of stratification economics to provide a coherent explanation for the persistence of intergroup inequalities. Aligned with the critical race theory concept of “the property rights in Whiteness,” stratification economics explicitly incorporates the concepts of identity-group investment and group-based agency in the construction of identity-group hierarchies. We survey the intellectual lineage, foundations, tenets and theoretical underpinnings of stratification economics, and conclude with a treatise on inclusive economic rights as an appropriate policy frame to empower people and counteract structural inequalities generated from inter-group conflict and competition for preferred outcomes. (JEL D63, G51, I14, I24, J15, J31, Z13)

Black agricultural land ownership was at a peak just after the turn of the twentieth century; however, there was a nearly 90 percent decline in ownership from 1910 to 1997. In this paper, we use US Census of Agriculture data to estimate that the present, compounded value of the Black land loss from 1920 to 1997 is roughly $326 billion.

Racial differences in effort at work, if they exist, can potentially explain race-based wage/earnings disparities in the labor market. The authors estimate specifications of time spent on non-work activities at work by Black and White males and females with data from the American Time Use Survey. Estimates reveal that trivially small differences occur between non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White males in time spent not working while on the job that disappear entirely when correcting for non-response errors. The findings imply that Black–White male differences in the fraction of the workday spent not working are either not large enough to partially explain the Black–White wage gap, or simply do not exist at all.

We investigate how wages and occupation sorting vary by race, gender, and class during recessions. We performed repeated Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions of the Black-White wage gap from 1988 to 2020. Black professional-class workers’ wages are more unstable and take a more substantial hit during recessions. Black workers see a lower return to their labor market characteristics during recessions, and this is pronounced for the professional class. Using an occupational crowding methodology, we find that Black women are overrepresented in essential work and roles with high physical proximity to others and receive the lowest wages. White men are crowded out of riskier work but, within these categories, dominate higher-paying roles. Black workers earn less in professional riskier work than in working-class roles, while the reverse is true for White workers. We find that class status does not protect Black workers to the same extent as White workers, especially during recessions.

In his 2017 presidential address to the National Economic Association (NEA), Professor Darrick Hamilton warned that treating economics as a morally neutral “science,” and the discipline’s limited attention to structural barriers and overemphasis individual agency, has resulted in bad economics, and bad policy particularly as it relates to racial disparity.

Studies have found that socioeconomic factors alone cannot explain the high incidence of infant deaths among black Americans, and structural racism may be producing these differences in IMR across racial groups. Using data from the 1988 National Maternal and Infant Health Survey, we applied decomposition analysis to test how much of the black-white differences in IMR were determined by racial differences in (1) characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic, demographic and geographic) versus (2) rates of return on those characteristics (e.g., ability to translate the characteristics into healthy infants), with the latter indicative of racism. The black IMR was found to be over twice as high as the white IMR. Differences in socio-demographic characteristics did not explain gap. Instead, the differential returns on the characteristics of black mothers and their inability to translate their characteristics to produce healthy infants, accounted for a larger part of the black-white IMR inequality, providing evidence of institutional racism. Attention must be paid to broader structural factors that may be creating and contributing to the maintenance of racial disparities in IMR.

Social scientists from a range of disciplines have provided evidence of a connection between unemployment and mental health. However, researchers recognize that poor mental health can lead to joblessness, highlighting the challenge of generating an accurate estimate of the impact of unemployment on mental health. In addition, virtually all of these studies use either self-reported measures of mental health or broad measures of emotional well-being such as self-esteem or constructs of general emotional health which are less than ideal. A shortcoming in the literature is that scholars have yet to examine whether race effects the extent of the effect of unemployment on psychological distress. Unemployment might have a smaller impact on blacks, because they have a higher degree of resilience due to encountering a greater and more intense array of life challenges, or a larger impact because of the fear of the consequences of unemployment due to structural discrimination and fewer buffers such as wealth. This paper uses measures of mental health based on the DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnostic manuals to offer estimates of the link between unemployment and psychological distress for whites and blacks. We directly consider the prior mental health background of individuals to address the problem of reverse causality bias that mars virtually all existing estimates of the link between mental health and unemployment. This also allows us to offer convincing evidence on the relative effect of unemployment on mental health across racial groups. The analysis uses data from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication. We construct two subsamples, one composed of those with no previous identified bouts of poor mental health (resilient) and a second group containing individuals with a history of psychological distress (vulnerable). Resilient persons, relative to those with a history of suffering from psychological distress, should be less likely to suffer a bout of poor mental health leading to unemployment. In addition, the influence of other covariates is likely different for resilient versus vulnerable individuals. Thus, our contention is that estimates generated using the resilient subsample will be less prone to suffer from reverse causality bias, measurement error, and specification bias. Hence, these estimates will provide the most accurate gauge of the mental costs of unemployment across racial groups. Our findings reveal that among resilient persons the pernicious effect of short-term unemployment on psychological distress is significantly greater for blacks. Our findings, based on data from the recession that began in 2001, allow us to infer that the Great Recession had a more intense adverse mental health effect on members of the black community. Our results imply that policymakers should consider both the monetary and psychological costs of unemployment, as well as their racial implications, when formulating policy to address the effects of economic downturns.

