Expert Focus Archives

Expert Focus: Understanding the role of market structure in equitable growth

Posted on December 16, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

Equitable Growth is committed to building a community of scholars working to understand whether and 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 relationship between inequality, market power and competition, and economic growth, please see the “Market Structure” section of our current Request for Proposals.

How does market organization and firm behavior affect economic growth and its distribution? In this installment of Expert Focus, we highlight the industry- and market-specific analyses of researchers helping to advance our understanding of the complex relationship between industrial organization and market structure, antitrust law and competition policy, and economic inequality and growth.

Leemore Dafny

Harvard University

Leemore Dafny is the Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University Business School and is a frequent adviser to federal policymakers on healthcare and antitrust matters. An academic health economist, her research focuses on competition and consolidation across various healthcare sectors. She currently serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Health Advisers (now in her seventh year on the panel), has testified before both houses of Congress, and was formerly the Deputy Director for Health Care and Antitrust at the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics from 2012 to 2013. She is also on the editorial board of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and Management Science.

Quote from Leemore Dafny on private insurers

Ying Fan

University of Michigan

Ying Fan is an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan and is an important voice in industrial organization research. In her highly cited 2013 article in the American Economic Review, she develops a novel dataset and model for jointly assessing the welfare effects of mergers on product characteristics and prices in the U.S. newspaper markets. Her more recent work with Chenyu Yang, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, studies the U.S. smartphone market and the impact of competition on firms’ choices of both the number and the composition of the products they offer.

Quote from Ying Fan and co-author on mergers and competition

Nathan Miller

Georgetown University

Nathan Miller is the Saleh Romeih Associate Professor at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. His research covers topics in the fields of industrial organization and antitrust economics, with a recent focus on collusion and the competitive effects of mergers. He was previously an economist at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he provided economic analysis for antitrust investigations, including the merger review of AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. He was awarded an Equitable Growth grant in 2020 to examine how technological innovation has affected market concentration, markups, productive efficiency, and prices in the cement industry over the past four decades.

Quote from Nathan Miller and co-author on the MillerCoors merger

John Van Reenen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Van Reenen is the Ronald Coase School Professor at the London School of Economics, and is an MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Digital Fellow. Van Reenen has published widely on the economics of innovation, labor markets, and productivity. In an Equitable Growth working paper co-authored with grantees Alex Bell and Raj Chetty at Harvard University, Xavier Jaraval at the London School of Economics, and Neviana Petkova at U.S. Treasury, Van Reenen looks at the lifecycle of inventors and determines that increasing exposure to innovation during childhood significantly affects children’s’ propensities to become inventors, with large gaps currently by income, gender, and race.

Quote from John Van Reenen and co-authors on the gender gap in innovation

Nancy L. Rose

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nancy L. Rose is the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on industrial organization, competition policy, and the economics of regulation. She previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and directed the National Bureau of Economic Research program in Industrial Organization. She is a co-author on two Equitable Growth publications related to antitrust enforcement and competition issues, including the recent report, “Restoring competition in the United States: A vision for antitrust enforcement for the next administration and Congress,” as well as a related column recommending guiding principles for U.S. vertical merger enforcement policy.

Quote from Nancy L. Rose on rebalancing competition

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: The consequences of economic inequality among Latinx groups in the United States

Posted on October 15, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

October 15 marks the end of Latinx Heritage Month. In this installment, we explore the work of five scholars whose research helps us understand the economic aspects of the diverse Latinx experience, including in the workplace, the broader U.S. labor market, and barriers to equitable access to opportunities in the U.S. economy and society. These experiences are often compared to the experiences of Black people in the United States, who tend to face similar barriers to economic equity—comparisons examined by several of the academics whose research we highlight here.

Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León

Indiana University Bloomington

Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León is an assistant professor of finance in the Kelley School of Business and an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University Bloomington. His work focuses on equitable finance, or the role of finance in economic redistribution, and its effects on disadvantaged communities and inequality. A 2018 Equitable Growth grantee, he and colleague Troup Howard from the University of California, Berkeley published a recent working paper showing that property taxes place an inequitable burden on Latinx and Black homeowners. Their work on systemic racism in taxes highlights the barriers that Latinx and Black homeowners face even after overcoming the U.S. homeownership divide. In other research, featured in this Econimate video, he and his colleague Abhay Aneja, also an Equitable Growth grantee, document how political empowerment through protecting the right to vote had a positive impact on U.S. labor market inequality for Black workers in the South following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Quote from Carlos Avenancio-Leon and co-author on minorities and higher tax burdens

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the James B. Duke distinguished professor of sociology at Duke University, is a longstanding influential voice on understanding the personal, collective, and structural dimensions of racism. His work, from his first publication, titled “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation” in the American Sociological Review in 1997, to his most recent book, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, is critically relevant in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and recession, and the social unrest against systemic racism and police brutality. Furthermore, he recently engaged in conversations on how economics can better adopt a racial equity lens by drawing from outside the discipline. At this moment, he is writing on how the actions of White people are central to the maintenance of systemic racism, lecturing across the nation on the subject “What Makes Systemic Racism Systemic?” and finishing the sixth edition of Racism Without Racists.

Quote from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva on residential segregation

Adriana Kugler

Georgetown University

Adriana Kugler is a full professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and was the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor during the Obama administration. She currently serves on the Science, Technology and Economic Policy committee of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and is the Chair of the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association. A 2016 Equitable Growth grantee, her current research is on the impact of Unemployment Insurance on the labor market during recessions. During the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent recession, the effect of Unemployment Insurance benefits, partly as a lesson learned from the Great Recession, has remained a vital topic for economic growth and the well-being of families and individuals who may have lost their jobs. Kugler and her co-authors Ammar Farooq and Umberto Muratori, the latter of whom is a former dissertation scholar at Equitable Growth, released a recent working paper showing the benefits of UI extensions to improve the quality of job matches for women, non-White workers, and less-educated workers—an understudied but important subject. Beyond Unemployment Insurance, Kugler’s research looks at labor markets and policy evaluation in developed and developing countries, as well as the role of public policies such as payroll taxes, employment protections, occupational licensing, and immigration.

Quote from Adriana Kugler on immigration policies

Juliana Londoño-Vélez

University of California, Los Angeles

Juliana Londoño-Vélez is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a 2018 Equitable Growth grantee. Londoño-Vélez’s research focuses on inequality and redistributive tax and transfer policies, including research on developing countries such as Colombia. In her Equitable Growth-funded research, Londoño-Vélez investigates the feasibility of wealth taxation in developing countries.

Quote from Juliana Londono-Velez on tax enforcement

Marie Mora

University of Missouri-St. Louis

Marie Mora is the provost & executive vice chancellor for academic affairs and professor of economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. As a labor economist for 25 years, Mora is a leading voice on education and employment outcomes within/among the Latinx population in the United States. As briefly presented by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, poverty and migration can drive lower outcomes in education and labor opportunities among Latinx groups, including U.S. born individuals. She has also given talks on the lack of access to capital Latinx groups face, which is increasingly evident in today’s recession. In August 2020, Mora obtained the national Presidential Award from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy and administered by the National Science Foundation for her excellence in mentoring. She continues to play a major role in supporting graduate students and faculty from diverse backgrounds—as evidenced by her leadership of the American Economic Association Mentoring program, as well as long-standing commitment to the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics Program and the NSF ADVANCE Program.

Quote from Marie Mora on disaggregating Hispanics

Expert Focus: The intersection of community and inequality

Posted on August 12, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

The social sciences are not immune to the ongoing and long overdue reckoning with racial injustice in the United States. In this installment of Expert Focus, we focus on scholars who have been pioneers in their conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in the U.S. economy, and how community and inequality intersect. Their respective work to center racial equity and community more consciously in research and policy analysis helps spur interdisciplinary dialogue on the historic and persistent role structural racism plays in driving wealth and income inequality in the United States.

