The Review of Black Political Economy

Statistical analysis often reveals that racial identity is a measurable, significant, and persistent predictor of economic outcomes. Persistent racial disparities in unemployment and wages are defining features of the U.S. labor market and as such, provide some of the most compelling evidence of structural racism in this country. In her 2023 NEA Presidential Address, Wilson discusses decades of data and research in support of this conclusion and identifies some of the institutions that play an important role in facilitating racial economic justice.

The inquiry in this paper has two parts: (1) an examination of potential disparities in exposure to airport noise pollution between Blacks (non-Hispanic) and Whites (non-Hispanic) around the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport (AHJA) area, and (2) a binary logistic regression analysis studying factors contributing to these disparities. The proposed model is that the difference in noise exposure measured by Net Exposure Difference score is a function of the degree of Black-White residential segregation; differences in poverty rates between Blacks and Whites; some socio-economic-demographic variables and four health indicators - noise annoyance (NA); sleep disturbance (SD); hearing impairment (HI); and cardiovascular disorder (CVD).

A stratified random sampling method and telephonic survey using a 43-questions questionnaire among the adult households around the AHJA area produced 237 observations on Black and White households over a period of 2 years.

Parameter estimates reveals disparities in exposure to aircraft noise exposure between the Black and White households within the 10-mile radius of the airport area indicating environmental injustice. The odds-ratios from the binary logistic regression suggests residential segregation, difference in poverty rates, race, education, as well as health conditions like hearing impairment and sleep disturbances have a statistically significant association with this disparity in noise exposure.

There is a major difference in the drug arrest rate and incarceration rates between Black and White individuals. However, the drug use rate across the two groups is similar (and has been over time). This study estimates the lost productivity over time of people arrested on drug charges because they are Black. Ceteris Paribus, if those using the drugs were White, instead of Black, at the point of arrest and incarceration, what would have been their additional productivity levels over their lives? In this study I estimate this lost productivity to be $53 billion to $220 billion from 1980–2018 (in 2019-dollars), suggesting that the Lucas wedge is substantial for racial drug arrests.

As the evidence linking test scores to long-run student outcomes has grown, standardized assessments have become a widely used management tool in education including addressing the racial education gap. One of the concerns with the use of standards tests is the perverse incentive for teachers to alter test scores. The consequences for educators found cheating can be substantial, although little is known about how students are impacted by cheating. Using an 11-year panel of individual-level data on students and teachers from a predominantly Black urban school district where widespread test-score manipulation occurred, we investigated the impact of teacher cheating on subsequent student test scores. To access the impact, we used school-grade and classroom fixed effects as well as measure potential omitted variable bias (OVB). We found that for each additional wrong-to-right altered test question it is associated with a reduced future achievement of between 0.003 and 0.014 standard deviations depending on the specification. Although the evidence from OVB analysis does not suggest that test-score manipulation itself harmed or benefited students. Our evidence also contributes to a growing literature on the importance of sensitivity tests for OVB. We show how failure to conduct such tests could lead to erroneous findings.

The present study seeks to add to the growing literature related to off-field actions impacting labor economic issues. It examines how off-field incidents with law enforcement and violations of league policies governing performance enhancing drugs impact career earnings for players. Furthermore, we seek to understand how career earnings are impacted for visible minorities. Ordinary least squares and quantile regression estimations of career earnings for over 3,500 National Football League players show generally these actions do not impact career earnings. If there are significant impacts, then the impacts generally tend to be positive, but not for racial minority players.

As accumulating wealth is a vital component of financial well-being, this paper aims to gain a better understanding of why African Americans do not accumulate wealth at the same rate as other racial groups. Researchers utilize data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to estimate the parameters of logistic regression specifications to examine the factors that determine wealth accumulation for African Americans. Researchers found that African Americans were less likely to have low wealth if they owned their own homes and more likely to have low wealth if they did not save. Saving and homeownership had more of an impact on wealth accumulation for African Americans than for White Americans. Furthermore, African Americans who did not invest in the stock market were more likely to have low wealth, as investing also had more of an effect on wealth accumulation for White Americans than for African Americans.