Researchers from a range of disciplines have conducted studies to identify why one in five persons in the United States fails to complete high school. Our research contributes to this literature by exploring the link between violence victimization as a youth on subsequently dropping out of high school and years of schooling completed. This pathway has largely been neglected in prior studies, although about a third of all women and men report being the victim of violence prior to the age of 16. Using data drawn from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) and the National Survey of American Life (NSAL), our analysis reveals that females and males who are the victims violence are more likely to drop out of high school relative to their peers who report that they never were the victims of violence. In addition, these negative effects appear to be driven by the effect of home violence for both genders while men also experience negative effects from community violence.

This article examines the mismatch between the political discourse around individual agency, education, and financial literacy, and the actual racial wealth gap. The authors argue that the racial wealth gap is rooted in socioeconomic and political structure barriers rather than a disdain for or underachievement in education or financial literacy on the part of Black Americans, as might be suggested by the conventional wisdom. Also, the article presents a stratification economic lens as an alternative to the conventional wisdom to better understand why the racial wealth gap persists.

Big data, that is, data that are byproducts of our lives rather than designed for research purposes, are the newest of the information highway innovations. One of the important challenges to social and behavioral science data collection, curation, and dissemination for the foreseeable future is to link diverse forms of data in a way that is cumulative, representative, meaningful, and accessible to a broad range of researchers. It is critical to explore the new questions these data can address and to develop new methods to address them, including linking persons and information about them and their environments across different data platforms while maintaining confidentiality and privacy. Linking a broad array of information—from administrative data (local and state and regional), to social media (Twitter, Facebook), to census and other surveys, to ethnographic data, and data from experiments such as randomized controlled trials—to address how humans and their communities make decisions is challenging. This issue was addressed by papers presented at a conference on New Data Linkages convened by the Social Observatories Coordinating Network in 2016; those articles are brought together in this volume.

We analyse survey data from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color Project for asset accumulation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The survey oversampled the American Indian/Alaska Native population in order to examine asset accumulation among a variety of racial, ethnic and legal status groups. We examine differences in asset accumulation across tribal members from a variety of American Indian tribes. Additionally, we make comparisons across those that are tribally enrolled to those that are not tribally enrolled. We find substantial difference across tribal affiliation in our data once we disaggregate the category of American Indian. Our research adds a new dimension to the literature examining differences in wealth accumulation by race and political status for a little-studied group. Specifically, we examine the intersection of race and legal status in wealth and asset accumulation.

A large share of the American population suffers from traumatic experiences early in life. Many adults are also victims of trauma. Using data drawn from the National Comorbidity Survey–Replication, we examine the link between self-reported happiness, a broad gauge of subjective well-being, and four types of traumatic victimization that may occur at various points in the life cycle. In particular, we consider the association between home violence, sexual assault, community violence, and stalking and subsequent victims’ adult happiness. For females and males, we find that each of these traumas significantly reduces self-reported happiness later in the life course, and for both women and men, the estimated impact of home violence is greatest. Furthermore, we find that the adverse effects of trauma on happiness are comparable to the impact of critical socioeconomic developments on happiness. Moreover, we find that experiencing more than one type of these four traumas has a greater negative impact on subsequent happiness than experiencing only one type. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls, and the influence of trauma on subsequent happiness is independent of personal and family characteristics. Since happiness and mental health are closely related, our work suggests that traumatic victimization undermines overall health and well-being in the U.S.

