Expert Focus Archives

Expert Focus: Examining the implications of financial well-being and asset building

Posted on January 18, 2023January 17, 2023 by Maria Monroe

Individual and shared financial well-being has widespread implications for broader economic outcomes, from boosting local economies through consumption to ensuring worker productivity and bolstering future growth. The ability to build wealth is an important contributing factor to financial well-being as it offers asset-building opportunities that pay dividends long into the future, while also ensuring families have a financial cushion to tap into when facing large expenses (think investments in human capital such as attending university) or financial emergencies (such as a job loss).

Yet wealth inequality in the United States has grown exponentially in recent decades, with the share of U.S. wealth increasingly held by a small group of individuals and families. Indeed, many workers and their families are now excluded from wealth-building opportunities in the United States, such as homeownership or investing in the stock market, whether due to longstanding discrimination and systemic racism or other barriers—including lack of access to credit or financial institutions, healthcare, and high-quality education—that hamper intergenerational mobility and macroeconomic growth, and fuel the racial wealth divide. More must be done to address these hurdles so that wealth distribution in the United States is more equitable.

This month’s installment of Expert Focus showcases scholars researching financial well-being, including asset-building and reducing the racial wealth gap in the United States. The research that these and other scholars are producing sheds light on the deep roots of racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, how these types of inequality are perpetuated through generations of U.S. households, and the impacts in terms of income and wealth inequality on children and families today and in the future—as well as on potential solutions and areas for further research.

The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is currently accepting applications for our 2023 Request for Proposals, which seeks to fund researchers examining various types of inequality and its impact on strong, stable, and broadly shared economic growth. Find more information on the 2023 Request for Proposals, funding channels, who is eligible, and how to apply. Additionally, watch our Doctoral/Postdoctoral & Dissertation and Academic webinars for more information.

Rachel M.B. Atkins

St. John’s University

Rachel Atkins is an assistant professor of economics at St. John’s University’s Tobin College of Business. Her research interests are in racial equity and inequity in entrepreneurship, organizations, and high-tech industries, as well as the public policy impacts and implications of racial inequity in those contexts. In 2021, Atkins was the American Economic Association summer economics fellow at Equitable Growth, a program that supports efforts to increase diversity in economics. Recently, she contributed to Equitable Growth’s Recovery Reports—a series of essays evaluating pandemic-era policies—writing on the financial well-being of business owners of color amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She has similarly published peer-reviewed pieces examining the Paycheck Protection Program’s impact on racial equity and discrimination, as well as on the Black-White entrepreneurship gap in start-up firms.

Donn L. Feir

University of Victoria

Donn Feir is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Victoria. They are an applied econometrician with expertise in contemporary and historical Indigenous policy, including Indigenous economic development and labor market experiences, economic history, labor economics, and race and the economy. Feir writes extensively on outcomes among Native Americans and First Nations peoples, from economic effects on health and well-being to the impact of recessions on labor mobility to disparities in mortgage financing rates. In 2022, they received an Equitable Growth grant to further study so-called deaths of despair—deaths by suicide and those caused by drug or alcohol use—among Native American women and girls in the context of fracking booms near Native American lands, which often lead to increases in human trafficking that disproportionately affects Native women and girls.

Darrick Hamilton

The New School

Darrick Hamilton is the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School and the founding director of the university’s Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy. He is a leader in the study of racial and economic stratification, and is a pioneer in the field of racial wealth inequality. Hamilton’s work largely focuses on racial justice, intersectional discrimination, racial disparities in health, educational, and economic outcomes, and the racial wealth gap. Hamilton’s research on using baby bonds to reduce the racial wealth gap has led to policy action in a handful of localities across the United States. He received an Equitable Growth grant in 2017 to study wealth inequality among racial and ethnic populations, and has written extensively for Equitable Growth’s website, including on the racial justice implications of cancelling student debt, labor market penalties at the intersection of race and gender, and continuing racial health disparities at various income levels in the United States.

Alexandra Killewald

Harvard University

Alexandra Killewald is a professor of sociology at Harvard University. Her research uses quantitative methods to study inequality in the United States, with two specific areas of focus: the gendered intersection of work and family, including how marriage and parenthood affect wages, mothers’ employment patterns, and other time-use and wage outcomes among couples; and intergenerational wealth inequality and the racial wealth divide, including how children’s outcomes are closely linked to their parents’ and grandparents’ wealth positions and the impact of social origins on wealth disparities by race. Killewald finds that racial disparities in wealth persist even among those who are born to parents with similar levels of resources, suggesting that the racial wealth gap in the United States is not solely tied to socioeconomic status at birth.

Fabian Pfeffer

University of Michigan

Fabian Pfeffer is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, research associate professor at the Institute for Social Research, and he also serves as the director of the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics. His research centers on inequality across time and generations, specifically focusing on wealth inequality and its consequences for future generations, intergenerational transmission of inequality, and education’s role in maintaining inequality. He also studies the effects of experiencing social mobility. In 2020, Pfeffer received an Equitable Growth grant to build a new dataset linking tax data and housing equity data that will enable the examination of wealth inequality and mobility. He also spoke with Equitable Growth in 2019 about his research on wealth inequality, how wealth and income inequality differ, and policies that can make intergenerational wealth transfers more equitable.

Trina Shanks

University of Michigan

Trina Shanks is the Harold R. Johnson Collegiate Professor of Social Work and the director of the Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on child well-being and poverty, asset-building policy and practice, the legacy of slavery on racial wealth inequality, and community and economic development. She has also written on the financial health of millennial workers, which is of consequence to the broader U.S. economy as these workers age and make up a larger percentage of the U.S. labor force. Shanks recently co-authored a paper on COVID-19’s impact on financial vulnerability in the United States, finding that changes in circumstances—from housing to health—as a result of the pandemic led to increased material hardship. Additionally, she is a co-lead for the Social Work Grand Challenge to reduce extreme economic inequality.

Equitable Growth is building a network of experts across disciplines and at various stages in their career who can exchange ideas and ensure that research on inequality and broadly shared growth is relevant, accessible, and informative to both the policymaking process and future research agendas. Explore the ways you can connect with our network or take advantage of the support we offer here.

Expert Focus: Studying the future of work and technology’s impact on workers

Posted on November 29, 2022November 5, 2024 by Maria Monroe

Equitable Growth is committed to building a community of scholars working to understand how inequality affects broadly shared growth and stability. To that end, we have created the series “Expert Focus.” This series highlights scholars in the Equitable Growth network and beyond who are at the frontier of social science research. We encourage you to learn more about both the researchers featured below and our broader network of experts.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of workers have transitioned to remote work or telework, vastly increasing their use of certain technologies and software as a result. Digital technologies, while enabling this switch to home offices, are a double-edged sword, often coming with increased employer monitoring of workers and their activities.

Yet workplace surveillance is nothing new and was becoming more rampant across sectors of the U.S. economy before the COVID-19 crisis. This increasing use of technology to monitor and control workers has widespread implications for worker power, protections, and well-being.

This month’s Expert Focus highlights leaders in the field of the future of work who are examining technology’s impact on workers and the U.S. economy. These researchers are seeking to clarify how workers are affected by various forms of monitoring and algorithmic management, how technology shapes new forms of work such as the gig economy, the impacts of Big Tech companies and their innovations on the workplace, and how to protect workers and ensure worker power in the age of digital technologies.

