PC: Zheng Fu

Publication

Pang, Nicholas. 2025. “The Moral Accounting of Debts: Productivity, Deservingness and the Consensual Creation of Chapter XIII Bankruptcy.”  Socio-Economic Review 23(1):155-181. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae047

Working Papers

Pang, Nicholas. “Victims Without Perpetrators: How Small Loan Laws Led Debtors to “Cause” Bankruptcies.” 

Pang, Nicholas. “Workers Across the Color Line: European Immigration and Black and White Men’s Divergent Occupational Outcomes.” 

Pang, Nicholas. “‘Mulatto’ Classification outside of the U.S. South after World War I”

Pang, Nicholas*, Weilong Wang*, Jorge Guzman, Mario Small. “Can Neighborhood Entrepreneurship be Predicted?”

Pang, Nicholas, Jorge Guzman, and Mario Small. “Styling Hair, Building Community: How Barbershops and Salons Spur Neighborhood Entrepreneurship.”

* Denotes equal authorship

I am interested in how state and market institutions evaluate people to decide who gets a job, receives investments, and deserves debt relief. I show how racial and class hierarchies lead to spatial variation in individual’s socio-economic outcomes.

My project examines how personal bankruptcy became an accepted part of the American political economy in the early twentieth century. This study probes how social actors interpreted which lenders were “fair” and which borrowers were “creditworthy” and “deserving” of debt relief. I argue that the rationalization of credit markets for deserving white men contributed to the political acceptance of bankruptcy. African Americans remained less likely to obtain credit and, ultimately debt relief, than their white peers. Beyond debating the economic rationality of bankruptcy, social actors envisioned how it could serve as a form of private welfare for white men.

I also study how community contexts shape labor market outcomes. Ongoing research examines how entrepreneurship is shaped by neighborhood characteristics, such as community organizations, credit access, and the built environment. Another study examines how European immigration shaped the occupational outcomes of white versus African American men in the early twentieth century United States.

Finally, I research how immigration shapes the social inclusion of racially subordinate groups. Continuing my focus on the early twentieth-century United States, I examine how European immigration shaped African American men’s racial classification as “mulatto” versus as “black”.