Funded Research

Our funding interests are organized around the following four drivers of economic growth: macroeconomics and inequality, market structure, the labor market, and human capital and wellbeing. We consider proposals that investigate the consequences of economic inequality, as well as group dimensions of inequality; the causes of inequality to the extent that understanding these causal pathways will help us identify and understand key channels through which inequality may affect growth and stability; and the ways in which public policies affect the relationship between inequality and growth.

Explore the Grants We've Awarded

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Building an open-source knowledge base and machine learning tools to automate the transformation of job advertisement text into data

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $60,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will process job ads accessed through the National Labor Exchange Data Trust in a transparent and replicable way. The authors will use natural language processing tools to turn the job opening text into machine-readable data and will make the code available to other scholars.

The Physics of Reparations: A Quantum Leap in Equity

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $40,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will explore whether reparations can close and have a lasting impact on the racial wealth gap. The research team will examine how parental income, wealth, and education affect offspring’s wealth as adults. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, they estimate an empirical model of the relationship between parents’ and children’s income, wealth, and education. They will then develop a general equilibrium model with endogenous accumulation of physical and human capital by heterogeneous households. Built into the model is an overlapping generations structure, whereby investments in children depend on parents’ income and wealth, and wealth can be inherited across generations. They will then use the model to examine the effect of different reparations policies and their effects on short- and long-run welfare, income, and human capital by race.

Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Implications of Wage Rigidity

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $70,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will unpack the effect of inflation on employment and wages during the current inflationary episode in the United States. They plan to establish stylized empirical facts related to heterogeneity in wage rigidity and the labor market effects of inflation. They will use Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data to study how wage rigidities vary with inflation. The team’s second goal is an extension of an existing theoretical model of the labor market by adding job-to-job mobility, wage renegotiation costs, and multiworker firms to better capture firms’ labor market power.

The Child Care Workforce and COVID: Community Capacity and Investments as Buffers to the Pandemic

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $60,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will unpack the association between child care infrastructure, child care employment, and unemployment rates across counties, and examine whether it differs by geography, race, or poverty level. The research team will estimate the racial and ethnic differences in the local availability of child care and then test the relationship between early childhood education and both child care workers’ employment and wages, as well as overall labor force participation. The project will provide a longitudinal national measurement of child care supply at the county level and evaluate whether the stability of publicly funded child care through schooling bolstered local child care employment and earnings.

Missing pieces in the puzzle: Leveraging untapped archival data to connect New Deal housing policies to racial and spatial inequality

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $70,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will digitize previously thought to be destroyed Federal Housing Administration maps created in the 1930s and 1940s that outline redlining in FHA loans. Furthermore, the authors plan to digitize 10,000 Paid Loan Case files, which describe individual FHA loans. They will then look at how the information in these maps helped decide which neighborhoods were redlined and how important race was in those decisions. Lastly, they will look at who received FHA loans and how these loans affected homeownership.

The Lifecycle Origins of Income Inequality

Grant Year: 2023

Grant Amount: $60,000

Grant Type: academic

This project will challenge an accepted finding in economics on the lifecycle pattern of inequality—namely, that inequality increases with age within a birth cohort. The research team builds on existing research from the Global Repository of Income Dynamics database to develop a model to explain an observation in the data that inequality is generated more from differences in childhood experiences such as parental income or school quality than from labor market experiences.

Funded research

Human Capital and Wellbeing

How does economic inequality affect the development of human capital, and to what extent do aggregate trends in human capital explain inequality dynamics?

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Funded research

Macroeconomics and Inequality

What are the implications of inequality on the long-term stability of our economy and its growth potential?

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Funded research

Market Structure

Are markets becoming less competitive and, if so, why, and what are the larger implications?

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Funded research

The Labor Market

How does the labor market affect equitable growth? How does inequality in turn affect the labor market?

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