Much is still unknown about how employers use technology and its effects on workers, and how employers’ use of technology for monitoring and management will continue to affect the U.S. workforce in the future. That’s why Equitable Growth’s 2023 Request for Proposals seeks to fund projects looking into technology and the workplace, including studies examining how employers’ use of technology affects work and workers in areas of hiring, work conditions, scheduling, and more; how employer decisions around automation, algorithms, and other technologies will impact workers, wages, and labor markets; the role of policy and labor market institutions in shaping these outcomes; and whether there are disparate effects on different demographic groups of workers and protected classes.

Find more information on the 2023 RFP, funding channels, who is eligible, and how to apply.

Annette Bernhardt

University of California, Berkeley

Annette Bernhardt is the director of the Technology and Work Program in the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center and a senior researcher at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She is a leading labor market scholar in the areas of low-wage work and the future of work and workers, with a focus on the impact of new technologies, the minimum wage and other labor standards, the gig economy, and enforcement of employment and labor laws. One of her recent reports, co-authored by colleagues Lisa Kresge and Reem Suleiman, looks at how employers are increasing their use of data and algorithms in ways that impact workers, wages, working conditions, and racial and gender equity, and then proposes policies that ensure worker technology rights. As an expert in these areas, Bernhardt also helped to develop and analyze innovative policy responses to the changing nature of work in the United States.

Peter Cappelli

University of Pennsylvania

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and the director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. His research focuses on human resource practices, public policy related to employment, and talent and performance management. His research on contract-based workers and the future of work looks at employer-employee relationships and workplace structures. He also examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work—including the technology that enables it—on professional outcomes and opportunities. Cappelli’s 2021 book, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face, looks at these issues in more detail and puts them in the context of broader labor market trends and changes.

Timnit Gebru

Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute

Timnit Gebru is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. She has spent much of her career working in technology and artificial intelligence and is widely recognized as an expert in AI research and ethics. Gebru is an strong advocate for diversity in tech and is the co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit that aims to increase the presence and foster the inclusion of Black people in artificial intelligence. In 2018, her co-authored study on racial and gender biases in facial recognition software led Microsoft Corp., her employer at the time, and IBM Corp. to diversify the datasets that inform their facial recognition algorithms. A recent co-authored paper lays out a “doctrine of universal human rights” to serve as a guiding framework for responsible artificial intelligence, centering humans and the risks to their rights—from the right to freedom from discrimination to the right to share in scientific advancement—in the research around AI and ethics.

Karen Levy

Cornell University

Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. Her research centers on how law and technology interact to regulate and control social life, with a particular focus on surveillance and contexts that are marked by inequality. One of her main areas of interest is the impact of data-intensive technologies and monitoring on work and workers. Levy’s upcoming book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, looks at how new forms of digital surveillance and automation are affecting long-haul truckers in the United States and upending their lives and work on the road. A co-authored chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI of 2020 looks at how technology and artificial intelligence will affect workers in ways other than displacing them—including employers using technology to shift risks from themselves to workers—in the workforce and offers some policy responses.

Peter Norlander

Loyola University Chicago

Peter Norlander is an associate professor of management and the director of the master’s degree program in human resources and employment relations at Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business. His research examines the balance of power in employment relationships, discrimination against certain groups of workers, and the future of work—including gig work, outsourcing, and remote work. Recently, Norlander has written about guest worker visa programs and their impacts on workers and firms, stigmatization against unemployed workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 recession, and the effects of digital surveillance tools in the gig economy. His latest working paper on predictors of remote work opportunities before and after the pandemic finds that firms play a key role in deciding if a job is remote, and that workers who are unionized, professionally licensed, or federal government employees were more likely to have remote opportunities before the pandemic.

Meredith Whittaker

Signal Foundation

Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs the ultra-private encrypted messaging app Signal. She previously served as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence to Chair Lina Khan of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and was the Minderoo research professor at New York University, where her research focused on AI policy and the state of AI, and surveillance business practices. In her 17 years of experience, she has become known as a fierce critic of tech companies, their harmful business practices, and the impacts on workers. She is an advocate for including those who are most impacted by technology and surveillance in decisions about when and whether to share their data. Whittaker has testified before the U.S. Congress on various aspects of technology, including ethical implications of AI and the transparency and accuracy of facial recognition.

Expert Focus: Researchers advancing our understanding of U.S. child care policy and how to improve the early care and education system

Posted on October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Maria Monroe

Equitable Growth is committed to building a community of scholars working to understand how inequality affects broadly shared growth and stability. To that end, we have created the series “Expert Focus.” This series highlights scholars in the Equitable Growth network and beyond who are at the frontier of social science research. We encourage you to learn more about both the researchers featured below and our broader network of experts. If you are looking for support to investigate the U.S. child care policy and the early care and education system, please see our funding opportunities and stay tuned for our next Request for Proposals in November 2022.

Child care and early education underpins the U.S. labor force and the overall economy. Yet broad investment in U.S. social infrastructure, including in child care, is often overlooked as a contributor to creating a strong, stable, equitable, and prosperous labor force and economy. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many early care and education providers closed their doors and schooling became virtual, forcing millions of workers—many of them women and mothers—to stretch themselves thin balancing child care and work or even to leave the workforce entirely.

Child care workers also are severely underpaid and have one of the highest turnover rates in the U.S. labor market, leading to unstable and inadequate care environments for many children and a dearth of quality, affordable providers for many others. Despite these challenges—all of which were exposed and worsened by the pandemic—policymakers have, year after year, failed to make the necessary public investments in early care and education and its workforce.

There is a broad base of evidence showing the importance of these investments and how they more than pay for themselves by boosting economic growth in both the short and long term. U.S. child care policy remains inadequate for how vital this industry is to the functioning of the overall economy. Research shows that the U.S. child care sector remains woefully unprepared to navigate future economic downturns and is on the brink of a potential crisis.

This month’s Expert Focus highlights scholars whose research will help inform U.S. early education and child care policy. The body of work put out by these and other early childhood experts shows that policy interventions will not only offer much-needed support to the child care workforce, but also strengthen family economic security and well-being, improve children’s future economic and health outcomes, and boost the broader U.S. economy.

Lea Austin

Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

Lea J.E. Austin is the executive director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, where she leads the center’s work to ensure the well-being of U.S. early educators. She is an expert on the U.S. early care and education system and its workforce, and has extensive research experience in the areas of compensation, preparation, working conditions, and racial equity in the child care sector. Recently, she has explored the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the child care sector and early care workforce, finding that preexisting disparities and challenges in the industry were deeply exacerbated by the economic and public health crises.

Jessica Brown

University of South Carolina

Jessica H. Brown is an assistant professor of economics at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. Her primary research interests are in public and labor economics and the economics of the child care market. Her recent co-authored research looks into the impact of increased public investment in early childhood education, finding, for instance, that subsidizing families’ child care payments would increase mothers’ employment by 6 percentage points and full-time employment by around 10 percentage points, with most increases occurring among low-income families. Another recent paper, co-authored with Chris Herbst of Arizona State University, examines the effects of macroeconomic cycles on the child care industry, finding that child care employment requires more time than other low-wage industries to recover from downturns. Her investigations into how the child care market responds to early care and education policy change have helped inform policymakers and advocates in crafting policy solutions that promote the stability of the entire early care and education market.

William Gormley

Georgetown University

William T. Gormley is university professor and professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University, as well as the co-director of the university’s Center for Research on Children in the United States. For nearly two decades, Gormley has worked to shape early childhood education and child care policy. His extensive work on the Tulsa preschool project—which began in 2001 to track the effects of Oklahoma’s universal pre-Kindergarten program—has been covered by many popular media outlets and academic journals. He also has recently written on universal pre-K and how to make it work in the U.S. context, analyzing President Joe Biden’s calls on Congress in 2021 to pass a nationwide public preschool program.