A growing body of research documents that middle income households are increasingly facing a higher prevalence of economic insecurity in relatives. We hypothesize that wealth accumulation will be greatly weakened for middle income households with proximity to a larger kin network of economic hardship. We focus on multiple generations and generational peers because they are members of the same family tree, yet they have grown up in different public policy regimes. Using panel data, we find that, compared to their white counterparts, third generation middle income black families are disproportionately exposed to relatives (siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents) that face poverty, unemployment, and wealth disparity. A decomposition of the wealth disparity reveals that economic insecurity in the family tree is one of the largest contributors to the black-white wealth gap among middle income earners in the third generation.

Using the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to explore the interwoven links between race, wealth and incarceration, this study examines the data on race and wealth status before and after incarceration. Data indicate that although higher levels of wealth were associated with lower rates of incarceration, the likelihood of future incarceration still was higher for blacks at every level of wealth compared to the white likelihood, as well as the Hispanic likelihood, which fell below the white likelihood for some levels of wealth. Further, we find that racial wealth gaps existed among those who would be incarcerated in the future and also among the previously incarcerated.

New data collected for the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area provide detailed information on financial assets that allow analysis to extend beyond the traditional black–white divide. Targeting US-born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Hispanics, findings from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color survey underscore the large racial and ethnic disparities in financial wealth, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic status. Further, some notable differences between Boston’s communities of color highlight the importance of detailed analyses for research on the racial wealth gap. In particular, among non-white communities Dominicans report comparatively low asset and high debt amounts, while Caribbean blacks report relatively higher levels of wealth. Altogether, these findings point to the need for wealth building opportunities in communities of color and further investigation of the causes and consequences of financial disparities between groups of color disaggregated by specific ancestral origin.

The National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey was developed to supplement existing national data sets that collect data on household wealth in the United States, but rarely collect data that is disaggregated by specific national origin. This paper begins with an examination of the importance of differentiating wealth and income, followed by a second section summarizing the methodology, and a third part analyzing the wealth position of various communities of color. For the first time, we are able to demonstrate differences in wealth across multiple Asian ethnic groups. The NASCC findings reveal that major disparities in wealth accumulation exist across certain racial and ethnic groups.

This special edition of the Review of Black Political Economics provides a contribution to the growing, vital and intellectually rich field of stratification economics. Stratification economics is an emerging field in economics that seeks to expand the boundaries of the analysis of how economists analyze intergroup differences. It examines the competitive, and sometimes collaborative, interplay between members of social groups animated by their collective self-interest to attain or maintain relative group position in a social hierarchy. The collection of articles in this volume span both quantitative and qualitative approaches, geographical distances (Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and the U.S.), types of intergroup disparity (class, race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, and phenotype), and outcomes associated with social stratification (property rights in identity, human capital, financial capital, consumer surplus, health, and labor market outcomes).

The purpose of this paper is to formally evaluate whether the deleterious impact of unemployment on mental health increases as skin shade darkens for black women in the U.S. Using data drawn from the National Survey of American Life, we find strong evidence of a gradient on depression between skin shade and unemployment for black women. These findings are consistent with the premises of the emerging field of stratification economics. Moreover, the findings are robust to various definitions of skin shade. Unemployed black women with darker complexions are significantly more likely to suffer their first onset of depression than unemployed black females with lighter skin shade. While in some cases, lighter skinned black women appeared not to suffer adverse effects of unemployment compared to their employed counterparts, persons with dark complexions did not enjoy the same degree of protection from poor mental health.

This chapter explores the development of the principle of a universal right to employment in the United States from Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights to the contemporary efforts of economists based at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Contribution to the development of the job guarantee scheme by black economists and advocates is given special attention. The breadth of support for the job guarantee across the ideological spectrum indicates that it is an idea whose time has come.

When President Lyndon Johnson gave his June 4, 1965 he invoked a symbolic language that would seize the political moment and serve as a foundatino for subsequent policy. The Civil Rights Act had passed only a year earlier and Johnson, nothing that it is not “enough just to open the gates of opportunity,” told the black graduating class that Ameica needed “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a result.” This call for “results” was a precursor to Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, a mandate for the enforcement of positive anti-discrimination measures in preferred positions of society, or “affirmative ation.”

