When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of callbacks to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 61 (146) percent. The removal "worked" in this sense because it generated a large increase in gender-mismatched applications, and because those applications were treated surprisingly well by employers, suggesting that employers' gender requests often represented relatively weak preferences or outdated stereotypes. The job titles that were integrated by the ban, however, were not the most gendered ones, and were disproportionately lower-wage jobs.

Democracy often confronts citizens with a dilemma: stand firm on democracy while losing out on policy or accept undemocratic behavior and gain politically. Existing literature demonstrates that citizens generally choose the latter—and that they do so deliberately. Yet there is an alternative possibility. Citizens can avoid this uncomfortable dilemma altogether by rationalizing their understandings of democracy. When a politician advances undesired policies without violating democratic rules and norms, people find ways to perceive the behavior as undemocratic. When a politician acts undemocratically to promote desired policies, citizens muster up arguments for considering it democratic. Original survey experiments in the United States, and 22 democracies worldwide, provide strong support for this argument. It is thus not deliberate acceptance, but a fundamentally different perceptual logic that drives the widespread approval of undemocratic behavior in today’s democracies.

How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor’s degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor’s completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor’s degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor’s completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) has been continuously biomonitoring Americans’ exposure to two families of harmful environmental chemicals: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). However, biomonitoring these chemicals is expensive. To save cost, in 2005, NHANES resorted to pooled biomonitoring; i.e., amalgamating individual specimens to form a pool and measuring chemical levels from pools. Despite being publicly available, these pooled data gain limited applications in health studies. Among the few studies using these data, racial/age disparities were detected, but there is no control for confounding effects. These disadvantages are due to the complexity of pooled measurements and a dearth of statistical tools. Herein, we developed a regression-based method to unzip pooled measurements, which facilitated a comprehensive assessment of disparities in exposure to these chemicals. We found increasing dependence of PCBs on age and income, whereas PBDEs were the highest among adolescents and seniors and were elevated among the low-income population. In addition, Hispanics had the lowest PCBs and PBDEs among all demographic groups after controlling for potential confounders. These findings can guide the development of population-specific interventions to promote environmental justice. Moreover, both chemical levels declined throughout the period, indicating the effectiveness of existing regulatory policies.

Since 2009, the Chinese state-owned corporation SINLANX has been managing the Anjava Sugar Plantation, previously managed by French, Malagasy, and Mauritian companies, in northern Madagascar. Built upon the infrastructure constructed by the French colonial regime and operating based on a collaboration agreement between SINLANX and the Malagasy state-owned sugar company, Anjava presents a telling story of spatialized acts of survival and racialized conflicts over land and water in the interstitial spaces between capitalist production and subsistence economy. Malagasy villagers’ access to resources is often squeezed by multiple enclosures: a water-delivery system and a land-distribution system that prioritize sugar production and a bureaucratic system that punishes those who transgress the enclosures. Although Anjava villagers take advantage of the rhythm of sugar harvests and the nature of fire to sabotage sugar production or to make water claims for their livelihood, the agrarian and infrastructural arrangements at Anjava have perpetuated conditions of chronic precarity and profound marginalization of a landless population. The struggles at Anjava must be contextualized in the complex and ambiguous spaces between capital and labor, livelihood and resistance, dominance and adaptation, and ethnic collaboration and hostility.

This article examines economic justice in nineteenth-century Mexico City through analysis of small-claims conflicts—juicios verbales. After the promulgation of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, this centuries-old tradition of judicial arbitration was shaped by liberal constitutionalism. A new class of officials, the alcaldes constitucionales, were elected by residents to decide cases. Cádiz liberalism inaugurated a new world. What happened when people faced a classic problem, when they did not pay their debts? Microeconomic history—the quantitative and qualitative study of the economic relationships, decisions, and actions of individuals, households, and small enterprises—exposes the workings of economic justice. From 1813 to 1863, tens of thousands of residents pressed their claims before magistrates. As this article shows, justice grounded in Cádiz liberalism was relatively effective for ordinary people and evinced a gender fairness. These small-claims conflicts might seem a petty world of negligible amounts and narrow-minded disputes, but analyzed together, they challenge conventional interpretations about institutional deficiency and historical underdevelopment. Cádiz liberalism established a judicial institution to protect property rights, especially for creditors, that enjoyed broad legitimacy.

Mental health services are experiencing unprecedented levels of demand from clients during COVID resulting in longer wait lists and therapist burnout. As Nemoyer et al. (2019) point out, minorities experience a higher burden of mental illness while having less access and lower quality treatments. COVID has increased demands for mental health services even further, creating bottlenecks of care, therapist burnout, and leading to ever longer wait lists. This article will argue that inefficient supply of services is created by mental health providers being incentivized toward individual therapy. Group therapy offers a solution because it is a “triple E treatment”—efficient, effective, and equivalent to individual therapy in terms of outcomes (Burlingame & Strauss, 2021). Group interventions also address systemic racism and the needs of minorities who have been marginalized and cope with minority stress. This article will utilize a labor and financial impact analysis to demonstrate how increasing group therapy by 10% nationally, particularly in private practice and primary care integration settings, would increase treatment access for over 3.5 million people while reducing the need for 34,473 additional new therapists and simultaneously saving over $5.6 billion. It will discuss how incentivizing groups while holding therapists accountable for training, competency when working with people from diverse backgrounds, and outcomes can result in improved efficiency. This will allow therapists greater freedom to collaboratively select the most effective treatments for those from underserved and minority backgrounds and create easier access to quality treatments.