Julia Henly

University of Chicago

Julia R. Henly is a professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, where she also serves as deputy dean for research and faculty development. Her research interests lie in the economic and caregiving strategies of low-income families and the design, implementation, and effectiveness of employment and child care policy and programs. Her ongoing projects include investigations into how COVID-19 impacted center- and home-based child care programs, equity in child care subsidy access and the effects of recent subsidy policy changes on program participation, child care decision-making of low-income families who use child care subsidies and families seeking care in Latino communities, and the effects of work schedule precarity and workplace flexibility on worker and family well-being. In 2021, Henly was awarded an Equitable Growth grant with David Alexander of Illinois Action for Children to further her work on child care subsidies and the home-based child care sector, particularly amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taryn Morrissey

American University

Taryn Morrissey is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University. In the spring and summer of 2022, she was on leave from her faculty position to work at the Office of Child Care at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her research focuses on public policies for children and families, including early care and education, nutrition and income assistance, and paid family leave, as well as family economic instability. Recent co-authored research includes a paper that looks into the connection between parent economic stability and the stability of children’s child care subsidy receipt, as well as another paper on access to early care and education in rural communities. In 2020, Morrissey contributed a chapter to Vision 2020: Evidence for a stronger economy, a compilation of 21 essays to shape the policy debate published by Equitable Growth. Her essay examined the need for affordable, high-quality, and universal early care and education in the United States.

Corey Shdaimah

University of Maryland, Baltimore

Corey Shdaimah is the Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor of Social Justice at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. Her research focuses on the policy implications of child care, dependency court, and street-based sex work. Recent media appearances focus on the U.S. child care sector, including the failure to support families and providers who bear care responsibilities. In 2021, she received an Equitable Growth grant, alongside Bweikia Steen of George Mason University and Elizabeth Palley of Adelphi University, to study the various challenges facing informal, home-based child care providers in the United States—a relatively unstudied group. She is also the co-author, with Palley, of In Our Hands: The Struggle for U.S. Child Care Policy (NYU Press, 2017), a book that explores why there hasn’t been much policy action to improve the U.S. child care industry.

Expert Focus: The economic impacts of access to abortion and contraception

Posted on June 28, 2022June 27, 2022 by Maria Monroe

With access to abortion in the United States increasingly restricted or banned, and access to contraception under threat in several states as well, research on the links between reproductive care and equity, economic stability, and overall health and well-being is more important than ever. Though reproductive health is often seen as outside the realm of economic research and policy, the reality is that access to these important healthcare and family planning options has vast economic and financial impacts on the lives of people who may become pregnant and their families.

An array of research already documents the links between bodily autonomy and economic opportunity, as well as the economic impacts of access to abortion and contraception. Studies find, for instance, that access to birth control pills were directly linked to women’s increased labor force participation and reductions in the gender wage divide. Other research demonstrates that access to abortion improves financial outcomes and reduces the likelihood of a woman being in poverty for up to 4 years, as well as facilitates many labor market opportunities for women and boosts educational outcomes.

Furthermore, reproductive justice scholarship and activism has long acknowledged the important links between economic disparities and health inequality, as well as pioneered a framework for considering how reproductive health can be affected by other factors, including race, sexual orientation, immigration or disability status, and environmental conditions.

This month’s installment of Expert Focus highlights scholars whose research establishes extensive evidence on the clear ties between access to reproductive healthcare and economic outcomes, as well as scholars who have made significant contributions to our understanding of how reproductive health inequities intersect with racial and gender inequality. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on June 24 to overturn Roe v. Wade, and thus overturn the nationwide right to access an abortion, the implications for the physical and mental health of individuals who may become pregnant are now front and center across the United States, as are the widespread economic and financial ramifications for those people and their families.

The work the scholars featured in this Expert Focus and other scholars—including those featured in past installments of Expert Focus, such as Martha Bailey at University of California, Los Angeles and Adriana Kugler at Georgetown University—are doing to document those impacts should guide federal and state policymakers as they face the post-Roe era in the United States.

Jennifer Barber

Indiana University Bloomington

Jennifer Barber is a professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and a senior scientist at the university’s Kinsey Institute. Much of her recent work explores contraception use, pregnancy desires, and intimate partner violence, as well as the racial divides in access to birth control and attitudes about pregnancy. Barber also previously directed the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life project, which surveyed 18- and 19-year-old women each week over 2.5 years to track changes in their social lives, such as intimate relationships, sexual behavior, and contraception use.

One element of this project examines racial disparities. Black women, for instance, are 2.4 times more likely than White women to have an unplanned pregnancy, in part due to racial disparities in the U.S. poverty rate and access to contraception—and the underlying mechanisms driving those disparities. Barber is a collaborator with fellow Equitable Growth grantee Martha Bailey on the M-CARES project, which is exploring how subsidizing reproductive care affects women’s decisions around contraceptive use.

Zakiya Luna

Washington University in St. Louis

Zakiya T. Luna is a Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses specifically on social movements and social change, health and inequality, and human rights and reproduction, with an emphasis on the effects of the intersecting inequalities within and across these areas, including gender and racial disparities. Luna is the author of Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice, a look at how women of color—and SisterSong in particular, which is the largest national multiethnic reproductive justice advocacy organization—were central to making the reproductive justice movement what it is today and linking the cause of reproductive rights to issues of fair wages, safe housing, job security, and other economic rights. She has written extensively on reproductive justice, and is co-creator and former co-editor of the University of California Press book series Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century, a collection of publications that explores the current reproductive justice landscape and serves as a resource for students and advocates.

Caitlin Knowles Myers

Middlebury College

Caitlin Knowles Myers is the John G. McCullough professor of economics at Middlebury College. Myers’ research examines issues related to gender, race, and the economy, and especially the effects of reproductive policies on people’s professional lives and economic outcomes. Her current work focuses primarily on access to abortion care and the effects of abortion restrictions or burdensome processes, such as traveling to receive care or mandatory waiting periods, on the incidence of abortions.

She also writes extensively in the popular press, academic journals, and for research organizations on the growing body of research reinforcing the economic impacts of access to abortion care for women, what restricting that care would do to women, the U.S. labor force, and the overall economy in the United States, and what a post-Roe era could mean in terms of U.S. abortion access and incidence. Myers was the lead economist on an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, detailing the economic imperative of not overturning Roe and signed by more than 150 leading economists.

Mayra Pineda-Torres

Georgia Institute of Technology (incoming)

Mayra Pineda-Torres is an incoming assistant professor of economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests are centered on the intersection of health economics, labor economics, and gender economics, with a particular focus on topics related to women and teen well-being and the economic and health impacts of access to reproductive healthcare. Her works in progress include papers on access to abortion care and its effects on inter-partner violence and educational attainment. She also co-authored an article that looks into the effects of abortion mandatory waiting periods on abortion timing and abortion rates in Tennessee.

In addition, she has a working paper with Kelly Jones at American University on the impacts of exposure to TRAP laws during adolescence on teen birth rates and educational attainment. This paper finds that young Black women are particularly affected by TRAP laws. In states with such restrictions, teen births increase by 3 percent compared to states without these laws. The paper also finds that adolescent exposure to TRAP laws has downstream impacts on education for Black women, who are 2 to 6 percent less likely to start and complete college.

Loretta Ross

Smith College

Loretta J. Ross is an associate professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College. Her research interests lie in women’s human rights, reproductive justice, and White supremacy. Ross’ expertise lies in her background as a reproductive justice pioneer and her own personal experience with abortion and unintended pregnancy. She has co-authored three books on reproductive justice—a framework that she co-created with 11 other Black women working within and beyond the pro-choice movement in the 1990s that combines reproductive rights and social justice into one theory of change and centers the voices and experiences of women of color and other marginalized people.

