Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) are central to African diasporic economic life, yet their contemporary operation within African American entrepreneurial sectors remains insufficiently examined. This article analyzes a cooperative financial practice known as the Jar among Black beauticians and aestheticians in Richmond, California (1990s) and Augusta, Georgia (2020s). Conceptualizing the Jar as a community-based financial institution embedded in occupational networks, the study draws on feminist and political ethnography, including group interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023, to examine governance structures, leadership roles, and economic functions across two comparative cases. Findings demonstrate that the Jar operates through relational trust, reputational authority, and shared accountability norms, with leadership roles analogous to solidarity economy displayed by the “banker ladies.” Situating the analysis within Black feminist political economy and African diasporic cooperative traditions, the article argues that cooperative finance functions as a hybrid institutional strategy that mitigates structural exclusion from formal credit markets while sustaining entrepreneurial resilience. The study contributes empirical evidence to the debates on Black political economy, solidarity economies, and informal institutional governance in marginalized markets.
This paper examines whether municipal bond credit spreads in the United States reflect efficient market discipline or systematic pricing inefficiencies rooted in racial capitalism. Using a panel of approximately 145,000 tax-exempt municipal bond issues from 2010 to 2023, we estimate spread regressions with extensive controls for credit ratings, fiscal fundamentals, bond structure, and macroeconomic conditions. We decompose observed spreads into components attributable to credit risk, liquidity, and residual premiums, revealing what we term the Municipal Bond Black Tax—systematic wealth extraction from predominantly Black communities through discriminatory credit pricing. Across all specifications, predominantly Black jurisdictions pay significantly higher credit spreads—between 15 and 30 basis points—than otherwise similar communities. Spread decompositions reveal that no more than 30% to 40% of this premium reflects credit quality or liquidity differences; the remainder constitutes an unexplained racial premium representing a pure transfer of wealth from communities of color to predominantly white bondholders. Critically, we demonstrate that markets systematically fail to price physical climate risk while consistently and significantly pricing issuer racial composition, a pattern that directly contradicts market efficiency and reveals how financial institutions function as mechanisms of racial capitalism. Sensitivity analysis using a 50% Black population threshold confirms and strengthens these findings: the estimated premium increases to 19–22 basis points, reinforcing the conclusion that the Black Tax intensifies precisely where Black political and economic presence is most concentrated. For a typical $10 million, 20-year bond, the Municipal Bond Black Tax imposes $300,000 to $500,000 in excess interest costs. At national scale, this wealth extraction exceeds $500 million annually.
This paper examines why 3-year federal student loan repayment rates differ between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other not-for-profit, 4-year institutions, and how institutional characteristics—such as resource levels, student composition, and intercollegiate athletics—contribute to this gap. Using a panel of 709 institutions from FY 2010 to FY 2017, we apply entropy balancing to reweight characteristics and estimate random effects models to identify conditional differences in repayment outcomes. Year-by-year Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions separate the portion of the gap explained by differences in institutional endowments from the portion arising from differential returns to those characteristics. Across specifications, repayment rates at HBCUs remain lower—by about 13.7 to 17.9 percentage points—even after covariate adjustment. The explained component is generally small, statistically insignificant, and often negative, while the unexplained component is large and significant in several years. These patterns suggest that observable characteristics account for little of the disparity, and that structural factors, including possible discriminatory returns, play a substantive role. Higher household income improves repayment performance, while greater shares of Pell Grant and part-time students reduce it. Intercollegiate athletics spending is positively, though modestly, associated with repayment rates. The findings emphasize the influence of institutional context, culture, and unobserved dynamics on student loan outcomes.
This research investigates the potential for achieving racial reconciliation in the United States through addressing systems of discrimination in historically marginalized communities. Using qualitative methods including focus groups and interviews, this study explores the impact on community economic viability of elevating Black and minoritized businesses to survive entrenched race-based discriminatory practices. Based on interviews with 21 Oakland manufacturing business owners, findings reveal that beyond the well-documented challenges facing marginalized businesses (access to capital, market, and education), additional needs exist including building community and ecosystem collaboration, building community and ecosystem trust, alleviating the “social vs. profit” strategy gap, and engendering community commitment. The study proposes methods for addressing these complex and interconnected needs as a first step toward racial reconciliation in affected communities.
The War on Drugs (WoD) notoriously targeted poor people and communities, especially Black and Latinx people. Its negative impact on the formation and defense of unions has only recently been studied. This paper explores the magnitude of the WoD's role in increasing arrests and imprisonment, and its long shadow in probation and parole. It details the way it divided workers by race, and hammered the poor under the guise of fighting drugs. Incorporating unemployment and manufacturing's employment share, the paper shows that the WoD and the dramatic conservative turn it represented contributed substantially to the decline in union density.
