The Washington Center for Equitable Growth announced today that it has awarded funding to seven scholars seeking to better understand the effects of economic inequality in the United States and who are interested in engaging beyond academia to inform evidence-backed policymaking. These researchers are all in the early years of their careers, either currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program or those who received their degrees in the past 8 years.
The funded research projects range in topic, from the housing crisis to child care to supply chain resilience. Below, we detail each grant awarded funding in this year’s cycle.
Ph.D. students
The following projects are headed by students currently enrolled in Ph.D. programs at a U.S. university:
- Market Power in Homebuilding and the U.S. Housing Shortage. Anna Croley at Yale University will study housing shortages and market power in the United States. She seeks to answer the question of whether market power among homebuilders can explain the undersupply of new housing, particularly entry-level units, or whether their economies of scale reduce costs.
- Empirical Evaluations of Child Care Subsidy Policies. Serena Goldberg at Yale University aims to inform the policy design of child care subsidies for the U.S. child care sector to improve access to and affordability of high-quality care while also improving the wages of care workers. First, she will evaluate the effect of reimbursement-rate policies on local maternal labor force participation, child care worker wages, child care prices, and quality of care. Then, she will simulate the effects of counterfactual subsidy policies on parents’ use of child care, worker wages, mark-ups, and the distribution of quality.
- Determinants of Irregular Worker Schedules. Whitney Zhang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will examine the impacts of schedule instability on workers. Utilizing third-party scheduling data that is well-suited to investigate schedule volatility, she seeks to document novel facts about worker schedules, evaluate the effect of predictive scheduling and minimum wage laws on schedule-related outcomes for firms and workers, and understand the welfare effects of the regulation of schedules on workers.
Pre-tenure academics
The projects below are led by early career scholars who received their Ph.D.s within the past 8 years:
- The Distribution of Federally Insured Mortgages: 1935–1975 Evidence from Local Land Records. Omer Ali of the University of Pittsburgh seeks to create systematic data on the mortgage activity of the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration—two federal agencies whose policies are understood to have contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, wealth, and neighborhood opportunity in the United States. He will digitize and publicly release a dataset of FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed mortgages issued between 1935 and 1975 to assess who received these loans, how they were distributed across neighborhoods, and whether FHA and VA insurance accelerated White flight and exacerbated segregation.
- Corporate Governance and Labor Market Outcomes. Andrew Baker of the University of California, Berkeley will study a new potential explanation for the declining relative earnings of workers: changes in corporate governance. He will use the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, Longitudinal Business Databases, Census of Manufacturers, and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers to analyze changes generated by activist hedge fund investors, then changes in equity-based compensation of managers, and their impacts on worker outcomes.
- Unlocking Opportunity: The Long-Term Effects of EITC-led Migration on Families and Intergenerational Mobility. Jacob Bastian of Rutgers University will evaluate the role of the Earned Income Tax Credit in supporting families’ decisions to move and outcomes for both parents and children. Leveraging detailed linked administrative data—including the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and individual tax records—the author will conduct a longitudinal analysis of U.S. families’ migration patterns and economic outcomes.
- Supply Chain Resilience and Economic Growth: Evidence from Global Shipping Disruptions. Diego Känzig of Northwestern University will provide new causal evidence on the economic implications of supply chain disruptions. Leveraging the fact that global supply chains rely on maritime trade, which depends on a few critical choke points, he will identify disruptive incidents, which are plausibly exogenous to the U.S. economy, and then isolate the market impact of the disruption using high-frequency financial data. He will then use these shipping cost surprises to identify a structural supply chain shock.
Supporting the next generation of researchers
Equitable Growth is committed to seeding and supporting the next generation of economic and social science scholars, particularly those who are interested in how their research relates to policy. Preference in this year’s application process was given to those students and early career scholars eager to work with the media and policymakers to translate their findings for a broader audience and wider impact.
We thank all of this year’s applicants and are looking forward to following along as the recipients of these awards produce results that can help shape the U.S. policy environment for years to come.
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