In 1997, she co-founded SisterSong, a Southern-based, women of color-led national reproductive justice collective, to work together to improve institutional policies and systems that affect not just the reproductive health of marginalized communities but also their economic security and well-being. Ross is a sought-after thought leader who speaks often (including before congressional committees) about the impact of restricting access to abortion care on women, and especially women of color.

Expert Focus: Scholars researching how Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities navigate the U.S. economy, labor market, and society

Posted on May 26, 2022May 26, 2022 by Maria Monroe

There are more than 1.6 million Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders currently living in the United States, and approximately 370,000 people in the predominantly Pacific Islander-populated U.S. territories and freely associated states in the Pacific region. As demonstrated in the Map of Colonial Impact published by Empowering Pacific Islander Communities—an organization that engages NHPI communities in culture-centered advocacy, leadership development, and research—the economic realities of these communities is shaped by the many diverse and complicated relationships between the U.S. government and ancestral NHPI lands.

The U.S. Census Bureau and other federal agencies, as well as some state and local agencies and universities, now collect disaggregated data on 21 distinct Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups related to median income, employment rate, and educational attainment, among other socioeconomic indicators. Collecting and using such administrative data is vital for researchers to examine the experiences of NHPI populations and for policymakers to develop and target policies that address the economic challenges that NHPI communities face. Many of these hurdles stem from intentional policy choices made over the years and carefully constructed political institutions that uphold structural racism and pervasive discrimination in the United States.

May is AANHPI Heritage Month in the United States. This month’s installment of Expert Focus highlights community leaders and scholars across disciplines doing research on NHPI populations and their experiences in the United States. This includes work on COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on NHPI communities, community-based economic development, Indigenous history, and using Indigenous knowledge to combat climate change and guide sustainable development efforts.

Such research demands insights from across the social sciences, health, history, law, and interdisciplinary fields, such as environmental studies and ethnic and gender studies. And this research must be grounded in Indigenous rights, histories, and knowledge to guide the creation of inclusive and equitable policies for these communities.

This interdisciplinary research will be even more telling if paired with an increase in the diversity of scholars from NHPI backgrounds studying these topics. As Randy Akee, an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and an Equitable Growth grantee, recently wrote:

One of the many pitfalls of not having diversity among researchers is that certain areas of research, outcomes, and evaluation tend to be forgotten—many of which could inform future research and policy decisions. … These areas of unexplored research opportunities are often only known to the communities in which they are being put into practice, which means that without researchers from those communities, they will probably remain unknown.”

Hōkūlani Aikau

University of Victoria, British Columbia

Hōkūlani Aikau is a professor of Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Her research focuses on contemporary Native Hawaiian identity and politics, Indigenous resurgence and climate change in the Pacific, U.S. race relations, and the restoration of Indigenous food systems, specifically Native Hawaiian kalo (taro) cultivation. She has written extensively on the experience of Native Hawaiian and other Indigenous peoples, incorporating theories and themes from Indigenous feminist theory, gender studies, and religion.

Aikau’s forthcoming book, Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation, co-authored with Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark and Aimée Craft, will examine the central concerns and challenges facing Indigenous nations in their resurgence efforts and seeks to center the work, knowledge, and strategies for resurgence of these communities. She is also the co-editor of the 2019 book, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i, a guide for decolonization in which Hawaiian artists, activists, and scholars direct tourists to places and experiences that highlight the complex and fraught history that Native Hawaiians have with colonialism, military occupation, food insecurity, high costs of living, and climate change.

Sefa Aina

Pomona College

Sefa Aina is the associate dean of students and director of Draper Center for Community Partnerships at Pomona College, as well as the director of the Asian American Resource Center. He is an accomplished activist and educator in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. He is also a board member of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities and a founding member of the National Pacific Islander Education Network, an organization that works to help Pacific Islander students pursue their educational goals, including through mentorship and networking.

Aina has spent much of his career supporting and cultivating opportunities for nontraditional, marginalized, and first-generation college students, including establishing a leadership pipeline for Pacific Islander students to access internship and fellowship opportunities in Washington, D.C., California, and Hawaii. From 2010 to 2014, he served as vice chair of then-President Barack Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, advising the administration on ways to improve quality of life for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander groups through federal initiatives and likewise to boost the involvement of these communities in these programs.

Kamanamaikalani Beamer

University of Hawaii at Mānoa

Kamanamaikalani “Kamana” Beamer is a professor at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and the Dana Naone Hall chair in Hawaiian studies, literature, and the environment. His research centers on Indigenous agency and Hawaiian economic development, as well as governance, land tenure, and resource management in Hawaii. Beamer is a founder of Aloha Kuamoʻo ʻĀina, a community based non-profit focused on social justice and ecological peace for Hawaiʻi. As co-founder of ʻĀina Aloha Economic Futures, a grassroots organization, he worked to develop a vision for Hawaii’s economic recovery and future grounded in a core set of values and in bringing community together.

Beamer is an ongoing collaborator on the Circular Economy study, mixing this modern economic approach with the Indigenous principles of “aloha ‘āina”—respect, reverence, and justice—to build sustainable, efficient systems. Reflections on this work will be published this summer in Ecology and Society, in an article titled “Island and Indigenous systems of circularity: How Hawai’i can inform the development of Universal Circular Economy Policy Goals.”

David Aiona Chang

University of Minnesota

David Aiona Chang is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. His research specialties are race and nationalism, Indigenous and Native Hawaiian peoples and history, U.S. colonialism, and borders and migration in Hawaii and North America. In his most recent book, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, Chang studies the ways that Native Hawaiians explored the outside world after European colonizers landed on the islands’ shores in the late 18th century.

His current research projects include an examination of the relationship between Native Hawaiians and Indigenous communities in Canada and how colonialism complicated the fur trade they established, as well as an anthology of writings on the meaning of indigeneity in various countries written by historians from North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Chang’s work examines Indigenous people’s role as active agents of global exploration and migration, and highlights the importance of understanding both Indigenous people and the world more broadly from Indigenous perspectives.

Richard Calvin Chang

University of California, Los Angeles

Richard Calvin Chang is a Native Hawaiian attorney and the data analytics director and co-founding member of the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Data Policy Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2021, Chang was appointed to the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, which considers issues that impact hard-to-reach populations in the United States. His current work focuses on raising awareness of COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on NHPI populations and ensuring the community is accurately represented. He previously worked in nonprofits focused on supporting NHPI communities, including serving as the president (and currently on the Board of Directors) of the Pacific Islander Health Partnership, which educates, trains, and builds the capacity of Indigenous NHPI communities to improve health outcomes, reduce health disparities, and boost access to high-quality healthcare.

Chang also helped found the nonprofit Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, where he co-authored and led the development of the first demographic profiles of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the United States, providing an in-depth look at the social, economic, and political challenges and opportunities of these groups to better inform policy and advocacy. Much of his work focuses on data disaggregation for subgroups of Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations, acknowledging that these different groups fare differently across the U.S. economy, labor market, and society.

Michelle Ka’uhane

Hawaii Community Foundation

Michelle Ka’uhane is the senior vice president of Community Grants and Initiatives at the Hawaii Community Foundation, an organization dedicated to investing in and strengthening Hawaii’s communities. In this role, she leads the organization’s grant-making process via its CHANGE framework, through which nonprofits doing work in six main areas—Community and economy, Health and wellness, Arts and culture, Natural environment, Government and civics, and Education—received approximately $7 million in funding in 2021 alone. She previously served as president and chief executive officer of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, where she focused on deploying capital in underserved Native Hawaiian communities across Hawaii.