Daina Ramey Berry

University of Texas at Austin

Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the incoming chair of the department. Berry’s research focuses on the history of gender and slavery in the United States and Black women’s history. She contributed a key chapter on the role of the slave trade and slave labor in capital and wealth accumulation in the pre-Civil War era in After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, an interdisciplinary commentary on economic debates spurred by Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. Her most recent publication, A Black Women’s History of the United States, co-authored with Kali Nicole Gross, is an empowering testament to Black women’s ability to build communities while oppressed and Black women’s continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Watch Berry discuss her research on enslaved people at a virtual Economics for Inclusive Property event last month.

Quote from Daina Ramey Berry on the humanity of enslaved people

Jasmine Hill

Stanford University

Jasmine Hill is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stanford University and a Washington Center for Equitable Growth grantee. She is a self-described “mixed-methods researcher, educator, and scholar-activist” focused on improving the economic conditions of people of color in the United States. Her current work aims to shed light on mechanisms creating and prohibiting social mobility, particularly for low-income communities of color. Hill is co-editor of Inequality in the 21st Century with Equitable Growth grantee David Grusky. Additionally, she regularly designs and evaluates diversity and inclusion initiatives for organizations and corporations to help foster equity and equality in workplace communities.

Quote from Jasmine Hill on Black mobility

Marlene Kim

University of Massachusetts Boston

Marlene Kim is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston and specializes in race, gender, and class discrimination, especially their intersection, in employment. She is the editor of Race and Economic Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, a book that explores the economic and social environments that shape economic outcomes and help explain the persistence of racial disparities. She was the first recipient of the Rhonda Williams Prize for her work on race and gender discrimination. Kim currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Feminist Economics, The Review of Radical Political Economy, and Panoeconomics. Her research challenges the invisibility of Asian Americans in discussions of race in the United States, focuses on the compounded burden of discrimination faced by women of color, and looks at disparities between different racial and ethnic communities.

Quote from Marlene Kim on Asian American unemployment rates

Manuel Pastor

University of Southern California

Manuel Pastor is a distinguished professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Research Advisory Board. His research focuses on the economic, environmental, and social conditions facing low-income urban communities, and the social movements seeking to change those realities. His book, Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas, argues that inequality stunts economic growth and suggests that bringing together equity and growth requires concerted local action. And his book, State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future, explores the role of social movement organizing in terms of shifting the political calculus to move toward racial and economic justice. He is director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, which recently collaborated with PolicyLink to release the National Equity Atlas, a first-of-its-kind data and policy tool containing data on demographic change, racial and economic inclusion, and the potential economic gains from racial equity for the largest 100 cities, largest 150 regions, all 50 states, and aggregate data for the United States as a whole (excluding territories). Additionally, his developing work on solidarity economics argues that caring for others leads to better outcomes.

Quote from Manuel Pastor and co-author on flattening the economic curve

Patrick Sharkey

Princeton University

Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His work focuses on the connection between criminal justice, economic mobility, and inequality. His most recent book, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, was published in 2018 after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. He recently authored an op-ed calling for long-term investments in community-based public safety institutions and alternatives to law enforcement, and he testified before the Joint Economic Committee in 2019 on how to build stronger communities and spoke on the intersection of community and inequality. Additionally, his current work with Crime Lab New York looks at how the decline of violent crime affects urban inequality.

Quote from Patrick Sharkey and co-authors on urban policy and neighborhood communities

Equitable Growth is building a network of experts across disciplines and at various stages in their careers 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: Leading Black scholars on U.S. economic inequality and growth (Part 2)

Posted on July 20, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

The future health and stability of the U.S. economy depends on our ability address the roots of longstanding racial inequalities. Continuing the theme from last month’s installment of “Expert Focus,” we highlight Black scholars whose cutting-edge research is influencing our understanding of the historic and persistent role that structural racism plays in driving wealth and income inequality for Black Americans particularly.

