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on Minorities Research (Ethnic, LGBTQ+, Disabilities) |
| By: | Arlette Simo Fotso (INED - Institut national d'études démographiques, CEPED - Centre Population et Développement - INED - Institut national d'études démographiques - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - UPD5 - Université Paris Descartes - Paris 5); Jacob Martin (INED - Institut national d'études démographiques); Florian Bonnet (INED - Institut national d'études démographiques) |
| Abstract: | The World Health Organization estimates that that the highest prevalence of disability among individuals below age 60 years is observed in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, knowledge of disability remains limited in the region, which is partly due to the lack of robust and comparable measurements of disability. In Sub-Saharan Africa, sub-national and comparable estimates of disability prevalence are limited.This paper aims to use comparable sources of data to estimate and construct an atlas of sub-regional disability prevalence. We take data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) which use the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) short set of questions, which is designed to be a 'culturally neutral' disability screening tool. The questionnaire assesses limitations across six functional domains (seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, communication and self-care). We have data for a total of 26 Sub-Saharan African countries which were collected between 2016 and 2022. We aim to estimate the age-specific prevalence of functional limitation in the population aged 15-49 at the second subnational administrative division level in each country. Given the instability of direct estimates at the subnational level, we use recently developed small area estimation techniques that borrow strength over age and space. From our estimates we compute age standardized prevalences of limitation to facilitate comparison between regions and countries. Preliminary results show large heterogeneity between and within countries, but the amount of within-country differences varies from country to country. |
| Date: | 2025–09–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05458456 |
| By: | Goodman, Joshua (Boston University); Nitkin, Samuel (Boston University) |
| Abstract: | rivate tutoring chains like Kumon and Sylvan have expanded rapidly in recent decades. Combining data on business locations, household spending, and district test scores, we study who uses these centers and how they affect academic skills. Nearly half of tutoring users are from the top income decile, with Asian and White households five and two times as likely to purchase tutoring as Black and Hispanic households. A staggered differences-in-differences design shows the opening of a district’s first chain center raises district-wide math and reading scores by 0.02-0.03 standard deviations, at a much lower cost than public spending typically producing similar gains. Math effects are largest for White and Asian students, so that center entry widens racial achievement gaps, though less so in more racially integrated districts. These private investments help their users, deepen educational inequality, and shape outcomes by which state accountability systems and families judge schools. |
| Keywords: | tutoring center, test scores, achievement, educational inequality |
| JEL: | I21 I28 H52 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18905 |
| By: | Head, Keith Robert |
| Abstract: | Being on the "down low" (DL) describes men who identify as straight and secretly engage in same-sex encounters while maintaining heterosexual public identities. While the DL phenomenon has been discussed primarily in the context of African American men, Latino men in the United States experience similar patterns of sexual concealment shaped by cultural forces not experienced similarly by other groups. Relatively little is still known about how machismo, familismo, and religious values affect the sexual decisions and health outcomes of Latino men who have sex with men (MSM), and most existing research aggregates Latino MSM with other racial and ethnic minorities without examining their experiences separately. This article applies three theoretical frameworks to the DL among Latino men. The concealment-specific model is used to explore how the act of hiding same-sex behavior produces anxiety, depression, and ongoing self-monitoring, particularly within cultural settings where discovery threatens masculine standing and family belonging. Sexual configuration theory is used to examine why Western categories of gay and bisexual do not fit the way many Latino men understand their own sexuality, especially in cultural contexts where sexual role rather than partner gender defines sexual identity. Syndemic theory is used to examine how conditions such as homophobia, HIV stigma, substance use, poverty, and immigration status interact to worsen health outcomes for this population. The findings of this analysis suggest that DL behavior among Latino men is shaped by the interaction of cultural, psychological, and structural conditions and cannot be understood through any single framework alone. Applied in combination, these theories explain DL behavior among Latino men more fully than established Western approaches. This article is intended to support future empirical research and the development of culturally informed interventions for Latino MSM. |
| Date: | 2026–05–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:cuj7b_v1 |
| By: | Zhang, Luyin; Menon, Varsha; Trejo, Sam |
| Abstract: | Decades of research have linked skin tone to meaningful inequalities in health and social outcomes among individuals in the same self-identified racial/ethnic group. Yet efforts to document and understand within-race/ethnicity skin tone stratification have been hampered by a fundamental data problem: in most social surveys and biomedical databases, skin tone is either not collected or measured imprecisely using coarse categories based on a single observer’s judgment. In this study, we begin by conducting an online survey to quantify the reliability of existing interviewer-rated skin tone measures. Then, using elastic net regression, we build a genomic prediction model for skin tone among Black and Hispanic participants in the Add Health study, with the goal of improving the accuracy and availability of skin tone measurement in admixed populations. Finally, we use these DNA-based skin tone measures in two longitudinal studies to explore within-race/ethnicity skin tone inequality in contemporary America. Predicted skin tone yields substantially steeper gradients in socioeconomic status and racial classification, indicating that interviewer-rated measures meaningfully understate the degree of social stratification operating within racialized groups. Our results suggest that genetically derived skin tone predictions represent a promising new tool for advancing research on colorism – and, via the ancestry disequilibrium regression framework we introduce, a path toward identifying the causal effects of skin tone. |
