The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Lukas Althoff (Stanford University) for this session, where he will share his work.
Lukas Althoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research explores long-term economic changes, with a focus on inequality, based on methods from applied microeconomics and economic history.
Event Topic:
Race-Blind Policy and Racial Inequality: Long-Run Effects of the GI Bill
with Christiane Szerman
The GI Bill, one of the largest social programs in US history, is widely credited with expanding the American middle class by increasing access to higher education and homeownership after World War II. Using age-based eligibility cutoffs, local variation in draft leniency, and new state-level data, we reassess its impact on veterans and their descendants from World War II until today. In the short run, we find that while white men saw substantial educational gains, Black veterans faced systemic exclusion, and women experienced negative spillovers. We then examine intergenerational effects using newly linked census, administrative tax, and real-time residential address data spanning 1940 to 2025. We document large disparities between the children of veterans versus non-veterans and identify causal spillovers using fathers’ age-based eligibility cutoffs. We find that in the long-run, veterans’ children attained significantly higher education, income, and homeownership, with the largest benefits for white sons and smaller but substantial gains for Black children. Our findings highlight that designing policies to be race-blind does not ensure that they are race-neutral.
Event Details:
Date: 1 July 2025
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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