Peter Blair

Harvard University

Peter Blair is an assistant professor of education at Graduate School of Education of Harvard University, where he co-directs the Project on Workforce and serves as the principal investigator of the Blair Economics Lab—a research group with partners from Harvard University, Clemson University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received an Equitable Growth grant in 2019 to study the impacts of state-by-state occupational licensing policies on wage and employment outcomes for individuals with a previous felony conviction. Blair’s professional interests are broad in scope—he recommends that businesses wanting to address systemic racism in hiring and management should focus on job skills, rather than continuing to privilege college degrees, and has shared his views on the importance of mentorship, particularly to support diversity in the economics profession.

Quote from Peter Blair on systemic racism and diversity in the workforce

Terry-Ann Craigie

Connecticut College

Terry-Ann Craigie is an associate professor of economics at Connecticut College and economics fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. She recently joined the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as a visiting scholar. She is a labor economist who studies the intersections of mass incarceration, criminal justice reform, and labor markets. Her current research examines the economic and social costs of mass incarceration within the U.S. labor market context, as well as the implications for racial justice. In her most recent study, she evaluates the impact of “Ban the Box” policies on the public employment of people with criminal records and tests whether these policies lead to discrimination against young males of color.

Quote from Terry-Ann Craigie and co-authors on incarceration

Ellora Derenoncourt

Princeton University

Ellora Derenoncourt recently joined the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy. She was previously a postdoctoral research associate in the Economics Department at Princeton University and has received several grants from Equitable Growth, including one as a graduate student for her work, in collaboration with Claire Montialoux of the University of California, Berkeley, on the historical determinants of racial gaps in earnings and upward mobility. That research resulted in a recent working paper that found a dramatic reduction in the racial earnings divide in the United States through a reversal of racist and exclusionary wage policy. Watch her discuss her and Montialoux’s research here at the Allied Social Sciences Associations’ 2020 annual meeting.

Quote from Ellora Derenoncourt on Black migration and policing

Damon Jones

University of Chicago

Damon Jones is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy working at the intersection of public finance, household finance, and behavioral economics. His work has provided important insights into the ongoing debates around economic security and opportunity, universal basic income, retirement, and tax. He recently testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget hearing about health and wealth inequality in the United States and how health and wealth interact with the current coronavirus pandemic. His recent working paper shows that income shocks affect Black and Hispanic households more strongly than their White counterparts, as a result of the persistent racial and ethnic wealth divide in the United States.

Quote from Damon Jones on racial disparities

Adia Harvey Wingfield

Washington University

Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology and associate dean for faculty development at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how and why racial and gender inequality persists in professional occupations. Her recent book, titled Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy, offers an in-depth look at racial and gender inequality and U.S. labor market outcomes, as well as the consequences of the lack of diversity for Black professionals in the healthcare industry. She has been leading critical conversations on the challenges faced by Black scholars in academia and the need to elevate and integrate the research of sociologists in economic policymaking.

Quote from Adia Harvey Wingfield on structural problems

Expert Focus: Leading Black scholars on U.S. economic inequality and growth

Posted on June 22, 2020February 9, 2023 by Maria Monroe

Understanding the historic and persistent role that structural racism plays in driving wealth and income inequality, particularly for Black Americans, is central to addressing the health and stability of the U.S. economy. In this installment of “Expert Focus,” we highlight Black scholars whose cutting-edge research draws on the respective roles of history, power, and institutions in shaping economic behavior and trends. Though by no means an exhaustive list, the scholars highlighted here have influenced our understanding of the roots of racial inequities facing Black Americans and how to address those inequities through policy and research initiatives.

Ultimately, it is the collective responsibility of Equitable Growth and other policy and research organizations to actively confront our own biases and practices that reinforce anti-Blackness, as well as commit to addressing racism in economic and social institutions.

