This proposal will utilize a large and comprehensive dataset to evaluate whether historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, can narrow or close racial gaps on numerous measures of economic well-being, not just typical measures such as income. The dataset links College Board SAT data with credit bureau data and National Student Clearinghouse data. It includes students who took the SATs between 2004 and 2010, tracking them from high school through college, and will allow the authors to look at financial outcomes at age 30. Using these data, the authors will compare the longer-term outcomes for Black students who attend these schools versus similar students who applied to but did not attend one. The authors will explore several outcomes, including those where racial disparities exist, such as college-related debt, other forms of debt, and whether the individual has a mortgage (a proxy for homeownership). The credit data also give a more complete picture of income than earnings since it covers all types of income. Existing research shows how important social supports and social capital are to economic mobility. This project will shed light on the distinctive social and psychological value-added features of historically Black colleges and universities.

This project explores the question of how policy shocks propagate through the economy. The researchers will build a large dataset using Danish Bank and Danish government administrative data to build matrices of income, consumption, and production in different regions and sectors, as well as how income, consumption, and production in different regions and sectors are interconnected. This “disaggregated economic account” will be used to trace out how a shock that hits one part of the economy propagates to other parts and determine the aggregate impact of the shock. The resulting model will help define optimal policy responses to different kinds of shocks, to measure how certain shocks affect income inequality and growth, and to identify the most important channels that propagate shocks. Tracing how a shock in one sector filters through the economy is only possible with this type of administrative data linked in this way.

This project examines associations between municipality of residence during childhood and upward mobility. Notably, the project creates a new dataset by identifying municipalities across the United States and documenting and categorizing municipal policies for comparison. Research on municipalities is hampered because a single repository or dataset containing all municipalities and their characteristics and policies does not exist. In addition to the potential data contribution, from a policy solution standpoint, understanding municipal policy is critically important. It is neither practical nor reasonable to propose solutions for mobility that operate just at the neighborhood or commuting-zone level, outside of the context of local governance. City and county governments need to know what they can reasonably do within their jurisdictions in order to increase mobility. While the proposed study, like many others in this space, does not attempt to identify causality, the descriptive work has the potential to be telling since it could provide municipalities with evidence of how they are succeeding or failing at supporting upward mobility for their residents.

This project explores how low-income people with immediate needs for cash make borrowing decisions in states where payday lending is heavily restricted versus states where it is not. It takes a qualitative approach to exploring the experiential processes that unfold across varying state policy contexts. As the author notes, there is a burgeoning line of scholarship on payday loans and states’ attempts to restrict them, but with mixed evidence on the effects on low-income borrowers. On one hand, these loans come with predatory lending rates that are often compounded for borrowers who are unable to pay back the loan in the original period and therefore roll it over, incurring more fees and often resulting in the borrower owing many times over what they originally received. On the other hand, credit is highly constrained for low-income individuals, with payday loans filling the gap. Yet there remains neither a consensus on the utility of such loans for low-income borrowers nor an understanding of how low-income individuals make decisions about borrowing. This gap limits policymakers from addressing the dual needs of credit access for low-income borrowers and the need to reduce the deleterious effects of payday lending, a gap this research will shed light on.

This project aims to provide an exhaustive analysis of how pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions affect market competition and prices of patent-protected branded drugs involved in the deal. So far, little direct evidence exists about the impact of mergers and acquisitions activity on pharmaceutical market outcomes, partly because reliable data on prices and ownership of drugs is very difficult to obtain. The scholars will assemble a comprehensive dataset tracking the ownership of new products. This will be one of the major contributions of this project since there are no data sources that systematically track the marketing rights of each pharmaceutical product. The project examines whether prices, sales, and formulary coverage of acquired products increase after acquisition and, if so, what types of acquisitions are more likely to lead to changes in these market outcomes. This project will be the first to examine the differences in how list and net prices of pharmaceuticals respond to changes in market structure and competition. It also asks why market outcomes change. Economic theory predicts that within-market (substitute products) mergers will lead to higher prices. More recent evidence suggests that cross-market (noncompeting products) mergers also may generate upward pricing pressure in markets. The project tests these theories in the context of the pharmaceutical market. It also explores alternative explanations, such as shifts in marketing strategy, by incorporating advertising data into the analysis. Finally, the project also investigates anticompetitive effects of acquisitions in the patent-protected branded drugs market and what types of deals are more likely to have an anticompetitive effect.

This project takes a macroeconomic approach to market power. The authors will use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata on monthly prices to study how market power affects prices for the whole U.S. economy, not just one sector. Past work has looked at mark-ups and concentration as a proxy for price, but in principle, this could help address the fundamental question of whether market power or efficiency is driving increased mark-ups. This project would provide new evidence on the linkage between market concentration and margins across industries and within industries. It would also provide evidence on how import cost shocks lead to the pass-through of those shocks to the prices paid by final consumers. The authors plan to infer market power from the degree of pass-through. A main innovation in this study is the use of novel data, which record price for different sectors.