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Chika Okafor

Assistant Professor of Law | Assistant Professor of Economics (by courtesy) | Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations (by courtesy)
Chika Okafor

IPR Fellow

Research Areas:
Neighborhoods and Community Safety, Policy Discourse and Decision Making, Race, Poverty, and Inequality

PhD, Economics, Harvard University, 2024

Chika O. Okafor is a law, economics, and inequality scholar. Through his research he originated the concept of "social network discrimination"—the insight that minorities receive systematically fewer opportunities even under race-neutral policies, simply because their social group is smaller. This work, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, reveals how colorblind systems can reproduce inequality without intentional discrimination and has shaped public discourse around landmark Supreme Court decisions on voting rights and affirmative action. His ongoing research extends social network discrimination to voting rights and redistricting. A second line of work, published in the Journal of Public Economics, shows how electoral incentives shaped criminal sentencing during the rise of mass incarceration. He also studies public engagement on climate action. 

His research has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered, he has been interviewed on WBEZ's In the Loop and Illinois Public Radio's The 21st Show, and his writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Slate, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Democracy Docket. 

Before joining Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in 2025, Okafor held academic appointments at Harvard Law School, MIT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and a corporate attorney at Skadden’s London office. In public service and social impact, he founded Todaydream®, led gun violence prevention efforts with Chicago Public Schools, supported national policy at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and promoted international human rights through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

He earned his JD from Yale Law School and his BA in economics with honors from Stanford University. 

Current Research

Social Network Discrimination. Okafor studies labor markets in which firms hire via referrals while maintaining “colorblind” practices. Using rigorous economic modeling calibrated with nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, he demonstrates that—despite initial equality in ability, employment, wages, and network structure—minorities receive disproportionately fewer jobs through referrals and lower expected wages simply because their social group is smaller. This discriminatory outcome, termed “social network discrimination,” arises from homophily and falls outside dominant economics discrimination models. This work isolates a potential underlying mechanism for inequality and disproves the proposition that “colorblind” policies are inherently merit-promoting, thereby introducing a new rationale for race-conscious policy. He is now extending the framework to voting rights and redistricting. 

Prosecutor Politics and Incarceration. Okafor investigates how electoral incentives shape prosecutorial decision-making and contribute to historic levels of incarceration. Exploiting variation in the timing of district attorney elections during the steepest rise in U.S. incarceration (1986–2006), he finds that election years increased prison admissions by about 3 percent—roughly 63,000 additional admissions—along with total months sentenced to state prison. The election-year effect diminished as public demand for harsher sentencing waned, and sentencing outcomes tracked voter preferences, including anti-Black/pro-White racial bias and preferences regarding court harshness. The findings suggest that collective approaches to transforming public opinion, beyond technocratic policy approaches, may be essential to reducing incarceration. This work is published in the Journal of Public Economics (2026). 

Selected Publications

Okafor, C.O. Prosecutor Politics: The Impact of Election Cycles on Criminal Sentencing in the Era of Rising Incarceration. 2026. Journal of Public Economics 262: 105777. 

Okafor, C.O. Seeing Through Color Blindness: Social Networks as a Mechanism for Discrimination. 2025. Journal of Law and Economics 68(3):519.

Okafor, C.O. Un-Erasing Race: Introducing Social Network Discrimination to the Law. 2025. North Carolina Law Review 102(6):1517.