William A. Darity, Jr.

Duke University

William A. Darity, Jr., a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Research Advisory Board, is the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics, and the founder and director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity is the founder of stratification economics, an approach to economics that focuses on economic disparities between persons, groups, and regions, and the structure of social hierarchy. In an interview with Equitable Growth, he discusses the importance of stratification economics in understanding U.S. economic growth and inequality. He has been a leading figure on changing the way economics discusses poverty and inequality, as well as the current policy debate on reparations for Black descendants of enslaved Americans. He recently published From Here to Equality, co-authored with Kirsten Mullen, which focuses on reparations and the inequalities borne from systemic racism. In addition, his recent work on the relationship between incarceration and credit scores helps connect structural racism in law enforcement to Black wealth accumulation.

Quote from William Darity, Jr. on the racial wealth gap

Dania V. Francis

University of Massachusetts Boston

Dania V. Francis, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, studies racial and socioeconomic disparities in education, wealth accumulation, and labor markets. In an essay for Vision 2020: Evidence for a stronger economy, Francis tackles the critical issue of how to design and carry out a reparations program in the United States that would help close the racial wealth divide and address discrimination, which she also touched on during Equitable Growth’s Vision 2020 conference last fall. Additionally, in a recent article with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, who is also featured below, Francis highlights the racial inequalities within the economics profession itself and outlines much-needed initial steps to address anti-Black racism.

Quote from Dania Francis on Black Lives Matter

Trevon D. Logan

The Ohio State University

Trevon D. Logan is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees distinguished professor of economics at The Ohio State University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an Equitable Growth grantee. He specializes in economic history, economic demography, and applied microeconomics. His research in economic history concerns the development of measures of living standards that can be used to directly asses the question of how human well-being has changed over time. In his Vision 2020 essay, co-written with Equitable Growth grantee Bradley Hardy, Logan examines the historic links among intergenerational economic mobility, race, and the Black-White divide in income and wealth. They highlight recent research showing that school segregation, disinvestment from public goods, and divergent levels of investment in education since the 1950s have combined to create a nexus of low mobility for Black Americans. These and other policy decisions that persist today in terms of housing, education, and health continue to disadvantage Black Americans and limit the potential for overall U.S. economic growth.

Quote from Trevon Logan on intergenerational poverty

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Fanta Traore

The Sadie Collective

The team at the Sadie Collective organized its second annual conference in February 2020, named in honor of Dr. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in economics and the second Black woman to receive a doctoral degree in the United States. Fueling this effort is a new generation of Black women pursuing doctorates and careers in economics, finance, data science, and public policy. As the share of Black women awarded doctorates in economics is declining, groups such as the Sadie Collective—co-founded by Opoku-Agyeman and Traore, a senior research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board—provide crucial support to help Black women thrive in fields where they are woefully underrepresented and where they can sometimes feel out of place. This year’s conference featured conversations with Equitable Growth Steering Committee member Janet Yellen and Research Advisory Board member Lisa Cook. Recently, the Sadie Collective Community authored a powerful open letter to economic and policy institutions in the face of #BlackLivesMatter protests across the country. Also, listen to Opoku-Agyeman and Traore describe the Sadie Collective and their experience as Black women in economics here.

Quote from Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Fanta Traore on minority women in economics

Jhacova Williams

Economic Policy Institute

Jhacova Williams is an economist for the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. At PREE, she explores the role of structural racism in shaping racial economic disparities in labor markets, housing, criminal justice, higher education, voting, and other areas that have a direct impact on economic outcomes. Prior to joining EPI, Williams served as an assistant professor at Clemson University. Williams’ research focuses on southern culture and the extent to which historical events have impacted the political behavior and economic outcomes of southern Black Americans. Her recent working paper, which examines the negative relationship between Confederate symbols and local labor market conditions for Black people, is helping to improve how we identify and measure the specific impacts of racism through research.

