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.

This project explores the causes and implications of the resilience of public-sector unions after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which effectively made the entire public sector right-to-work. The research team will field a national survey of 4,000 full-time, nonmanagerial, union-eligible public-sector workers to shed light on two questions: Why didn’t the Supreme Court decision in Janus cause a large decrease in public-sector union membership? And what can spark increased unionization efforts among public-sector workers in the United States? This project is poised to inform what options there may be for boosting union membership in the public sector.

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.

This project seeks to explain how climate adaptation projects mitigate the unequal effects of climate change. They plan to model efficient investment in climate adaptation from a global perspective to inform how the United States should fund global activities to mitigate climate change. They will develop and calibrate a multiregion, multisector spatial equilibrium model that incorporates heterogenous exposure to climate change and adaptive capacity to deal with climate change. They will use the model to explore the equity-efficiency frontier of adaptation funding. Importantly, the model will account for global production networks, which play a key role in the propagation of shocks. They seek to understand how these shocks propagate across countries and affect workers with different characteristics, such as education level or race.

This project partners with two guaranteed income experiments in Georgia to understand how guaranteed income affects asset development and credit-building. One experiment, in and around Atlanta, enrolled 654 low-income Black women in the summer of 2022. This experiment uses two different models of benefit delivery—equal-sized regular payments versus a one-time lump-sum payment followed by smaller regular payments. There is also a control group formed by those not randomly selected for the program. The other project takes 200 homeless clients from Project Community Connections Inc. and randomly assigns half of them to receive case management and housing assistance, while the other half receives those services plus $400 per month. For both experiments, the research team will link to credit report data and create a control group from the credit data to provide insight on racially patterned economic disparities and potential policy interventions. This paper will bridge guaranteed income—an income-maintenance intervention—with the study of wealth development and access to credit.

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.