National Bureau of Economic Research
Journal Data
| Type | REPOSITORY |
|---|---|
| OpenAlex | S2809516038 |
| MAG | 2809516038 |
| Website | http://www.nber.org/ |
| Total publications | 349 |
| Coverage period | 1979 - 2025 |
| Language | EN |
| Cited by | 1.588 |
| Impact factor | 493 |
| h-index | 20 |
| i10-index | 26 |
The National Bureau of Economic Research is a prominent institution focused on economic research, primarily within mainstream economics. While economic anthropology exists, this venue's content is largely quantitative and has only loose intersection with social anthropology
Banking stability, regulation, efficiency · Corporate Finance and Governance · Corporate Taxation and Avoidance · Economic Growth and Productivity · Economic Policies and Impacts · Economic theories and models · Economic Theory and Policy · Employment and Welfare Studies · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis · Financial Markets and Investment Strategies
Malthusian Migrations
Are We Fragmented Yet? Measuring Geopolitical Fragmentation and Its Causal Effect
After decades of rising global economic integration, the world economy is fragmenting.To measure this, we introduce a geopolitical fragmentation index based on a dynamic hierarchical factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility.We then use structural vector autoregressions and local projections to assess the causal effects of fragmentation.Increased fragmentation negatively impacts the global economy, with emerging economie…
The Economic Effects of American Slavery: Tests at the Border
To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border.We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side.Half of the border region was half underutilized.This does not support the view that abolition was a costly constraint for landowners.Indeed, the lower demand for similar,…
Social Movements and Public Opinion in the United States
Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change.This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes.Drawing on a database covering the quasi-universe of protests held in the United States, we identify 14 social movements that took place from 2017 to 2022, covering topics related to en…
Upward Mobility in Developing Countries
This article provides an overview of the literature on mobility in developing countries.Explicit distinctions are drawn between directional and non-directional measures, absolute and relative measures, and combinations thereof.We note that the scarcity of panel data has hindered the measurement of mobility for many countries.We pay particular attention to the recent development of panel-free mobility measures, which allows us to measure upward mo…
The value of forecasts: Experimental evidence from India
Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries.Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs.Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season ahead.We experimentally evaluate monsoon onset forecasts in India, randomizing 250 villages into control; a forecast group receiving information well in adva…
Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States
We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and US compensation programs.The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-prote…
“Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and the Origins of U.S. Partisan Realignment
We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. We show that less-educated Americans differentially demand “predistribution” policies (e.g., a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while more-educated Americans differentially favor redistribution (taxes and transfers). This educational gradient in policy preferences has been largely unc…
The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century
The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguist…
The Confederate Diaspora
This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation.These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become pervasive nationally in the early 20th century.Occupying positions of authority, former slaveholders played an outsized role in this process.Beyond memorializ…
Techies and Firm Level Productivity
We study the impact of techies—engineers and other technically trained workers—on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by using French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with innovation, as well as with technology adoption, management, and diffusion within firms. Using structural econometric methods, we estimate the causal effect of techies o…
The Impact of the Prehistoric Out of Africa Migration on Cultural Diversity
Evidence suggests that the prehistoric Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intrapopulation genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe.This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity.Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral traditions across the world, we find that ethnic groups further away from East Africa along the migratory routes have lower folkloric diversity.This pattern is c…
Generative AI at Work
We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents.Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14 percent on average, with the greatest impact on novice and lowskilled workers, and minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers.We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the potentially tacit know…
National Wage Setting
The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains
In the late nineteenth century, the North American bison was brought to the brink of extinction in just over a decade. We demonstrate that the loss of the bison had immediate, negative consequences for the Native Americans who relied on them and ultimately resulted in a permanent reversal of fortunes. Once amongst the tallest people in the world, the generations of bison-reliant people born after the slaughter lost their entire height advantage. …
Shareholder Power and the Decline of Labor
Shareholder power in the US grew over recent decades due to a steep rise in concentrated institutional ownership. Using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database for 1982-2015, this paper examines the impact of increases in concentrated institutional ownership on employment, wages, shareholder returns, and labor productivity. Consistent with theory of the firm based on conflicts of interests between share…
Small Campaign Donors
Understanding of Trade
This paper sheds new light on two questions: How do people perceive and understand trade and trade policy, and what shapes their support for different trade policies? Despite extensive research documenting the efficiency gains from trade and its distributional impacts on different groups of workers, firms, and consumers, we still need to uncover how people perceive these various effects of trade. Trade involves many trade-offs. When forming their…
Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?
