Inequality & Discrimination

poverty and inequality

Discrimination and implicit biases due to an individual’s gender, race, origin, or religion remain significant barriers to true equality of opportunity across the globe. Data-driven evidence can help unveil and tackle these issues by informing policymakers to make institutions more equitable and fight persistent economic inequality.

This project aims to highlight the topic from two different angles.

First, intersectionality – a theoretical concept to understand inequalities by race/ethnicity, gender, and other factors, emphasizing their overlaps in shaping social identities – has the potential to uncover these disparities in a previously unknown way. There is extensive theoretical literature on intersectionality, but hardly any work that applies the concept with quantitative data. To fill this gap, we incorporate intersectionality into the measurement of education inequality in 27 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa using household-level survey data.

Second, there is a vast pool of research documenting disadvantages for women, racial minorities, and individuals with immigration backgrounds when seeking jobs. We explore a previously neglected explanation for a gender and racial gap in job market outcomes. Exploiting quasi-experimental features of the institutional setting in Switzerland, we study the role of unemployment assistance in propagating inequality in the labor market.