PC: Zheng Fu

Publication

Pang, Nicholas. “The Moral Accounting of Debts: Productivity, Deservingness and the Consensual Creation of Chapter XIII Bankruptcy.” Forthcoming at Socio-Economic Review

Working Papers

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

Pang, Nicholas, Jorge Guzman, and Mario Small. “Barbershops and Salons Spur Neighborhood Entrepreneurship.” (working paper)

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

My research examines how social institutions shape individuals’ outcomes in credit and labor markets, with a focus on variation based on economic actors’ racial backgrounds. In my dissertation, I uncovered how changing perceptions of creditors and debtors contributed to the institutionalization of personal bankruptcy law between the Gilded Age and the New Deal. I engage with theories of discrimination and inequality in markets to show how perceptions of “fair” creditors and “deserving” debtors shape borrowers’ experiences in credit markets. This research has received support from the National Science Foundation. 

In ongoing research, I also examine how social networks shape individuals’ labor market outcomes and decisions to become an entrepreneur. Within these areas of inquiry, I focus on the formation of a racial occupational queue following European immigration to America in the early twentieth century and how barbershops and salons spur entrepreneurship for women and in racial minority neighborhoods.