Economic Opportunity, Innovation, and Equitable Growth

There is growing interest in understanding the link between inequality and growth.  Is there a tradeoff between the two?  Are there policies that can improve equity while increasing growth?  Prior research on these important topics has focused primarily on macroeconomic evidence, comparing countries with different policy or studying changes in the aggregate time series.  Unfortunately, this macroeconomic approach has not been conclusive about the determinants of inequality and growth because there are vast differences across economies, making it difficult to isolate causal effects and understand the key mechanisms driving inequality and growth. This project seeks to tackle this question using microeconomic methods, drawing upon large individual-level administrative datasets to obtain more precise answers and identify policy interventions that can improve opportunities for low-SES subgroups in a manner that contributes to economic innovation and equitable growth.