This project seeks to provide some of the first causal evidence on how concentration in the meat-processing industry affects producers, workers, and consumers across racial and income groups in the United States. Rising concentration has been especially salient in the meat-processing industry, and recent research connects market power in the product market with monopsony power in the labor market. This project will build and expand on that literature by measuring the effect of consolidation by meat processors on monopoly power in the input and product markets, and monopsony power in the labor market, and then assessing what the implications of these market conditions are on racial inequality, specifically farmer profits, conditions for workers, and prices for consumers.

Individuals and their families use a variety of caregiving arrangements, but there is little research on who is likely to use which kind of arrangement. Furthermore, existing scholarship mainly focuses on the characteristics of the care recipient, without considering how family characteristics influence choices for caregiving arrangements. This mixed-methods study will explore how family characteristics and social infrastructure programs shape caregiving arrangements for older adults in the United States. The first two papers quantify and study the relationship between family characteristics and the size and scope of several social infrastructure and caregiving arrangements. The third paper will use semi-structured interviews with families who have eldercare responsibilities, focusing on Black females in the Chicago area, to shed light on their decision-making processes. Through these interviews, the author will explore how access to public programs affects their decisions, how they were selected as caregivers, what their preferences and future expectations are, and how employment plays into their decisions. The sample will include recipients (either care recipients or caretakers) of Social Security Insurance, Social Security Disability Insurance, Old Age and Survivors Insurance, Paid Family Leave, and Home & Community Based Services waivers from Medicaid.

This project ties together neighborhood segregation, migration patterns, and local spending and policies to explore how “structural racism is built into physical infrastructure in cities.” The author will use granular satellite images to measure temperature in Black and White urban neighborhoods. The project will look at the degree to which neighborhoods are segregated and the level of surface imperviousness in each of those neighborhoods. The author also will map Great Migration patterns, White flight, and local government spending patterns. The research uses data from the University of Virginia’s Environmental Inequality Lab and builds on research on Northern cities’ responses to the Great Migration. Preliminary results show that historical Black migrant inflows increased the surface temperature of neighborhoods where Black households live, relative to the neighborhoods where White households live, as well as the Black-White gap in neighborhood imperviousness.

This research explores how nonwork policies affect work opportunities. The inability for individuals with low incomes to access transportation is a significant barrier to employment. Existing research has focused on the lack of car ownership or transportation deserts. But for millions of U.S. workers, the suspension of their driver’s licenses is a significant concern, with a large portion of those suspensions due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations. As of 2021, more than 1 million people in North Carolina (the state the author is researching) have active license suspensions as a result of these policies. For many, these policies often create a vicious cycle of debt and collateral consequences that linger for years. The author will conduct semi-structured interviews with people in North Carolina whose driver’s license has been suspended due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations to better understand the mechanisms through which driver’s license suspension structures affect individuals’ employment opportunities.

This project will explore the impact of natural disasters on small businesses and whether effects differ depending on the demographics of the entrepreneurs running those businesses. Understanding how the composition of local economies changes after disasters because of the demise of some firms and the startup of others can explain a lot about what makes a particular place more or less resilient. Research shows that there is a lot of startup activity following a natural disaster, but this could be misleading if it is generated from rebuilding and doesn’t fully factor in displaced workers or shuttered businesses, which will have larger long-term effects. This project will look at the impact of natural disasters on firms’ entry/exit, survival, and financial performances. It will also look at whether these effects vary by entrepreneur demographics, their socioeconomic backgrounds, the types of firms and in which industries, market power, and competitive setting.

This project looks to determine the effect of monetary policy on wealth inequality in the United States. The author seeks to add to the literature demonstrating how portfolio heterogeneity is an important driver of wealth inequality. One contribution of the research is the use of the Distributional Financial Accounts. This dataset, collected by the Federal Reserve, reconciles the definitions of wealth between the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances and the quarterly flow of data from its Z.1 Financial Accounts of the United States, and then combines the datasets to create a series that tracks wealth for four quantile bins of households by wealth at a quarterly frequency. A key strength of the Distributional Financial Accounts is the ability to decompose quarterly wealth data into component asset and liability classes, allowing for the study of the channels by which monetary policy affects wealth for different groups of U.S. households.