Research News

The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity is proud to celebrate the release of Stratification Economics and Disability Justice, a new book by Adam Hollowell, Ph.D. and Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Ph.D. Published by Cambridge University Press, explores how the activism of Black disabled leaders must be central to how we understand and address economic inequality…

Faculty Affiliate Sarah E. Gaither co-authored a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology titled, “Cross-cultural perceptions of racial ambiguity: Testing the universality of the ingroup overexclusion effect”. Dr. Gaither is the Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. Dr. Gaither an her…

The second edition of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, authored by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, has made Oklahoma’s best seller list. The book, published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2022, engages critically with economic injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive…

Cook Center Director William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr. and former Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) fellow Stephan Lefebvre published a new article in the AEA Papers and Proceedings titled “Root Causes of the Racial Wealth Gap: A Critique of the Fed View”. In this piece, Darity and Lefebvre challenge the Federal Reserve’s approach…

On May 14, 2025, the Duke Center for Child & Family Policy hosted the Triangle Economics of Education Workshop (TEEW) at the Sanford School of Public Policy. The event convened leading scholars to share and discuss empirical research on the economics of education. Among the presenters was Sungmee Kim, Postdoctoral Associate at the Samuel DuBois…

Core Faculty Affiliate Keisha Bentley-Edwards led a research team in examining the way CKD and kidney failure disproportionately affect marginalized racial and ethnic populations because of structured inequalities in new paper in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Dr. Bentley-Edwards and her research team identify a critical need for clinical trials to identify…

Faculty Affiliate Sarah E. Gaither co-authored a chapter in the Handbook of Experimental Social Psychology titled, “Social stigma and coping for people with pluralistic identities”. Dr. Gaither an her team address that pluralistic identities have become increasingly common, yet the shared stigma experiences of these groups go relatively unrecognized. They highlight the shared experiences of…

New research published in Nature Human Behaviour advances a case for child-centric Black reparations in the United States. The study, co-authored by Faculty Affiliate Lisa Gennetian, Christina Gibson-Davis, and Founding Director William A. Darity Jr. explores how reparations could specifically address long-standing disparities experienced by Black children and their families. The paper, supported by the…

Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Fenaba R. Addo, Ph.D., recently coauthored a review article in the Annual Review of Sociology that explores the racialized dynamics of debt and wealth in the United States. The paper synthesizes various categories of research that examine the sources of racial disparities in wealth and debt, and it explores how these disparities reflect…

A research team led by Dr. Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences at Duke and faculty affiliate at the Cook Center, examined how structural factors such as access to housing support and patterns of health care use, including emergency department visits, relate to the risk of overdose withing 12 months following release from…