Throughout her career, Ka’uhane has worked to support vulnerable communities in Hawaii and improve economic outcomes among Native Hawaiians. She is currently a commissioner for President Biden’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services committee that advises the Biden-Harris administration on issues of equity, justice, and anti-discrimination for AANHPI communities. She also serves on the Community Advisory Council at the Federal Reserve of San Francisco to offer perspectives on the economic and financial-service needs of low- and moderate-income populations in Hawaii.

Expert Focus: Bolstering labor movements and boosting worker power this May Day

Posted on April 28, 2022April 28, 2022 by Maria Monroe

The United States celebrates Labor Day in September, but May 1 is a day on which many other nations around the world celebrate worker power and labor movements. The first May Day in 1886 was marked by widespread demonstrations in the United States by workers demanding an 8-hour workday. Since then, unions have played an outsized role in securing adequate working conditions for the U.S. workforce, beginning in earnest in the early 20th century and building the middle class in the post-World War II era.

This is not the case today. The drastic decline in unionization since the 1980s has exacerbated income and wealth inequality, both of which are rampant and growing in the U.S. economy. Yet there are promising signs recently that the U.S. labor movement is headed toward a resurgence in the 21st century. A wide range of workplaces—from Starbucks coffee shops to Amazon.com Inc warehouses, and national newspaper staff to policy and research institutes, such as the Washington Center for Equitable Growth—are organizing.

In the lead-up to this year’s May Day, this month’s Expert Focus is dedicated to scholars known for their research on worker power and labor movements, and the impact unions have on economic, income, and wealth inequality in the United States. These researchers are advancing the literature on such topics as labor and employment law, union strategies, unions and racial solidarity, immigrant organizing, and wage-setting processes.

The list below is certainly not exhaustive, and indeed, several distinguished scholars in this field have already been featured in previous editions of Expert Focus, including economists Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez at Columbia University (on leave while serving as the deputy assistant secretary for research and evaluation at the U.S. Department of Labor), and William Spriggs at Howard University and the AFL-CIO.

Kate Andrias

Columbia Law School

Kate Andrias is a professor of law at Columbia Law School. She recently served as commissioner and rapporteur for the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Her areas of expertise are in constitutional law, labor and employment law, law and social movements, and law and democracy. In particular, her work looks at the failures of U.S. law to protect workers’ rights, the historical and contemporary labor movements’ efforts to transform legal structures, the tie between the Constitution, inequality, and political economy, and the relationships between the law and the perpetuation of economic inequality. Andrias has written extensively on labor law and political organizing, including an in-depth overview, published in The Yale Law Journal, of the early Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, its relationship to collective bargaining, and its role in building the U.S. labor movement. She previously worked for several years as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union.

Kate Bronfenbrenner

Cornell University

Kate Bronfenbrenner is the director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She is also the co-director of the Worker Empowerment Research Project, which will be releasing a policy report on the state of labor organizing and collective actions in May 2022. Her research explores union strategies and labor relations; labor, race, and gender; and the impact of labor laws and trade policy on employment, wages, and unionization. Her most recent book focuses on union and employer strategies on organizing and bargaining in the global economy, and she has edited and co-authored several peer-reviewed books on these and similar issues. Bronfenbrenner also worked for many years as an organizer and union representative. In 2015, she received an Equitable Growth grant to study the gains that low-wage workers—and especially women and workers of color—make when they join unions in terms of wages, benefits, health and safety protections, grievance procedures, training and skill-building, and work flexibility and regularity.

Jake Grumbach

University of Washington

Jake Grumbach is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington. His research focuses on political economy, with a particular interest in public policy and race. Recently, he has studied labor unions and business, political and economic inequality, and race and gender in campaign finance. Grumbach contributed a chapter, along with political scientists Paul Frymer at Princeton University and Thomas Ogorzalek at TKO Research, to The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy on how unions can help White workers become more racially tolerant—a topic on which he also published an article (co-authored by Frymer) in 2021 in the American Journal of Political Science that was highlighted by Equitable Growth. They find that union membership, in addition to upholding labor standards, boosting wages, and addressing economic inequality, also works to promote racial solidarity and foster support for public policy that benefits Black workers, families, and communities, such as affirmative action.

Ruth Milkman

City University of New York Graduate Center

Ruth Milkman is a distinguished professor of sociology and chair of the Labor Studies Department at the City University of New York. Her area of study centers on labor and labor movements in the United States, including low-wage immigrant labor, women workers and gender inequality, and unionization among auto workers in the 1980s and 1990s. She also studies paid family and sick leave policies and violations of employment and labor law. Milkman received a grant from Equitable Growth in 2020, along with Suresh Naidu and Adam Reich at Columbia University and Luke Elliot-Negri at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to study the effects of collective action and worker power on platform businesses—specifically, those related to food workers, such as Instacart—as well as public perception of these workers and jobs amid strikes and worker safety concerns during the pandemic. She also received a grant in 2014 to study the effects of paid sick days on workers and their families in New York City.

Suresh Naidu

Columbia University

Suresh Naidu is a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Columbia University. His research lies in the economic history of slavery, unions, and other U.S. labor institutions, intergenerational mobility and the dynamics of inequality, monopsony in the United States, and the economic effects of political transitions. He recently co-authored “Unions and inequality over the 20th century: new evidence from survey data” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which constructed the first data on individual union membership during the rise and heyday of union power, showing that union density was an important force driving the increase in economic and racial equality in the mid-20th century. Naidu has received multiple grants from Equitable Growth as part of research teams to study the role of unions in defining contract language, worker power and collective action in platform businesses, and monopsony’s role in the low-wage labor market. He also co-authored an essay as part of Equitable Growth’s Vision 2020: Evidence for a stronger economy book of essays, in which he and co-author and Equitable Growth grantee Sydnee Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley dissect the wage and employment implications of monopsony and offer policy solutions to combat these consequences.

Jake Rosenfeld

Washington University in St. Louis

Jake Rosenfeld is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focus is on the political and economic determinants of inequality in the United States and other advanced democracies. He looks at wage-setting across time and place and the role of unions and the consequences of the decline in labor power in the United States, including the racial wage divide. In March 2021, Rosenfeld joined Equitable Growth’s director of labor market policy and chief economist Kate Bahn for a conversation on the role of power in setting wages, policy ideas to improve pay-setting practices for U.S. workers, and more, including his most recent book, You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy. The book outlines incorrect assumptions around how wages are set in the U.S. economy, placing power and social conflict at the heart of economic analysis.

Expert Focus: Feminist economists studying women’s roles and contributions to the U.S. economy

Posted on March 23, 2022March 22, 2022 by Maria Monroe

Feminist economics is a field of study that pushes for a fuller exploration of economic life. Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics and argue that its models and methods are biased by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics, assumptions, and methods. As such, they tend to focus on issues that have long been overlooked or snubbed by the largely male-dominated field, such as unpaid care work, unequal power relations between women and men, and labor market outcomes for women of color.

The themes studied by feminist economics were often sidelined or viewed as fringe interests. In the early 1990s, however, a group of scholars founded the International Association for Feminist Economics, or IAFFE, and its related academic journal, Feminist Economics, now a renowned publication in its 29th year of print. The ideas, theories, and research questions that this important subset of economics examines are now more and more mainstream, especially in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic and the so-called She-cession.

