This project ties together neighborhood segregation, migration patterns, and local spending and policies to explore how “structural racism is built into physical infrastructure in cities.” The author will use granular satellite images to measure temperature in Black and White urban neighborhoods. The project will look at the degree to which neighborhoods are segregated and the level of surface imperviousness in each of those neighborhoods. The author also will map Great Migration patterns, White flight, and local government spending patterns. The research uses data from the University of Virginia’s Environmental Inequality Lab and builds on research on Northern cities’ responses to the Great Migration. Preliminary results show that historical Black migrant inflows increased the surface temperature of neighborhoods where Black households live, relative to the neighborhoods where White households live, as well as the Black-White gap in neighborhood imperviousness.

Individuals and their families use a variety of caregiving arrangements, but there is little research on who is likely to use which kind of arrangement. Furthermore, existing scholarship mainly focuses on the characteristics of the care recipient, without considering how family characteristics influence choices for caregiving arrangements. This mixed-methods study will explore how family characteristics and social infrastructure programs shape caregiving arrangements for older adults in the United States. The first two papers quantify and study the relationship between family characteristics and the size and scope of several social infrastructure and caregiving arrangements. The third paper will use semi-structured interviews with families who have eldercare responsibilities, focusing on Black females in the Chicago area, to shed light on their decision-making processes. Through these interviews, the author will explore how access to public programs affects their decisions, how they were selected as caregivers, what their preferences and future expectations are, and how employment plays into their decisions. The sample will include recipients (either care recipients or caretakers) of Social Security Insurance, Social Security Disability Insurance, Old Age and Survivors Insurance, Paid Family Leave, and Home & Community Based Services waivers from Medicaid.

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 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.