Economics Insights @ CBS

Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less-than-desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences.

As financial technology improves and data becomes more abundant, do market prices reflect this growing information and allocate capital more efficiently? While a number of recent studies have documented rises in aggregate price efficiency, we show that there are large cross-sectional differences. The previously-documented increases are driven by a rise in the informativeness of large, growth stocks. The informational efficiency of smaller assets' prices or prices of assets with less growth potential are either flat or declining.

By integrating the intersectional invisibility hypothesis with the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map framework, we examine the extent to which Black women’s dual-subordinated identities render them nonprototypical victims of discrimination, relative to White women and Black men, and the corresponding consequences.

Ensuring the privacy of training data is a growing concern since many machine learning models are trained on confidential and potentially sensitive data. Much attention has been devoted to methods for protecting individual privacy during analyses of large datasets. However in many settings, global properties of the dataset may also be sensitive (e.g., mortality rate in a hospital rather than presence of a particular patient in the dataset).