As March is Women’s History Month, this month’s Expert Focus highlights six feminist economists studying women’s roles and contributions to the U.S. economy, the differences in outcomes between men and women in the U.S. labor force, and a multitude of other feminist economics topics. The scholars featured here range in background and are in various stages of their careers, though many of them were part of the original generation of feminist economists who founded IAFFEand launched Feminist Economics. Other prominent feminist economists and pioneers of the field—including Nina Banks, Nancy Folbre, and our President and CEO Michelle Holder—have been featured in previous editions of Expert Focus.

Randy Albelda

University of Massachusetts Boston

Randy Albelda is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a senior research fellow at the university’s Center for Social Policy. Her research focuses on economic policies affecting low-income women and families. She has written extensively on poverty, wage inequality, and precarious work. Her book, Economics and Feminism, studies the history of feminism and economics, and examines why economics had been relatively impervious to feminism. She also recently contributed a chapter to The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics on the fragmented state of work-family policies in the United States and its impact on families and low-income women. In 2018, Albelda received an Equitable Growth grant to study the long-run effects of Temporary Disability Insurance on labor market outcomes, such as earnings stability and labor force participation.

Radhika Balakrishnan

Rutgers University

Radhika Balakrishnan is a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on gender and its relationship to development, the global economy, and human rights, in particular economic and social rights. Throughout her career, Balakrishnan has sought to change the lens through which macroeconomic policy is interpreted by applying international human rights norms to the assessment of the macroeconomy. She is the outgoing president and conference chair of the International Association for Feminist Economics, where she worked to connect economic policy and feminist activism, while continuing her longstanding work on human rights. Balakrishnan was also a commissioner for New York City’s Commission for Gender Equity, which seeks to address inequity and discrimination along gender lines in the most populous city in the United States.

Joyce Jacobsen

Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Wesleyan University

Joyce P. Jacobsen is the president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an economics professor there as well as the Andrews professor of economics emerita at Wesleyan University. Her research focus lies in labor economics, particularly the economics of gender, sex segregation, migration, and the effects of labor force disruptions on women’s earnings. Jacobsen has spent her career furthering the status of women in the economics profession—an achievement for which she received the 2021 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award, named after the first chair of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, or CSWEP. She has authored several textbooks, including The Economics of Gender and most recently, in 2020, Advanced Introduction to Feminist Economics. This textbook is the first of its kind to provide an overview of feminist economics and examine its relation to several economics subtopics, such as economic development, environmental economics, and international trade and finance.

Julianne Malveaux

Cal State LA

Julianne Malveaux is the dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at Cal State LA, a college that focuses on interdisciplinary analysis of histories, cultures, and social experiences of people of color. She is also the president emerita of Bennett College, the country’s oldest historically Black college for women located in Greensboro North Carolina. Malveaux has written extensively on Black Americans’ impact on the U.S. economy and on issues related to gender and women in the workforce, intersectionality, and public policy. She is a frequent commentator in media outlets and podcasts on issues from the economy and the labor force to racial and gender pay discrimination and the wealth gap. Her columns and blog posts frequently touch on economic instability and inequality as it relates to Black women and communities of color in the United States.

Katherine Moos

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Katherine Moos is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an economist at the Political Economy Research Institute. Her research focus is feminist political economy and the welfare state, social reproduction, unpaid household labor and care work, and time-use and working-hours legislation. Many of Moos’ recent publications utilize a feminist lens to examine various political and economic processes, from measuring the cost of social reproduction (which refers to the process of maintaining the labor force on a daily and intergenerational basis) to state regulation of the economy and labor market. In 2021, Moos published a study looking at U.S. fiscal policy in response to the coronavirus pandemic and recession from a feminist perspective, arguing that the federal aid did improve the livelihood of some groups but left others—including low-wage workers, women, and people of color—in vulnerable positions.

Diana Strassmann

Rice University

Diana Strassmann is the Carolyn and Fred McManis distinguished professor in the practice of humanities in Rice University’s Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a leading scholar in feminist economics, a co-founder of the International Association for Feminist Economics and the founding editor of Feminist Economics. Her work bringing feminist perspectives into more mainstream thinking and her research on the economy and the labor force has changed the field of economics not only in terms of what is studied but also how it is studied and who studies it.

Expert Focus: Scholars examining anti-racist ideas and proposals across U.S. economic policy areas

Posted on February 24, 2022March 24, 2022 by Maria Monroe

February is Black History Month in the United States. While we celebrate the vast contributions of African Americans to our economy, society, and culture, we must also consider the disparities, discrimination, and divides that continue to disproportionately harm Black individuals and communities in the United States. It is essential for all of us to acknowledge and address the continuing effects of institutional racism—not just during one month of the year, but always.

We at Equitable Growth can work—and are working—toward this goal by supporting Black scholars at various career stages and fostering more diversity in economics. Centering Black voices and making space for Black experts to share their knowledge and lived experiences is a key step in the process of enacting real structural change. This is exactly the goal of a new book edited by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, titled The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System. This compilation of essays shares the anti-racist ideas and proposals of Black experts and scholars seeking change across policy areas, from macroeconomics to climate change, and from the criminal legal system to the health care system.

This month’s edition of Expert Focus highlights six scholars who contributed chapters to The Black Agenda, showcasing their expertise in various policy and research areas and highlighting their ideas to reduce racial disparities in the United States, thus fostering strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth. Though we selected the following six scholars for this installment, we encourage you to explore the work of all the essayists, many of whom were featured in prior Expert Focus installments.

Fenaba Addo

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Fenaba Addo is an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research lies in the areas of debt and wealth inequality, economic strain as a social determinant of health and well-being, and union formation, with a focus on societal inequities stemming from historical and structural racism. In recent years, she has written extensively on the racial disparities in student loan debt, and in 2020, she received an Equitable Growth grant to examine the impact of debt-free tuition assistance on educational outcomes for students who transfer from a two-year to four-year college. In The Black Agenda, Addo illustrates how student loan debt is both a higher education issue and a wealth-building one, writing that Black students at all levels take on more debt and have higher default rates than their White peers. In fact, her research shows that if young adult Black and White students had an equal debt burden, the racial wealth divide in the United States would decrease by approximately 10.5 percent.

Karl Boulware

Wesleyan University

Karl Boulware is an assistant professor of economics at Wesleyan University. His research interests are in monetary economics, macroeconomics, and financial economics. Recently, he published work on racial wealth stratification and investment portfolio decisions in the United States as well as on the links between labor market conditions and racial discrimination claims. In The Black Agenda, Boulware’s chapter focuses on how U.S. monetary policy and the Federal Reserve must center its monetary policymaking on Black workers to ensure lasting economic growth and recovery. He urges the Federal Open Market Committee—the Fed’s monetary policymaking committee—to adopt a new long-term framework that enhances equal opportunity and reduces racial disparities in the U.S. labor market, allowing Black workers to share in the country’s economic prosperity.

