This project investigates the causal effects of discriminatory assessment practices introduced by the New Deal-era federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Specifically, the two researchers plan to examine HOLC’s systematic evaluation of neighborhoods and the maps it produced based on credit risk. Research has already led to the understanding that HOLC practices were a type of institutional discrimination. Data collected by the two researchers show that in 1930, about 86 percent of Black Americans lived in areas deemed hazardous (denoted in red on the maps, hence the term “redlining”) while almost 98 percent of the population in higher-rated areas was White. This research will measure how grade assignments affected the evolution of home values, income composition, and residential segregation in the short run and the long run. They will tackle the question by exploiting the fact that only cities over a certain population threshold were affected by the program. They will utilize a machine-learning algorithm to compare redlined neighborhoods with those that would have been redlined had the city been large enough to be affected by the program.

There is a significant racial divide in homeownership, as well as wealth, in the United States. In 2018, 73 percent of White householders owned their homes, compared to only 42 percent of Black householders, and the typical White household owned 20 times as much wealth as the typical Black household. A number of factors may explain this disparity, but one key contributor is the positive association between wealth and the ability of renters to transition to homeownership. This project will consider nonparental family members as potential sources of financial assistance to prospective homeowners. Utilizing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Bucknor will measure household wealth, parental wealth, grandparental wealth, and extended-family wealth, including businesses owned, transaction accounts, real estate, stocks, vehicles, home equity, and other assets, minus all debts. This research is poised to add to our understanding of intergenerational transmission of wealth and the far-reaching impacts of structural racism, and give insight into policies that may be effective in addressing persistent racial wealth inequality.

This project will use longitudinal data from two states to explore racial disparities in access to family child care centers by looking at rates of homeownership and disparities in homeownership by race. Family child care centers—licensed child care centers located within an operator’s home—make up a declining but still substantial proportion of the supply of formal child care. There are many obstacles to licensing a family child care center in a rental property, so areas with low rates of homeownership may experience a lack of access to this often more affordable child care option. Family child care centers also tend to have more flexible hours, making them especially valuable for parents working irregular or unpredictable schedules. Borowsky will conduct a market-definition analysis intended to approximate regions of common demand and supply. He will then evaluate the extent to which low rates of homeownership in a region are associated with low supply of family child care centers.

As the U.S. economy emerges from the coronavirus recession, public policies to support women’s ability to return to work and stay in the workforce will be necessary for economic recovery. This study seeks to assess if paid sick leave reduces short-term income volatility and increases long-term economic security through improved job attachment among women, particularly those who are less likely to have access to paid sick leave in the absence of paid sick leave mandates. Using the American Community Survey, Slopen will conduct analyses at the state and county level using the five states and 21 counties that implemented paid sick leave as the treatment group. She will exploit the variation in the timing of the implementation of mandates at the state or county level using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of paid sick leave mandates on women’s labor force participation, continuity of employment, weekly hours worked, income, and poverty. She also will identify effects on subpopulations most likely to lack access to paid sick leave in the absence of mandates.

Manufacturing jobs in the United States were widely considered to provide an important opportunity for less-educated workers to climb the U.S. economic ladder by offering high pay and stable careers. Research shows that the decline in manufacturing jobs since the 1970s coincided with a decline in upward mobility: Children born in the 1980s are less likely to grow up to earn as much as their parents than children born in the 1950s were, particularly in the post-industrial heartland. This project examines how increases in high-wage manufacturing work opportunity affected individual opportunity following the industrial mobilization for World War II. Garin and Rothbaum will exploit the fact that the siting of new plants was based on idiosyncratic short-run strategic considerations, leading to the construction of massive new publicly financed manufacturing plants in places that would not have been chosen by private firms. This historical dynamic gives rise to an ideal laboratory for studying how public investments that create high-wage employment impact upward mobility in the long run. The authors have digitized data on the locations of World War II manufacturing facilities using the War Production Board data books. Focusing on children who grew up in those areas in the 1940s, the two researchers will then trace those individuals’ income trajectories using the later-20th century Current Population Survey data linked to Social Security Administration-based income histories to examine mobility rates.

An estimated 7.5 million children under 6 years old are cared for by home-based child care providers each year, which represents the majority of young children in regular nonparental care arrangements in the United States. Home-based child care programs are more affordable and accessible to a broad range of families, especially low-income, Black and Latinx, and rural families. The pandemic has drawn attention to longstanding racialized inequities in access to child care and the structural inequalities that are perpetuated due to insufficient investment in the home-based child care sector. This project will document trends over time (before, during, and after the pandemic) in access to child care subsidies for home-based care providers using administrative records data for the state of Illinois, paying particular attention to the racial composition of those receiving child care subsidies and those who serve racially diverse and economically disadvantaged families through the child care subsidy program. The analysis of the administrative records will be able to show how licensed and unlicensed providers' access to child care subsidies were affected by the pandemic, compared with one another and compared with center-based care. The two researchers will augment this analysis with in-depth interviews with home-based care providers. These qualitative interviews will explore how home-based care providers fared during the pandemic.