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 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 examines the effects of the expanded refundable Child Tax Credit on household economic well-being, including material hardship, debt, savings, and employment, with a focus on racial implications. The monthly Child Tax Credit, issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, was novel and represented a departure from how the United States typically provides assistance to low-income families via yearly cash transfers through the tax system or in-kind provisions, such as through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The expanded Child Tax Credit also was short-lived, issued only from July 2021 to December 2021. Existing evidence, including some from this proposed study's investigators, reveals the monthly CTC payments reduced poverty, and especially child poverty, despite high underemployment or unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The contribution of this project is its investigation of nonincome outcomes, such as material hardship and food insecurity rates relative to the monthly CTC payments. The project also will consider racialized effects, which are important since early evidence reveals that Black and Latino families were disproportionately less likely to receive, or were delayed in receipt of, the monthly CTC payments. The study will rely on data from an app from Propel Inc., a financial services firm serving low-income Americans. The app allows low-income families manage their SNAP benefits.

This project considers the interplay between paid and unpaid care work and the relationship between care work penalties and gender, race, and class inequalities. The author makes the novel argument that prior research does not sufficiently understand the combined effects of both paid and unpaid care work penalties and how they interact. To fill this gap, this project will develop a “care-work-systems” framework to determine how pay penalties for care work impact economic inequality. The project identifies that paid and unpaid care work penalties are often viewed as separate even though they impact each other. In addition to bringing these two skeins of research literature in conversation with one another, it will also bridge the research literatures in child care and eldercare, and integrate class, in addition to race and gender, into the analysis. In addition to the theoretical contribution, it proposes an empirical study to test this framework using panel data from three countries with different care infrastructures—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany—to help shed light on how policies and social structures play a role in generating paid and unpaid care work penalties.

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.