Ebonya Washington


Ebonya L. Washington is Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is also a National Bureau of Economic Research Faculty Research Fellow in the Programs on Political Economy and the Economics of Children.
Her research focuses on the political economy of low-income and minority constituents and the processes through which low-income Americans meet their financial needs. Several of her papers have been discussed in the popular press. She is associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies.

Education

Washington received her BA from Brown University in 1995 and her PhD in economics at MIT in 2003.

Research highlights

"Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate" (with [Ilyana Kuziemko])

In this paper, Washington and Kuziemko use historical Gallup data on racial attitudes and political preferences to empirically examine why Southern whites left the Democratic party in the second half of the 20th century. This notable political shift has been a central question in Political Economy and has conventionally lead to two competing explanations: Civil Rights caused racially conservative whites to leave the party and economic development in the South made Democratic redistributive policies unattractive. They find evidence that defection among racially conservative whites explains most of the decline in white Democratic identification among Southerners from 1958–1980, which lends credence to the Civil Rights attitudes over the economic development hypothesis.

Other selected works

*