Objectives. This article offers new evidence on whether stalking damages the mental health of female victims. This study advances the literature by accounting for age of initialstalkingvictimization,mentalhealthstatuspriortobeingstalked,andexposure to other forms of traumatic victimization. Methods. Using logistical analysis, we utilize data drawn from three large national data sets. Results. We find that being the victim of stalking as a young adult, ages 18‐45, significantly increases the odds of initial onset of psychological distress; however, this is not the case for victims ages 12‐17. Conclusions. Stalking has emerged as a deeply disturbing public issue because of its prevalence and the fear it creates in victims. Unfortunately, little is known about the psychological consequences of being stalked because the emerging literature typically is based on small, nonrandom samples. Our findings highlight the benefits of reducing stalking and the importance of supporting victims. Stalking, the willful, malicious, and repeated pursuit of another person threatening his or her safety, is a criminal offense that takes many forms, including frequent unwelcome telephone calls, e-mails, letters, loitering nearby, and following. The perception that stalking is largely confined to strangers pursuingcelebritiesorpoliticalfigureswascommonuntilthe1990s.However, overthepasttwodecadesstalkinghasemergedasadeeplydisturbingpublicissuebecauseof itsprevalenceand the fearitcreates inits victimsin partbecause of the violence perpetrated by stalkers. One in 20 Americans (12 percent of women and 4 percent of men) report being stalked at some point in their lives

In the late 1970s, amidst growing unemployment in black and Latino communities, the newly-formed Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) supported the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in its call for full employment in the run up to the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1 978. Never fully implemented, the act has been de facto an unfunded mandate for close to 40 years. Only recently has it been resurrected by a handful of lawmakers, while both discussion and support for a national jobs program has begun to gain steam in the media and the general public. With support from labor market research and other empirical evidence, we propose and outline for a bold policy: a National Investment Employment Corps to provide a permanent job guarantee for all citizens with the purpose of maintaining and expanding the nation's physical and human infrastructure. Given the disproportionate effect of the recent economic downturn and labor market bias on African Americans and Latinos, we argue that a National Investment Employment Corps program would address the employment needs for blacks and Latinos by assuring full-employment and simultaneously ensuring long-term benefits for the nation's well-being.

The U.S. is characterized by a longstanding pattern of large structural racial inequality that deepens further as a result of economic downturn. Although there have been some improvements in the income gap up until around the mid 1970s, the employment gap, and the racial wealth gap - two dramatic indicators of economic security - remains exorbitant and stubbornly persistent. We offer two race-neutral programs that could go a long way towards eliminating racial inequality, while at the same time providing economic security, mobility and sustainability for all Americans. The first program, a federal job guarantee, would provide the economic security of a job and the removal of the threat of unemployment for all Americans. The second program, a substantial child development account that rises progressively based on the familial asset positioning of the child's parents, would provide a pathways towards asset security for all Americans regardless of their economic position at birth.

Despite an enormous and persistent black-white wealth gap, the ascendant American narrative is one that proclaims that our society has transcended the racial divide. The proclamation often is coupled with the claim that remaining disparities are due primarily to dysfunctional behavior on the part of blacks. In such a climate it appears the only acceptable remedial social policies are those that are facially race neutral. However, even without the capacity to redistribute assets directly on the basis of race, our nation still can do so indirectly by judiciously using wealth as the standard for redistributive measures. We offer a bold progressive child development account type program that could go a long way towards eliminating the racial wealth gap.

The inter-racial marriage gap that opened in the past 50 years is generally attributed to a decline in the availability of young black marriageable men. We contend that the associated shortage of desirable men in the marriage market provides those black men who are sought after with the opportunity to attain a high status spouse, which has placed a premium on black women with lighter skin. We provide evidence, based on data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality, consistent with this hypothesis. Our theoretical analysis of the marriage market reveals that marriage promotion policies to increase the desire to marry on the part of young black women will serve to exacerbate the importance attached to skin shade.

