The Review of Black Political Economy

National Economic Association 2025 Presidential Address.

It has been more than 20 years since a study of the research productivity or impact of Black economists has appeared in the economics literature. This study revisits the subject, and in the process combines methodological features from each of the two prior studies. In addition to a ranking of the top 200 Black academic economists in the United States, we also examine other aspects of the data, such as the prevalence of clinical faculty and female professors.

The Freedman's Savings Bank, founded in 1865, was established with the express purpose of providing safe banking access for newly freed black Americans. Despite a charter dedicated to low-risk banking, the boot-strap mythology expounded by Congress was undermined by rampant fraud. Nine years after its founding, the Bank folded, swallowing 1.2 million dollars in deposits (approximately 29.6 million today) spread among roughly 61,000 individuals.

The Freedman's Bank offers policy makers and social justice advocates an under-explored opportunity. Despite the near universal recognition that the fault for the institution's collapse lies with Federal mismanagement, a majority of the deposits were never compensated. Both the power to restitute and the culpability rest with the same party. Further, the record keeping of the bank ensures reasonably clean lines of inheritance for compensation. Combined these factors make a return of Freedman's Savings deposits politically viable in the rhetoric of contemporary America.

This article provides the historical and data research necessary to arm policy makers in the restitution of the victim's deposits. It is not the intention of this policy to supplant the more ambitious effort of reparations, but instead to build a rhetorical position squarely within the liberalist market tradition, which also mitigates harm.

Black households trail other racial groups when it comes to economic factors such as employment, income, and wealth. As discussed in this paper, a significant issue that contributes to these disparities is lower rates of new venture creation and successful business ownership within Black communities. While research has sought to explain this underperformance, no consensus has been reached. Moreover, the role of systemic racism has been underexplored. Improving Black entrepreneurship could help reduce the racial economic gaps and understanding the reasons for diminished Black new venture creation is vital for the development of effective public policy solutions. Utilizing an entrepreneurial ecosystem framework, and a systemic racism theory lens, we discuss challenges faced by Black entrepreneurs and present a model illustrating the issues. It is argued that racism has resulted in lower access to inter-connected resources within Black entrepreneurial ecosystems which has hindered new venture creation and productive entrepreneurship. We provide broad public policy recommendations for improving Black entrepreneurial ecosystems, including greater access to financial capital, mentoring, and entrepreneurship education through Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed and future research directions are offered.

We review select literature on racial and ethnic disparities in retirement outcomes in the United States and the impact of outreach on such outcomes. First, there are significant disparities in retirement outcomes, reflecting a long history of racism and structural barriers. Second, there is comparatively little work on the differential impact of retirement outreach across race and ethnicity. Future work should consider designing interventions that cater to the needs of specific demographic groups, for example, by embracing the fact that Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites acquire retirement information from different sources. Future work should also incorporate behavioral insights, particularly from prior interventions, and innovate on methodologies for data collection, linking, and analysis.

This paper investigates the existence of discretionary total accrual earnings management and working capital accrual earnings management in Nigeria which is Sub-Saharan Africa's largest economy. Unlike previous studies that use the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) technique that does not control for endogeneity that can invalidate results, our empirical methodology implements the maximum likelihood estimation that controls for endogeneity to estimate economically plausible levels of discretionary accrual earnings management. Our results find that discretionary accrual earnings management in Nigeria is characterized by statistically significant, tax-induced income-reducing discretionary accruals. This study contributes to the literature as it is the first emerging market, African and Sub-Saharan African economy study to the best of the researchers’ knowledge that estimates discretionary accrual earnings management for listed non-financial firms using various models based on the maximum likelihood estimation technique to control for endogeneity. The findings inform the political economy of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly as it relates to how firms, especially multinationals, are motivated to extract rents from African economies. The results have policy implications for accounting regulatory interventions by policy and standard setting bodies that mitigate and/or eliminate capital flight, tax evasion, aggressive tax avoidance and financial corruption practices in Sub-Saharan African economies.