Quote from Jhacova Williams on Confederate street names and minority employment and wages

Expert Focus: Equity and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Recession

Posted on April 30, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

The underlying problem of economic inequality in the United States will only prolong and deepen the coronavirus recession. Disparities by income, race, ethnicity, and gender render any response to a deep recession and eventual recovery all the more difficult. As the twin public health and economic crises continue to unfold, it’s critical to examine our policy responses with an eye toward equity in order to protect the most vulnerable workers and communities.

Our monthly series “Expert Focus” highlights scholars in the Equitable Growth network and beyond who are leading important conversations in social science research. In this installment, we explore the work of scholars contributing to our understanding of how this crisis is affecting individuals and families working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic across the U.S. economy. In addition, see our coronavirus recession page for updated analysis and resources from experts in our network.

Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat and Anna Gassman-Pines

Columbia University; Duke University

The coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic downturn highlight the absence of critical social supports—from paid leave to predictable schedules to health and safety protections on the job—that should be available to all workers. Anna Gassman-Pines, the WLF Bass Connections Associate Professor of Public Policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and Elizabeth Ananat, the Mallya Chair in Women and Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, both of whom are also Equitable Growth grantees, have produced research that helps to understand the various ways economic shocks affect family well-being and intergenerational poverty and inequality.

In their recent survey of hourly service workers, they asked about the impact school and business closures were having on working families. They found that the coronavirus recession led to drastic reductions in work hours and to job losses as well as mental health deterioration. Meanwhile, policy support in the form of Unemployment Insurance relief has yet to reach many eligible households. Their work, which was featured in The Economist, underscores the pressing need for public policy to both alleviate current suffering and ensure that rescue efforts equitably meet the needs of working families in the long run.

Manasi Deshpande

University of Chicago

The coronavirus pandemic laid bare the underlying structural fragilities of the U.S. economy and the limits of the existing public health infrastructure to protect workers. Manasi Deshpande, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago and an Equitable Growth grantee, has been researching the interactions between social safety net programs and the financial well-being and families.

In this working paper, Deshpande and her co-authors look at the effects of disability programs on financial outcomes in the United States. Her research is contributing important evidence to understand how programs such as Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income substantially help to alleviate financial distress of recipients as well provide spillover benefits to nonrecipients. Fully appreciating the varied needs of vulnerable workers and their families can help ensure access to vital programs when needed most.

Nancy Folbre

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Paid and unpaid care work undoubtedly play an immensely valuable role helping both families and the U.S. economy overall weather the coronavirus pandemic and the sharp economic downturn it triggered. Nancy Folbre, Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a leading scholar on rethinking economic measurement to value care provision and public expenditure to support working families.

Folbre co-authored a working paper with Equitable Growth grantee Kristin Smith to examine the source of earnings inequality in care industries (health, education, and social services) that are disproportionately comprised of women, in particular women of color. Her blog, Care Talk, presents important questions on measuring the economic contributions of the care sector, and highlights ideas needed to build more efficient systems of care and better protect the most vulnerable and undervalued workers.

Michelle Holder

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Previous evidence shows that workers of color are one of the most harmed groups of workers during economic downturns. Michelle Holder, an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, has written extensively on the disproportionate impact of the current crisis on black women—impacts that are rooted in long-running and persistent disparities. Already, black women are crowded into low-wage occupations and firms with the highest rates of layoffs during recessions.

In her recent report, she shows how the long-term lack of economic security and pay discrimination for black women exacerbates hardships brought upon by the coronavirus recession, such as reductions in work hours, job losses, and exposure to the coronavirus while on the job. Putting workers first means recognizing the historic and persistent role of workplace and government discrimination that reinforce gender and race disparities among workers and their families.

Kyle K. Moore

U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee

The coronavirus pandemic brings into focus longstanding racial disparities in health and economic security made worse during this emergency. Kyle Moore, currently a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, has explored the links between racial disparities in health and economic inequality in the United States.