Scholars have found that poor English proficiency is negatively associated with wages using self-reported measures. However, these estimates may suffer from misclassification bias. Interviewer ratings are likely to more accurately proxy employer assessment of worker language ability. Using self-reported and interviewer ratings from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, the authors estimate the impact of English proficiency on wages for men ( n = 267) and women ( n = 178) with Mexican ancestry residing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Use of interviewer proficiency ratings suggests a larger and more gradational language penalty as fluency falls, and women face a stronger penalty than their male counterparts. Moreover, controlling for worker accent and skin shade does little to alter these effects.

This paper develops and tests a theory, referred to as “preference for whiteness,” which predicts that the interracial (white-black) and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens. Using data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality and the National Survey of Black Americans, we report evidence largely consistent with the theory. Moreover, we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps, and find that favorable treatment of lighter-skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory.

[Author Affiliation]Arthur H Goldsmith, Department of Economics, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA; GoldsmithA@wlu.edu; corresponding authorDarrick Hamilton, Milano--The New School of Management and Urban Policy, 72 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011, USA; hamiltod@newschool.eduWilliam Darity Jr, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA; darity@unc.edu This work is supported by grant #0213838 from the National Science Foundation.[Acknowledgment]We are grateful for suggestions provided by Barry Hirsch and seminar participants at Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. In addition, we are grateful for comments from Julie Hotchkiss, Co-Editor for this journal, and two anonymous referees. This paper was presented at the 2004 Southern Economic Association Meetings.1. OverviewThere is an extensive literature documenting the lower wages of black and Latino workers relative to white workers in the United States. The explanations for these racial and ethnic wage disparities have ranged from differential accumulation of human capital to labor market discrimination.1 Farmer and Terrell (1996), and more recently Lewis and Terrell (2001), extend this literature by advancing a hypothesis, which we summarize as the theory of ability misperception . This hypothesis explains how group membership may differentially influence the gains associated with workplace experience, and hence the relative wages of black and Latino workers over the course of their working lifecycle.Their basic idea is twofold: First, employers believe nonwhite employees acquired fewer skills on prior jobs than white workers. Thus, employers will reward additional experience with prior employers to a greater extent for white workers than for nonwhite workers. We refer to this hypothesis as Proposition 1 . This first proposition falls under the umbrella of statistical discrimination, which explains wage inequality as a result of employers offering nonwhite workers lower wages as a result of employer reliance on their perception that the distribution of skills for nonwhite workers is worse than that of white workers.Second, as employers directly observe nonwhite workers on the job, they come to realize that their perceptions concerning the distribution of skills for nonwhite workers were incorrect and, consequently, they have underrated the ability of nonwhite employees. This learning leads employers to update their assessment of the relative productivity of nonwhite workers. Therefore, racial/ethnic differences in the return to additional tenure or seniority with the current employer will be smaller than the racial/ethnic difference in the return to prior experience when Proposition 1 holds. This prediction constitutes Proposition 2 of the theory of ability misperception .In addition, we introduce a third proposition (or a strong form of Proposition 2), which suggests that the returns to additional tenure for nonwhite employees will actually exceed that of white employees. Thus, Proposition 2 requires that the difference in returns to additional tenure with the current employer between nonwhite and white workers be smaller than the difference in returns to prior experience, while Proposition 3 requires that nonwhite workers actually receive a higher return for tenure. The purpose of this paper is to advance the existing empirical literature aimed at evaluating the validity of the propositions central to the theory of ability misperception using data drawn from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI).If Farmer and Terrell (1996) and Lewis and Terrell (2001) are correct that employers underestimate the skills of nonwhite workers before directly observing them at the worksite, then many capable nonwhite applicants will be denied work, and, if employed, will suffer undue economic losses. …

Vol. 13, Issue 2, pp. 103–109, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. © 2005 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentthrough the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

The 1990s witnessed significant changes in home ownership policy that were designed to reduce disparities in home ownership rates between whites and non‐whites. The study finds evidence that the policies were, indeed, effective in reducing home ownership disparities between whites and non‐whites. In this study data from the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS) are used to examine ethnic/racial home ownership rate disparities. Decompositions are performed to determine the component of home ownership rate differentials due to ethnic/racial group characteristics versus ability to translate those characteristics into home ownership. Presumably, a shift in public policy to be more ethnically and racially inclusive should reflect a change in home ownership rate disparities and, more particularly, a change in the component of those disparities attributed to differential ability to translate group characteristics into home ownership rates. Hence, this study addresses the success of recent policies to...