Carycruz Bueno

Wesleyan University

Carycruz Bueno is an assistant professor of economics at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching focus is on microeconomics, labor economics, race and education policy, education inequality, and health economics. Her recent work looks at the impact of enrollment in virtual school on student outcomes and how teacher pay differentials affect recruitment and retention. In The Black Agenda, Bueno and her co-author—her sister, economist Caridad Cruz Bueno at the State University of New York —write about the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on schooling. Existing racial inequities in U.S. education—including in school funding, access to pre-Kindergarten, advance-course options, high-quality teachers, and well-resourced facilities—meant COVID-induced disruptions created disproportionate challenges for Black students. They recommend a national response that addresses structural racism in education, including targeted interventions for and investments in Black and low-income students, and culturally responsive social justice curriculum and anti-bias training for teachers.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times. Her writing focuses on technology, higher education, and racial and gender inequality, with her most recent book exploring the everyday culture of themes such as racism, sexism, inequality, and oppression, and how Black women navigate U.S. society. In 2020, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work that shapes the public discourse on class, race, gender, and digital technology. In the foreword to The Black Agenda, Cottom writes that there can be no progress, and no progressive agenda, in the United States without first recognizing and agreeing upon the debt owed to Black Americans because of racial capitalism. She argues that there is a critical need to align our economic behaviors with our cultural and social values. Developing anti-racist ideas and proposals—ideas and proposals this Expert Focus installment aims to elevate—involves centering upon Black lives and experiences, she explains, which is key to effectively creating structural change in the United States.

Jevay Grooms

Howard University

Jevay Grooms is an assistant professor of economics at Howard University and currently a visiting faculty and scholar at the University of Southern California. Her research lies at the intersection of public economics, health economics, and poverty and inequality. Specifically, she is interested in the impediments to the adequate delivery of health care among underserved communities with a focus on the role of wealth inequality on health outcomes among people of color. In The Black Agenda, Grooms addresses the wellness angle of the intersection of race, gender, and class, along with structural racism within the U.S. health care system. Her research on the pandemic’s effect on the mental health of essential workers, for example, shows that workers of color disproportionately displayed symptoms of anxiety and depression. Grooms’ chapter illustrates how unequal access to healthcare and mental health services, including substance abuse treatment, harms Black Americans more than their peers.

Hedwig Lee

Washington University in St. Louis

Hedwig Lee is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also is the co-director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity. Her research centers on the social determinants and consequences of population health and health disparities, focusing on race and ethnicity, poverty, and the family. Her recent work looks at the impact of structurally rooted and race-related chronic stressors, such as mass incarceration, on health outcomes. In The Black Agenda, Lee continues to examine mass incarceration and its effects, specifically on Black families and Black women in particular, as the carceral system would not function without the labor of those on the inside alongside the financing from families for food and essentials for inmates and housing and health care support upon their release. She proposes that any policies aimed at improving the mental and physical health of the incarcerated must also incorporate and even center around the women and families connected to those in prison.

Expert Focus: Advancing the frontier of economic data creation and measurement

Posted on January 13, 2022January 13, 2022 by Maria Monroe

One of our missions since Equitable Growth was founded in 2013 is to make evidence-backed policy the norm in the United States, centering innovative research from academics across disciplines to inform policy decision-making. It goes without saying that economic data is central to this work—which is why Equitable Growth is excited to continue seeding and supporting academic research that advances our understanding of economic measurement in 2022.

This month’s installment of Expert Focus highlights exemplary economic data collection, creation, and linking projects that cut across Equitable Growth’s issue areas, from fighting poverty and inequality to enforcing U.S. antitrust laws, and from addressing the racial wealth divide to bolstering the macroeconomy. These projects make economic data more accessible for both researchers and policymakers, provide for cross-sector analyses, and can inform policy that will foster strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth for all.

The scholars profiled below are all Equitable Growth grantees from diverse backgrounds, various disciplines, and at all stages of their careers. Learn more about Equitable Growth’s funding opportunities via our annual grants program.

report

2022 Request for Proposals

November 10, 2021

Martha Bailey

University of California, Los Angeles

Martha Bailey is a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on labor economics, demography, and health in the United States. Her recent studies examine the short- and long-term effects of anti-poverty programs, as well as the implications of contraception on women’s career and childbearing decisions and outcomes. Bailey leads UCLA’s Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database, or LIFE-M database, which combines four generations of U.S. individuals’ vital records—such as birth, marriage, and death certificates—with their U.S. Census Bureau data. LIFE-M achieves an unprecedented level of historical record data linkage, which Bailey has co-authored studies about in recent years.

Bailey received two Equitable Growth grants, including one in 2020 (with Paul Mohnen at the University of Michigan and Shariq Mohammed at Northwestern University) focused on measuring intergenerational mobility in the United States. This project is a massive undertaking to produce a set of economic data on mobility going back to 1900, extending the scope of previous studies that typically use data from the mid-20th century. It also uses Social Security Numerical Identification files, which are more detailed than census records, allowing for more and better-quality data linkages, including the ability to study geographic, racial, and gender mobility disparities.

Simcha Barkai

Boston College

Simcha Barkai is an assistant professor of finance at Boston College, where he studies the competition between firms in the United States and implications for the macroeconomy. He also studies the decline in the labor share of income since the 1980s. Barkai is a junior fellow at the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago, a research institute dedicated to promoting the power of markets to enhance people’s well-being.

Barkai—alongside co-authors Tania Babina at Columbia University, Jessica Jeffers at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Ezra Karger at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Ekaterina Volkova at the University of Melbourne—is currently compiling a comprehensive database of U.S. antitrust enforcement actions against firms and individuals in the United States between 1890 and 2017. The data will then be linked to industry-level economic outcomes and restricted firm-level tax records. This project—for which Barkai and Karger received an Equitable Growth grant in 2019—will advance the existing knowledge base on the effects of antitrust enforcement on economic output and outcomes.

Jamein Cunningham

Cornell University

Jamein Cunningham is an assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management and the Department of Economics at Cornell University. His research interests center on four broad themes: the intersectionality of institutional discrimination, access to social justice, crime and criminal justice, and race and economic inequality. Cunningham is a co-creator, alongside Rob Gillizeau at the University of Victoria, of the Racial Uprisings Lab, which is working to create a database of all racialized uprisings in the United States since 1991, with a particular emphasis on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Cunningham recently co-authored a working paper and accompanying column with Robynn Cox at the University of Southern California and Alberto Ortega at Indiana University that examine the link between affirmative action litigation, the racial composition of U.S. police forces, and police killings of civilians. He also received an Equitable Growth grant in 2020, alongside Jose Joaquín Lopez at the University of Memphis, to study the connection between civil rights enforcement and socioeconomic outcomes of communities of color. This innovative project will track enforcement at the court level and link it to individual and household-level data on labor market outcomes and intergenerational mobility, and then create a comprehensive dataset to determine how presidential judicial appointees have influenced civil rights enforcement over time.

David Johnson

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

David Johnson is a research professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also the director of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the longest-running household panel survey in the United States and a cornerstone of data infrastructure for social science research, having been used in more than 6,800 peer-reviewed publications and by at least nine federal agencies. Johnson is a member of Equitable Growth’s Research Advisory Board and previously worked for several years in the federal statistical system. His research focuses on the measurement of inequality and mobility, poverty measurement, and the effect of tax rebates, among others.

In 2014, he and his co-authors—Equitable Growth’s Jonathan Fisher, Timothy Smeeding at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jeffrey Thompson at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston—were awarded an Equitable Growth grant to study how income and wealth inequality affect consumption and saving in the United States. One of the resulting working papers from this grant, “Inequality in 3D: Income, consumption, and wealth,” produced a groundbreaking method for researchers investigating and modeling inequality by using economic data on well-being along three conjoint dimensions—inequality, consumption, and wealth—for the same U.S. households. Their findings show that looking at economic data on inequality through just one of these dimensions understates the level and growth of economic inequality.

Jacob Robbins

University of Illinois at Chicago

Jacob Robbins is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he specializes in inequality and macroeconomics. His research uses theory and data to better understand key economic trends in the United States. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he has written about both the importance of a bold economic response to avoid an economic depression and has studied the impact of COVID-19 lockdown policies on retail spending. Robbins was a Dissertation Scholar at Equitable Growth from 2017–2018 and has received two Equitable Growth grants to study various aspects of consumption and inequality in the United States—including one in 2020 to develop a novel dataset that measures individual holdings of public equities and fixed-income assets using IRS data in order to track U.S. wealth inequality.