| Date: | 2026–08–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:bewdx_v1 |
| By: | Paul Carrillo; Rujia Li |
| Abstract: | The racial homeownership gap, defined as the difference in homeownership rates between White and minority households, exhibits substantial spatial variation across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), across Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), and even across census tracts within urban areas. These spatial patterns have also changed substantially between 1990 and 2019. Using PUMAs as the unit of analysis, we apply a semiparametric reweighting approach that jointly models location and housing-tenure choices. We decompose local gaps into a component attributable to differences in observed household characteristics, including education and income, and a residual component. Observed characteristics explain a substantial share of average gaps, but the residual varies markedly across locations. This residual is strongly correlated with local racial composition: areas with larger Black and Hispanic population shares tend to exhibit narrower racial homeownership gaps. |
| Keywords: | Homeownership; Decomposition; Spatial Inequality; Urban Economics. |
| JEL: | C13 R23 R30 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gwc:wpaper:2026-013 |
| By: | Loureiro Lopes, A.I.; Ortega, Alberto Lopez; van der Velden, Mariken Anna Catharina Geertruida |
| Abstract: | Corporations increasingly feature minority families in mainstream advertising, positioning themselves as inclusive civic actors. Yet whether audiences read such representation as ordinary marketing or as a political statement—and whether all minorities are read alike—remains unclear. We field a pre-registered survey experiment in the Netherlands (N≈1, 500), randomly exposing respondents to a supermarket advertisement depicting a control (white, heterosexual), Muslim, or same-sex family. Minority-family advertisements are perceived as substantially more political than the control and shift perceptions of the brand to the ideological left, both in abstract placement and in concrete party association. These effects are markedly selective: the Muslim-family advertisement is read as roughly twice as political as the same-sex advertisement, and is the only condition to lower purchase intention, and does so precisely through the perception that it is political. Issue attributions are domain-specific: the same-sex advertisement moves perceived brand support for LGBTQ+ rights, the Muslim advertisement perceived support for immigration—and, contrary to expectations, these reactions are broad rather than confined to right-wing consumers. The findings reveal a selective politicization of corporate inclusion, in which ethno-religious diversity is politicized and commercially penalized while sexual-orientation diversity is comparatively normalized. |
| Date: | 2026–08–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:yugqh_v1 |
| By: | Chris Dong; Sonja Kraiczy; Rohit Vasishta; Markus Brill; Wesley H. Holliday; Niclas Boehmer |
| Abstract: | Society constantly has to determine the boundaries of what it deems acceptable, from legislative decisions to the guardrails governing autonomous systems. We initiate the axiomatic study of collective consent: given individuals' attitudes toward options, which options should receive societal consent? We organize our analysis around three principles: sufficient support, minority protection, and dominance by decisively better options. Each captures a distinct reason for withholding societal consent from an option. For each principle, we develop a corresponding solution concept that transparently implements the principle and is canonical in a mathematically precise sense. For example, for minority protection, the resulting concept is a consent-adapted version of Moulin's Proportional Veto Core. Balancing multiple principles simultaneously is more challenging. To address this, we develop a game-theoretic characterization of our veto core that naturally gives rise to a family of related concepts. From this family, we identify the Approval-Weighted Veto Core as particularly desirable. By making minorities' blocking power depend on the approval support of the options being challenged, it smoothly interpolates between proportional minority protection and majority support. Experiments on five datasets spanning high-stakes decision-making (such as political elections, ethical AI evaluations, and moral decision-making) show that solution concepts violating a principle in theory also violate it empirically. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.10759 |
| By: | Manolios Sandy (European Commission - JRC); Chaudron Stephane; Fortuna Paula (European Commission - JRC); Sala Arianna (European Commission - JRC); Gomez Emilia (European Commission - JRC) |
| Abstract: | The impact of social media on young people, particularly minors, is a very current and popular topic in the media and the scientific community, but also in policies. Current focus of the public discourse has been mostly on the risks that young social media users may face. However, while it is true that social media use is associated with many risks and that minors are an especially vulnerable population, this practice also offer a wide range of opportunities touching to children’s rights to access to information, education and health tools, opportunities for civic participation, new environments for play and social interaction, for self-expression and improved accessibility for children with disabilities. To have a comprehensive understanding of the impact of social media on minors, we need to consider both the risks and the opportunities. The evidence gathered in this brief shows that, alongside well documented risks, social media platforms can provide minors with a range of concrete benefits that directly support several articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – notably the rights to education, information, participation, health and freedom of expression. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc147510 |