This article traced the concept of international development to the condescending, Eurocentric mission of civilizing the so-called Third World, including Africa. This perspective served as the template for Western development thinking, which informed Harry Truman's Point Four Program for countering the threats that the poverty of the underdeveloped world posed to their Western, developed counterparts. While sub-Saharan Africa, by default, is synonymous with the century-old colonial definition of underdevelopment, this article contributes to the clarion call to redefining development in Africans' own terms and cultural relevance. The paper argues for a twinlineal, Afrocentric approach to revisiting the colonial grammar of androcentric development. This course must be charted by pragmatic leaders who appreciate the nexus between gender and health as critical pathways to the application of decoloniality as the method toward an agentic, sustainable development thinking in sub-Saharan Africa.
We re-characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains. Coercive labor markets were severely distorted, with the social marginal cost of labor substantially above its marginal benefit. Production during enslavement came at immense costs imposed upon enslaved people that reduced aggregate economic surplus, or the total value of output minus total costs incurred. The costs of enslavement are inherently difficult to quantify, which leads to a wide range of quantitative estimates, but we calculate that emancipation generated aggregate economic gains worth the equivalent of a 4% to 35% increase in US aggregate productivity (7 to 60 years of technological innovation). Emancipation decreased output but sparked dramatic aggregate economic gains by decreasing costs substantially more, illustrating the substantial potential for aggregate economic gains in the presence of severe misallocation.
Analysis of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data reveals that Black workers are more likely than Whites to receive and provide informal support to family and friends, and most of that support takes the form of offers of rent-free housing. The value of money and in-kind housing received by White workers potentially bumped their total wealth accumulations by 7%, while among Black workers, wealth accumulations were potentially increased by 24%. When monetary support is given to family and friends, it reduces formal wealth balances by one to two percentage points among Whites and Blacks, barely impacting workers’ ability to accumulate wealth. Among retirees, the fraction of Blacks who receive and give informal support to others is almost double that among their White counterparts, and the majority of this support is in the form of rent-free housing. For the 10% of Black retirees and the 5% of White retirees who receive help from family and friends, the value of informal support makes up 38–40% of their total income. Those who do not receive support rely more heavily on Social Security, pensions, and “other” income, and among White retirees, there is also more reliance on earnings and property income.
In assessing the nature of income-growth, it would be desirable for at least two aspects of the growth process to enter the assessment – those of the ‘size’ of growth, and the ‘equitableness’ with which the growth is distributed across the population under consideration. An index of growth which combines these two indicators of size and equitableness – and preferably in a form that is ‘separable’ in the two indicators – is a summary statistic of what might be called ‘real national growth’. It is such a measure of growth, combining within itself considerations of both magnitude and distribution, that is advanced in this article. Two illustrative applications of the paper's concerns are provided: one is a comparison of household income inequality in the United States over two periods of time, 1975 to 1985 and 1995 to 2005, while the other is an assessment of Black–White disparity in the distribution of household income in the United States over the period 2010 to 2020.
The study aims to investigate what determinants had an impact on the imports of different categories of technology goods and to verify whether the determinants such as level of sustainable development and quality of institutions had also an impact on the imports of different categories of technology goods. The study covers 53 African economies and 17 categories of technology goods. To investigate the determinants of the Chinese technology goods imports with the use of the trade gravity in levels approach in a panel data set covering the period 2016–2021, we have applied the semimixed effect method using the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator. The study proved that most of the explanatory variables functioned in line with expectations and economic theory. Several anomalies were also identified in the behavior of variables such as productivity, quality of institutions and Internet technology advancement.
In this article, I study rates of upward intergenerational mobility within and across race/ethnicity and by college degree status using nationally representative data from the NLSY 1997 cohorts. Using probability models, I look at mobility rates for various outcomes when individuals are ages 30 to 35, including labor income, household income, and wealth, and look at absolute and rank mobility rates for each measure. Absolute mobility measures improvements from one generation to the next, and rank mobility measures movement up the income/wealth rank. I find that Blacks with a degree do better on all measures than Blacks without a degree. Hispanics without a degree do as well as, or better than, Hispanics with a degree on most measures, while non-Black-non-Hispanics with a degree do better on all measures than their nondegree same-race counterparts. Blacks see the largest differences in mobility between degree and nondegree holders. Across race, holding non-Blacks-non-Hispanics without a degree as the reference group, Blacks with a college degree have higher rates of absolute labor income mobility, household income mobility, and household income rank mobility, but lower labor income rank mobility and lower absolute and rank wealth mobility. Hispanics, regardless of degree status, have higher rates of mobility than the reference group on most measures. These results suggest an association between college degree and intergenerational mobility within race for Blacks, but a college degree is not enough to bridge the gaps across race. For Hispanics, there is upward mobility across race, but the role of a college degree appears weak.