Most recently, in 2021, Robbins was awarded funding, along with Loujaina Abdelwahed of The Cooper Union, to examine U.S. economic insecurity amid the coronavirus recession using real-time data on the impact of the pandemic on consumer spending inequality. Robbins and Abdelwahed will release their aggregate data publicly at the state and county levels along with quarterly reports, providing other researchers and policymakers with a valuable new data source.

Jennifer Romich

University of Washington

Jennifer Romich is a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington and the director of the West Coast Poverty Center. Her research centers on family economic stability and well-being, particularly among low-income workers and families, household budgets, and household interactions with public policy. Some of her recent projects include an investigation of the income of families involved with the child welfare system and mixed-method evaluations of the Seattle Paid Safe and Sick Time Ordinance and $15 minimum wage.

In 2019, she and her co-authors—UW colleagues Scott Allard, Heather Hill, and Mark Long—were awarded an Equitable Growth grant to support their work developing the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative dataset, which links demographic information to employment records and public program administrative data, such as state Unemployment Insurance records. The dataset, which contains information on more than 10 million individuals dating back to 2000, will be used to measure the impact of minimum wage laws on earnings inequality. Its innovative methodology is replicable for other scholars looking to analyze a range of policy interventions on household income and program participation.

Expert Focus: Advancing our understanding of new technologies and the future of work

Posted on December 15, 2021November 5, 2024 by Maria Monroe

Equitable Growth is committed to building a community of scholars working to understand how inequality affects broadly shared growth and stability. To that end, we have created the monthly series, “Expert Focus.” This series highlights scholars in the Equitable Growth network and beyond who are at the frontier of social science research. We encourage you to learn more about both the researchers featured below and our broader network of experts. If you are looking for support to investigate the intersection of technological change and economic inequality and growth, please see our current Request for Proposals.

The adoption of new technologies always affects how people work, but the possibilities posed by increasingly advanced artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics is spurring new questions about whether new technologies will lead to a seismic shift in the landscape of jobs and work in the United States and abroad. The choices employers make over how to implement new technologies could lead to an array of benefits for workers, such as higher wages, new occupations and industries, and safer working conditions—or various harms, such as lost jobs, weakened worker agency, and dangerous paces of work.

How employers are implementing new technologies will be shaped by the U.S. policy, regulatory, and economic landscape, which will in turn influence the effect of these technologies on workers’ lives and whether those effects will be different for different types of workers.

In this installment of “Expert Focus,” we highlight scholars across disciplines who are helping to advance our understanding of the adoption of new technologies and the future of work. This scope of work includes technological change, worker surveillance, privacy, automation, algorithmic bias, and discrimination. These scholars’ findings can help guide policymakers, business leaders, and advocates who are interested in addressing structural racial, gender, and other inequalities in the U.S. labor market and in labor markets abroad to create a more equitable future for all workers.

Daron Acemoglu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor in the department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Acemoglu has published a vast amount of research on topics ranging from economic growth and inequality to economic development and labor economics. A subset of Acemoglu’s research includes technological innovation and change on the future of work. In particular, he has written about the implications of new technology—such as AI, automation, and robotics—and the changes they can bring on the economy and the way people work and live.

Recently, Acemoglu published a working paper about the harms of AI, discussing how it can produce various social, economic and political harms, but stating that these harms are not due to the underlying nature of the technology itself, but rather in how it’s being currently used and developed by firms and governments in workplaces. In another working paper with his MIT economist colleague and Equitable Growth Research Advisory Board member and grantee David Autor, Acemoglu and his co-authors study the impact of AI on labor markets using online job vacancies, finding that while AI is currently substituting for humans in a subset of tasks, it is not yet having detectable labor market consequences.

Ifeoma Ajunwa

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ifeoma Ajunwa is an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as the founding director of the AI Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program, a training program for students interested in law and technology. Ajunwa is an expert on the intersection between law and technology, with a focus on the governance, impact, and ethics of new and emerging workplace technology. Often interweaving diversity and inclusion in the labor market into her work, she has written extensively about employment discrimination, worker surveillance, and genetic data and civil rights, and has published op-eds in major outlets such as The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. In 2019, she wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on how more adequate safeguards are needed to prevent unlawful employment discrimination in automated hiring platforms.

In 2020, Ajunwa testified before the U.S. Congress Committee on Education and Labor on protecting workers’ civil rights in the age of technology. Her forthcoming book, The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2022), will examine the role of technology in the workplace and its effects on management practices.

Bo Cowgill

Columbia University

Bo Cowgill is an assistant professor in the Management Division at Columbia University’s Business School whose interests lie in microeconomics, specifically technology information and labor markets. Cowgill writes extensively about artificial intelligence and algorithms, and their intersection with decisionmaking within labor markets and the workplace. His findings have been cited in media outlets such as Forbes, The New York Times, and in scientific and economic journals.

A large part of Cowgill’s research covers bias and fairness, which is the subject of his 2020 paper in which Cowgill develops an economic perspective on algorithmic bias and fairness, stating that algorithms can be used to bring about positive change, but more guidance is needed about how to deploy and regulate algorithms to minimize the potential harmful side effects of their use and implementation. At the Allied Social Science Associations annual meeting in 2020, Cowgill also presented a field experiment of his research on why algorithmic bias occurs, which Equitable Growth featured in a roundup.

Pauline T. Kim

Washington University in St. Louis

Pauline T. Kim is the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law at the Washington University in St. Louis and the co-director of its Center For Empirical Research, which promotes, supports, and enhances research about law and legal institutions. Kim specializes in employment law and has published her research and findings in numerous Law Journals. Much of Kim’s research focuses on how the adoption and use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, algorithms, and big data in the workplace legally intersects with employee privacy, discrimination, equality, and fairness.

In a recent Virginia Law Review article, Kim explores the concept of “manipulating opportunity,” where predictive algorithms control what information is delivered to whom, resulting in the potential of creating inequality and discriminatory effects in opportunity markets such as employment, housing, and credit. Her work “AI and Inequality” looks at the social consequences of AI-powered tools and their threat to worsen class inequality. Currently, Kim, along with her co-authors, publishes Work Law: Cases and Materials, a multi-edition textbook that takes a comprehensive view on employment law. Be on the lookout for her forthcoming article in the California Law Review that explores the extent to which designers can and should take race into account in order to mitigate or remove bias when building predictive algorithms.

Steve Viscelli

University of Pennsylvania

Steve Viscelli is a faculty fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in the Department of Sociology who studies work, automation, public policy, and energy and climate change. Much of Viscelli’s research and consulting expertise focuses on the freight transportation industry, which is the subject of his 2016 book, The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, in which he takes an ethnographic approach to exploring how the deregulation of trucking and the rise of independent contracting transformed the trucking industry in the United States.

In 2020, Viscelli received an Equitable Growth grant to examine how last-mile delivery workers experience new technological and outsourcing practices within the package delivery industry. Recently, Equitable Growth was excited to have Viscelli as a panelist during “A future for all workers: Technology and worker power,” a virtual event held in February 2021 where he discussed how workers can use technology to exercise their voice at work. Viscelli is set to release a book in 2022 based on his 2018 report titled “Driverless? Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker,” which explores the potential impacts of self-driving trucks on labor, workers, and the environment, and the role public policy will play in shaping them.