A former Dissertation Scholar at Equitable Growth, his interdisciplinary, historically contextualized research is timely for informing policy decisions that not only address the immediate resource needs of vulnerable communities but also redress the broader forces undermining access to the economic and social resources that ensure well-being for families across all races.

Expert Focus: Women’s History Month

Posted on March 23, 2020March 31, 2021 by Maria Monroe

In honor of Women’s History Month, the first installment of this series highlights the contributions and achievements of women scholars in our network and beyond. Both together and in their respective fields, these experts are changing the way we think about economic inequality and growth, and providing strong examples for and of women in the social sciences.

Nina Banks

Bucknell University

Nina Banks is an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University and a critical voice on the experience of individuals and families in the U.S. economy—particularly the economic and political disparities faced by people of color and by women (and especially by women of color). She is the co-author of the forthcoming Black Women in the U.S. Economy: the Hardest Working Woman, and is currently working on a manuscript titled Gender, Race, and Environmental Activism: Women of Color Working for Tomorrow. She organized the first joint annual conference of the National Economic Association and the American Society for Hispanic Economists, as well as the most recent meeting in 2019, to strengthen and elevate new communities, topics, and methodologies within economic research. Equitable Growth was excited to include her as a speaker in our recent conference, “Vision 2020: Evidence for a Stronger Economy,” which was designed to help inform economic policy ideas in advance of the 2020 elections. Banks told the story of Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, who advocated for full employment policies that are enjoying renewed attention in the current economic and political debate.

Mehrsa Baradaran

University of California, Irvine

Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, is a leading scholar on banking law and financial history. She recently joined the Board of Directors at The Washington Center for Equitable Growth to help advance a new economic vision that addresses economic and racial inequalities in the United States. In her most recent book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran exposes the historical role of anti-black racism and segregation in perpetuating the racial wealth gap, and boldly proposes more inclusive banking institutions and credit policies to promote upward mobility. As she proclaims in her book, “Americans must decide whether to keep embracing our history of racial tribalism or to shed these divisions and go forward as one people, indivisible.”

Robynn Cox

University of Southern California

Robynn Cox is changing our understanding of the social and economic consequences of mass incarceration and criminal justice policies in general. As an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and an Equitable Growth grantee, her research focuses on racial disparities in the criminal justice system and how to successfully transition individuals impacted by mass incarceration policies back into society, as well as analyzing the roots and effects of racial and economic inequality. In her policy essay for Equitable Growth’s recent publication, Vision 2020: Evidence for a stronger economy, Cox makes the case for addressing the role of racial bias in our criminal justice system and overcoming public biases that lead to the social exclusion of previously incarcerated individuals. As she states in the video below, “Because we don’t address our history of race, it permeates throughout society, to the point that we now see that racism is actually structural and embedded within many of our systems, such as the criminal justice system.”

Hilary Hoynes

University of California, Berkeley

Hilary Hoynes, the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities and professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, has deep research and policy expertise on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low-income families. An Equitable Growth grantee, she was recently appointed to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) new Council of Economic Advisors, which will be co-chaired by Laura D. Tyson, a distinguished professor of the Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley and a former Equitable Growth Steering Committee member. Hoynes has worked with Equitable Growth on developing policy proposals to strengthen our nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and to discuss the economic debate about trade-offs between social safety net spending and labor market participation, including the role that the social safety net can play in a national emergency or when the next recession hits the U.S. economy.

Abigail Wozniak

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abigail Wozniak is a labor economist who has worked extensively to further our understanding of the labor impacts of geographic mobility, job transitions, migration, and racial disparities. In February 2019, she became the first director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. An Equitable Growth grantee, she was previously associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame and a senior economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers. For Wozniak, as she states in the video below, economic growth has historically “not been inclusive,” so “thinking harder” about how growth is more broadly shared should be a high priority.