***New paper*** How do affirmative action's most common race-neutral alternatives comparatively reshape universities' enrollment of underrepresented minority (URM) and lower-income students?

Here's a thread of new evidence from California. #EconTwitter

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… My own prior work has shown that affirmative action provided big admission advantages to URM Californians before the state banned AA in 1998.

The ban led URM students to cascade into less-selective universities, which had long-run economic consequences: academic.oup.com/qje/advance-ar…

**New paper** Over the past 20 years (but not before!), Black and Hispanic college graduates have been steadily earning degrees in relatively lower-paying majors.

The main culprit? An increasingly-common public university policy.

A thread. #EconTwitter zacharybleemer.com/wp-content/upl… Underrepresented minority (URM) college graduates have long earned lower-paying majors than their non-URM peers, but the gap has been growing for the past 20 years.

Today, URM graduates earn degrees with lower average wages by almost 3%. 2/n

Thrilled to share that my research on the economic mobility ramifications of banning affirmative action is forthcoming at the @QJEHarvard.

https://twitter.com/QJEHarvard/status/1433134029704884227

Here's a thread that summarizes the paper's key findings.

https://twitter.com/zbleemer/status/1296778111107956737

Now published: Looking for a great way to explain regression discontinuity designs to undergrads? Show them the causal wage return to majoring in economics! A short thread. #EconTwitter

https://twitter.com/AEAjournals/status/1374365803269779461

In 2008-2012, UC Santa Cruz limited access to its economics major to students who earned at least a 2.8 GPA in their first two economics courses. Compliance was imperfect, but having a 2.8 GPA made students much more likely to declare the economics major.