Title: The importance of segregation, discrimination, peer dynamics, and identity in explaining trends in the racial achievement gap
Description: "After decades of narrowing, the achievement gap between black and white school children widened in the 1990s - a period when the labor market rewards for education were increasing.  This presents an important puzzle for economists.  In this chapter, I investigate the extent to which economic models of segregation, information-based discrimination, peer dynamics, and identity can explain this puzzle.  Under a reasonable set of assumptions, models of peer dynamics and identity are consistent with the time-series data.  Segregation and models of discrimination both contradict the trends in important ways"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.