This project will study the school-to-work transitions and subsequent earnings of Texas high school students. This project will focus on some of Texas’ most socially and economically excluded populations—those living in substandard housing settlements found in unincorporated areas outside Texas border cities. This research will shed light on the efficacy of potential education and workforce interventions to assist impoverished student populations.

Over the past three decades, both wealth inequality and the racial wealth gap have increased significantly. Research shows that inheritances, bequests, and intrafamily transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators, including education, income, and household structure. This project will examine the significance of intergenerational transfers on wealth inequality overall, and the racial wealth gap specifically, to identify policies that address growing inequality throughout the wealth distribution.

This project will bring together macroeconomic theory and large-scale microeconomic datasets to advance modern economics and inform monetary and public policy. Using employment records merged to credit reports, the authors will estimate the impact of credit access on the job-finding rates and re-employment earnings of displaced workers. Past research has examined the borrowing and credit use of the unemployed, and this study builds on that line of work to examine the direct impact of credit on future outcomes. In preliminary results, the authors find that credit access increases the time before re-employment, but also increases average salary once a new job is found. This work will develop a search model capable of explaining these new findings.

This project will study the rise of mass incarceration in relation to military downsizing. The author will determine whether the military-penal crossover, occurring in the 1990s and continuing through the present, has reinforced racial inequality in the labor market, with blacks experiencing more incarceration while decreasingly enlisting in the military.

The researchers will use an historical accounting methodology, established in earlier work, to examine the extent to which changes in household leverage have contributed to shifts in aggregate demand over the past 80 years. They will expand this accounting framework to analyze municipal debt—both an important asset in financial markets and a critical source of finance for local public goods. The results and underlying data will likely provide new evidence on how debt affects the macroeconomy and will have implications for monetary policy as well as policy responses to levels of private and public leverage.

Many argue that higher education is one of the best ways to increase intergenerationalmobility. Students from lower-income backgrounds can move up the income ladder if they attend the right college or university. But how equal is access to those schools? If qualified low-income students aren’t attending the schools that provide the most opportunity, then the college attendance process may be retarding upward economic mobility. This research project will look at the role of colleges and universities in transmitting income inequality into the next generation. Using gold-standard restricted-access tax data, the author will identify where students from across the income distribution attend college, and which colleges are improving the economic standing of students up and down the income ladder.