This essay was part of a plenary session at the 2024 ASSA meetings on “Thinking and doing like an inclusive economist” in honor of Bill Spriggs. I reflect on and expand Sprigg's 2020 open letter to economists that was titled, “Is now a teachable moment for economists?”
This article investigates the connection between educational attainment and economic outcomes for Black Americans. We note a quandary between narrowing disparities in educational attainment and little to no diminishment of disparities in employment and income outcomes. To better understand this quandary, we suggest perceptions of the quality of schooling, as represented by racial/ethnic differences in literacy proficiency, might be a helpful explanatory factor. To address perceived differences in educational quality as proxied by literacy disparities, we propose implementing several universal and evidence-based strategies for enhancing literacy outcomes. Achieving success in this effort would be an important step forward in ensuring the conditions are present for Blacks to obtain greater economic prosperity and fuller participation in American life.
Some scholars argue that the low employment rate for young Black males with less than a college degree is due, in part, to their lack of soft skills. This claim has been difficult to assess because soft skills are defined in multiple ways, and soft skills are difficult to measure. I evaluate this claim by focusing specifically on interactional soft skills (ISS). I address the measurement problem indirectly by using the occupational-task lists in the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to rate occupations by their need for ISS. I calculate Interactional-Soft-Skill Scores for the 399 occupational categories in which less-educated young men are employed. My analysis shows that, contrary to the claims by several scholars, less-educated, young, Black males are nearly as likely to be employed in interactional-soft-skills occupations as their White peers. The low employment rate of less-educated, young Black males is mainly due to their failure to obtain hard-skills work—not soft-skills work. There appears to be false and misleading stereotypes behind the argument that less-educated, young, Black males lack soft skills.
This essay is based on a talk that the author gave in a plenary session at the January 2024 ASSA economic association meetings in San Antonio Texas in honor of Bill Spriggs. The plenary session was entitled, Thinking Like an Inclusive Economist: Theory and Representation in Economics, In Memory of William E. Spriggs (1955–2023). The author uses personal narratives to discuss the implications of lack of representation of African Americans within the economics profession by drawing on Bill Spriggs’ powerful open letter to the economics profession as a basis for assessing inclusion within heterodox economics.
This study evaluates social justice across Alabama by applying the Community Capitals Framework and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the distribution of community assets at the county level. Secondary data, sourced from federal agencies such as the U.S. Census, were aggregated using GIS software (ArcMap) to create a comprehensive overview of capital distribution. The final outcome, termed the Social Justice Index, integrates various types of capital to assess each county's overall asset base. Contrary to expectations, several counties in the Black Belt region exhibited high levels of capital, particularly in social capital. The findings emphasize the critical role of social capital in community development and highlight its potential to enhance overall asset accumulation. This study contributes to the community development literature by offering a novel approach to identifying community assets and wealth. Furthermore, the resulting maps provide grassroots organizers with valuable tools for targeting areas in need of strategic interventions.
The incarceration rate of Black men has increased since the war on drugs began in the 1970s. This has coincided with a decline in the marriage rate for Black women. In this paper, I test this link directly by using the relaxation of existing cannabis legislation over the past decade, which has led to a reduction in the drug-related arrests of Blacks. Also, I present the difference-in-differences estimation results that show that legalizing recreational cannabis increases the odds of marriage for Black women without college education.
Despite the significant role of discriminatory preferences in shaping racial disparities in economic outcomes, much of the economic literature assumes racial preferences to be exogenous. However, existing research indicates that both economic and non-economic factors can influence racially prejudiced sentiments. This article contributes to the literature by (a) utilizing repeated cross-sectional survey data from multiple waves (1976–2018) of the General Social Survey to achieve more precise estimates and stronger test statistics; (b) performing regression analyses with varying model specifications to ensure robustness of the empirical results; (c) demonstrating how careful inclusion of controls for age, period, and cohort impacts the findings; and (d) employing a quantile regression approach to explore differential effects across the distribution of discriminatory preferences. Our results show that unemployment rates are significantly linked to discriminatory preferences, aligning with classical labor market competition theories. Furthermore, education plays a crucial role, especially in reducing discriminatory preferences at the higher end of the distribution. We argue that classical labor market competition theories are instrumental in explaining the determinants of discriminatory preferences.
In this paper, we develop a fixed effects model to assess the factors that are most reliably important or significantly associated in predicting variations in equity capital positioning and asset growth adjustments for minority depository institutions (MDIs) that are also community development financial institutions (CDFIs). Asset size played a role during each of the periods of the analysis. For the period immediately after the financial crisis, net income (profitability) played the most significant role for all bank types in terms of equity capital growth, but especially for MDIs-CDFIs. For the later period of analysis, from 2014 to 2019, macroeconomic factors and business cycle fixed effects have the most significant predictive power for equity capital. We find results that point to the benefit of strong balance sheets and equity capital ratios for MDIs-CDFIs as they extend lending and their other assets' growth strategies.