We examine individuals' decision to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent public health measures to combat COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our analysis is facilitated by a unique staggered panel data set originally constructed to study the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19. A wave of data collected in the summer of 2020 was expanded to capture details about protest attendance, polit…
Consensus and Disagreement: Information Aggregation under (not so) Naive Learning
We explore a model of non-Bayesian information aggregation in networks.Agents noncooperatively choose among Friedkin-Johnsen type aggregation rules to maximize payoffs.The DeGroot rule is chosen in equilibrium if and only if there is noiseless information transmission, leading to consensus.With noisy transmission, while some disagreement is inevitable, the optimal choice of rule amplifies the disagreement: even with little noise, individuals plac…
The World Uncertainty Index
Electoral Turnovers
In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and parliamentary elections held since 1945. We document the prevalence of turnovers over time and estimate their effects on economic performance, trade, human development, conflict, an…
The Social Consequences of Traditional Religion in Contemporary Africa
In most of Africa, traditional supernatural beliefs, including beliefs in witchcraft, black magic, or fetishism, are widespread and have remained so despite the spread of Christianity. The effects of these beliefs remain unclear. Some have hypothesized that these beliefs are beneficial and help to sustain cooperative behavior in a setting where the state is often absent. Others have documented that, inconsistent with this argument, such beliefs a…
The (Un)Importance of Inheritance
Transfers from parents-either in the form of gifts or inheritances-have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income, government transfers, and gifts and inheritances received over the period) accounted for by capitalized gifts and inherit…
Land Security and Mobility Frictions
Developing countries are characterized by frictions that impede the mobility of workers across occupations and space. We disentangle the role of insecure property rights from other labor mobility frictions for the reallocation of labor from agriculture to non-agriculture and from rural to urban areas. We combine rich household and individual-level panel data from China and an equilibrium quantitative framework that features the sorting of workers…
The Impact of Covid-19 on Gender Equality
The economic downturn caused by the current COVID-19 outbreak has substantial implications for gender equality, both during the downturn and the subsequent recovery.Compared to "regular" recessions, which affect men's employment more severely than women's employment, the employment drop related to social distancing measures has a large impact on sectors with high female employment shares.In addition, closures of schools and daycare centers have m…
Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth
This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development.We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two "quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth cent…
Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings
A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to ta…
Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development Among New World Economics
Whereas traditional explanations of differences in long-run paths of development across the Americas generally point to the significance of differences in national heritage or religion, we highlight the relevance of stark contrasts in the degree of inequality in wealth, human capital, and political power in accounting for how fundamental economic institutions evolved over time.We argue, moreover, that the roots of these disparities in the extent …
Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Cote d'Ivoire: Social Norms, Separate Accounts and Consumption Choices
We study resource allocation within households in Côte d'Ivoire.In Côte d'Ivoire, as in much of Africa, husbands and wives farm separate plots, and there is some specialization by gender in the crops that are grown.These different crops are differentially sensitive to particular kinds of rainfall shocks.We find that conditional on overall levels of expenditure, the composition of household expenditure is sensitive to the gender of the recipient o…
Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries
We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK.These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin's Q, sales growth and survival rates.Management practices also display significant cross-country differences with US firms on average better managed than European firms, and significant wi…
Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success
This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills.The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills|personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains.Their predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills.Reliable measures of character have been developed.All measures of char…
Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem
European unemployment has been steadily increasing for the last 15 years and is expected to remain very high for many years to come.In thi5 paper, we argue that this fact implies that shocks have much more persistent effects on unemployment than standard theories can possibly explain.We develop a theory which can explain such persistence, and which is based on the distinction between insiders and outsiders in wage bargaining.We argue that if wage…
This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises
This paper offers a "panoramic" analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England's fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis.Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions.It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults and restructurings in India and China.As the first paper employing this data, our aim is t…
Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development
There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development.There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience.In response, there is movement in development economics towards the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowledge of what works, withou…
The Gravity Model
The gravity model in economics was until relatively recently an intellectual orphan, unconnected to the rich family of economic theory.This review is a tale of the orphan's reunion with its heritage and the benefits that have flowed from it.Gravity has long been one of the most successful empirical models in economics.Incorporating the theoretical foundations of gravity into recent practice has led to a richer and more accurate estimation and int…
Finance and Growth: Theory and Evidence
This paper reviews, appraises, and critiques theoretical and empirical research on the connections between the operation of the financial system and economic growth.While subject to ample qualifications and countervailing views, the preponderance of evidence suggests that both financial intermediaries and markets matter for growth and that reverse causality alone is not driving this relationship.Furthermore, theory and evidence imply that better …
A Theory of Dual Labor Markets with Application to Industrial Policy, Discrimination and Keynesian Unemployment
This paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers' need to motivate workers.In order to elicit effort from their workers, employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage.This changes fundamentally the character of labor markets.The model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena.it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates.it also can provide the basis for…
The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins
In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes.We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified interpretation.We also address several objections to the empirical claim that legal origins matter.Finally, we assess the implications of this research for …
Debt and Seniority: An Analysis of the Role of Hard Claims in Constraining Management
We argue that long-term debt has a role in controlling management's ability to finance future investments.A company with high (widely-held) debt will find it hard to raise capital.since new security holders will have low priority relative to existing creditors.Conversely for a company with low debt We show there is an optimal debt-equity ratio and mix of senior and junior debt if management undertakes unprofitable as well as profitable investment…
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey
This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration.The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries.The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into host-country labor markets and concomitant effects for natives.The paper then turns to immigration's impact for the public finances of host countries.The final section considers emerging top…
Why Do Firms Train? Theory and Evidence
This paper offers and tests a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for general training they receive.The superior information about crucial ingredient in the worker's ability our model is that the current employer has relative to other firms.This informational advantage gives the employer an ex post monopsony power over the worker which encourages the firm to provide training.We show that the model can lead to multiple equilibria.In one …
Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past hundred years.But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973.We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality.We document dramatic chang…
Self-Employment, Family Background, and Race
We focus on the intergenerational transmission of the propensity to be self-employed.Our emphasis is on the role of family background, and in particular, on what we call the intergenerational pickup rate with respect to self-employment, the probability that a person with a self-employed parent will become self-employed him or herself.We use the General Social Survey, a data source with rich information on individuals' family histories, to investi…
Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics
We live in an age of paradox.Systems using artificial intelligence match or surpass human level performance in more and more domains, leveraging rapid advances in other technologies and driving soaring stock prices.Yet measured productivity growth has declined by half over the past decade, and real income has stagnated since the late 1990s for a majority of Americans.We describe four potential explanations for this clash of expectations and stati…
Fractionalization
We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries.These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used.We also revisit the question of the effects of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization on quality of institutions and growth.We partly confirm and partly modify previous results.The pa…
The Economics of Bankruptcy Reform
We propose a new bankruptcy procedure.Initially, a firm's debts are cancelled, and cash and non-cash bids are solicited for the 'new" (all-equity) firm.Former claimants are given shares, or options to buy shares, in the new firm on the basis of absolute priority.Options are exercised once the bids are in.Finally, a shareholder vote is taken to select one of the bids.In essence, our procedure is a variant on the U.S. Chapter 7, in which non-cash b…
A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History
Neither economics nor political science can explain the process of modern social development. The fact that developed societies always have developed economies and developed polities suggests that the connection between economics and politics must be a fundamental part of the development process. This paper develops an integrated theory of economics and politics. We show how, beginning 10,000 years ago, limited access social orders developed that…
Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa
In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa.In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding it.In the African case, however, this heterogeneity is muted, making an assessment of the average effect more interesting.We emphasize that to draw conclusions it is necessary not just to know what actually…
Indirect Rule and State Weakness in Africa: Sierra Leone in Comparative Perspective
A fundamental problem for economic development is that most poor countries have 'weak state' which are incapable or unwilling to provide basic public goods such as law enforcement, order, education and infrastructure.In Africa this is often attributed to the persistence of 'indirect rule' from the colonial period.In this paper we discuss the ways in which a state constructed on the basis of indirect rule is weak and the mechanisms via which this …
Parental Leave Policies in Europe and North America
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Industry or Class Cleavages over Trade Policy? Evidence from the BritishGeneral Election of 1923
Economists and political scientists have frequently attempted to determine whether trade policy-related political action takes place along factor-lines (such as capital versus labor, as implied by the Stolper-Samuelson theorem) or along industry-lines (as implied by models with imperfect factor mobility). This paper examines voting patterns in the British general election of 1923, an election that hinged on free trade versus protection. The elect…
Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth
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Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of the 1970 State Abortion Reforms
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The Missing Piece in Policy Analysis: Social Security Reform
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Unequal Societies
Why Do Firms Train? Theory and Evidence
This paper offers and tests a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for general training they receive.The superior information about crucial ingredient in the worker's ability our model is that the current employer has relative to other firms.This informational advantage gives the employer an ex post monopsony power over the worker which encourages the firm to provide training.We show that the model can lead to multiple equilibria.In one …
Law and Finance
This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries.The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian civil law countries located in the middle.We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the la…
Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study
Empirical findings for a panel of around 100 countries from 1960 to 1990 strongly support the general notion of conditional convergence. For a given starting level of real per capita GDP, the growth rate is enhanced by higher initial schooling and life expectancy, lower fertility, lower government consumption, better maintenance of the rule of law, lower inflation, and improvements in the terms of trade. For given values of these and other variab…
Trade, Social Insurance, and the Limits to Globalization
International economic integration increases exposure to external risk and intensifies domestic demands for social insurance through government programs. But international economic integration also reduces the ability of governments to respond to such pressure by rendering the tax base footloose. With globalization proceeding apace, the social consensus required to maintain domestic markets open to trade may erode to the point where a return to p…
What Drives Public Employment?
The American Business Elite in Historical Perspective
The Onset of the East Asian Financial Crisis
This paper provides an early diagnosis of the financial crisis in Asia, focusing on the empirical record in the lead-up to the crisis. The main goal is to emphasize the role of financial panic as an essential element of the Asian crisis. At the core of the crisis were large-scale foreign capital inflows into financial systems that became vulnerable to panic. The paper finds that while there were significant underlying problems and weak fundamenta…
The Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century
Does "Grease Money" Speed Up the Wheels of Commerce?
In an environment in which bureaucratic burden and delay are exogenous, an individual firm may find bribes helpful to reduce the effective red tape it faces. The "efficient grease" hypothesis asserts therefore that corruption can improve economic efficiency and that fighting bribery would be counter-productive. This need not be the case. In a general equilibrium in which regulatory burden and delay can be endogenously chosen by rent-seeking burea…
Economic Imperialism
Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques. In particular, economics stresses three factors that distinguish it from other social sciences. Economists use the construct of rational individuals who engage in maximizing behavior.
The Cost of Recessions Revisited: A Reverse-Liquidationist View
The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This paper proposes an alternative perspective. Based on a combination of theory with empirical evidence on gross job flows and on financial and labour market…
Self-Employment, Family Background, and Race
We focus on the intergenerational transmission of the propensity to be self-employed.Our emphasis is on the role of family background, and in particular, on what we call the intergenerational pickup rate with respect to self-employment, the probability that a person with a self-employed parent will become self-employed him or herself.We use the General Social Survey, a data source with rich information on individuals' family histories, to investi…
Exchange Rates and Financial Fragility
Introduction If one positive thing can be said about the Asian crisis and subsequent discussions of how to strengthen the international financial architecture, it is that they breathed new life into a moribund debate on the consequences of exchange-rate arrangements. Curiously, early contributions to post-Asia literature about how to make the world a safer financial place said little about the choice of exchange rate regime, focusing instead on t…
Slave Prices in the Lower South, 1722-1815
Using data from samples of probate inventories we construct a series of slave prices for Low Country South Carolina and Georgia covering the period 1722-1815. Using these data we examine variations in slave prices by age and sex, as well as geographic variations between and within the two colonies/states. Nominal slave prices more than doubled between 1722/29 and 1810/15. In real terms, however, there was essentially no change in slave prices def…
Institutions for High-Quality Growth: What They are and How to Acquire Them
This paper opens with a discussion of the types of institutions that allow markets to perform adequately. While we can identify in broad terms what these are, there is no unique mapping between markets and the non-market institutions that underpin them. The paper emphasizes the importance of "local knowledge," and argues that a strategy of institution building must not over-emphasize bestpractice "blueprints" at the expense of experimentation. Pa…
The Determinants of Trust
Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors that reduce trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences, even though the passage of time reduces this effect fairly rapidly; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (black in particular) and, to a lesser extent, wom…
South Carolina Slave Prices, 1722-1809
Based on data from several samples of probate inventories we construct and analyze a time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. These estimates reveal that prices fluctuated without trend prior to the 1760s and then began to rise rapidly, more than doubling by the early nineteenth century. Estimates of supply and demand functions indicate that while long-run slave supply was highly elastic, the short-run supply function was…
Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market
This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration in skill bias. In contrast to twentieth century developments, most technical change during the nineteenth century appears to be skill-replacing. I sug…
Peer Effects in the Classroom: Learning from Gender and Race Variation
Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics. I identify the effects of peers whom a child encounters in the classroom using sources of variation that are credibly idiosyncratic, such as changes in the gender and racial composition of a grade …