The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is excited to introduce our 2016 round of grantees. These grants are being awarded to researchers who are investigating the various channels through which inequality may affect economic growth and stability. The principal investigators receiving these grants are diverse in their research interests and backgrounds, and include full-fledged researchers as well as doctoral students.

The grants are awarded in one of four categories identified in our request for proposals:  macroeconomic stability; human capital and the labor market; governance and institutions; and innovation. This third round of grant-giving further enables Equitable Growth to build out a growing body of research that allows us to knit together a greater understanding of the U.S. economy. Please visit our grantee page for more information on past grantees.

Here is a brief overview of our newest, 2016 grantees.

Macroeconomics

 Three academic grants will support research on how economic inequality affects macroeconomic growth and stability:

• Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo of New York University will assess how the distribution of earned income, the rate of return for various assets, and the nature of bequests determine wealth inequality.
• Gauti Eggertsson and Neil Mehrotra of Brown University will build a model to demonstrate how higher income inequality has reduced the natural rate of interest through increased overall saving.
• Adriana Kugler and Ammar Farooq of Georgetown University will examine whether extensions of unemployment insurance benefits improve job-match quality, and the role that unemployment insurance plays in improving worker outcomes.

Three doctoral grants will support further research on macroeconomic growth and stability:

• Alexander Bartik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will explore the distributional implications of fracking and mass transit expansions using longitudinal U.S. Census Bureau microdata.
• John Coglianese of Harvard University will construct a comprehensive measure of underemployment and integrate it into commonly-used economic models to showcase the effects of underemployment on the functioning of the labor market.
• Andrew Elrod of the University of California-Santa Barbara will examine how the reorganization of the U.S. banking sector after World War II altered the relationship between profitable investment and macroeconomic stability.

Human capital and the labor market

Two academic grants will support research on how economic inequality affects the development of human capital, and to what extent aggregate trends in human capital explain inequality dynamics:

• Christopher Jencks and Beth Truesdale of Harvard University will investigate the relationship between inequality and health outcomes, which will further research on the relationship between income and life expectancy.
• Marta Murray-Close and Joya Misra of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst will construct estimates of how parenthood contributes to the gender wage gap and, in turn, how supporting working parents is key to promoting gender equity.

Three doctoral grants will support further research on human capital:

• Sydnee Caldwell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will draw on employer-employee data to document access to high-wage firms and movements between high- and low-wage firms over the span of a worker’s career.
• Blythe George of Harvard University will focus on the lack of employment options and life outcomes on the Yurok and Hoopa Valley Native American tribal reservations.
• Mariana Zerpa of the University of Arizona will explore the impact of large-scale, publicly-funded preschool education programs on health and developmental outcomes for children ages 4 to 12.

Innovation

 Two academic grants will support research on how economic inequality affects the quantity and quality of innovation, and whether technology innovations, in turn, affects inequality:

• Kyle Herkenhoff of the University of Minnesota and Gordon Phillips of Dartmouth College will study access to credit, via the removal of bankruptcy flags, on key outcomes, including business formation rates, earnings, and profitability.
• Heidi Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Patrick Kline of the University of California-Berkeley, Neviana Petkova of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Owen Zidar of the University of Chicago will create a new dataset that links patent applications to business tax records to estimate the relative effects of patent-generated monopoly rents on firm returns and worker wages.

Two doctoral grants will support further research on innovation:

• Xavier Jaravel of Harvard University will examine whether economic inequality affects the type of innovation that takes place and who benefits from that innovation.
• Hannah Rubinton of Princeton University will analyze how trends in firm start-up rates affect consumer welfare and productivity growth.

Governance and institutions        

 Three academic grants will support research on how levels and trends in economic inequality affect the quality of social and political institutions that contribute to economic well-being and economic growth:

• Manasi Deshpande of the University of Chicago, Tal Gross of Columbia University, and Jialan Wang of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will quantify how public assistance affects households’ financial well-being through increasing access to credit.
• Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, Ann Bartel of Columbia University, Maya Rossin-Slater of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia will investigate inequality in employer-provided paid parental leave in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
• Joan Williams of the University of California-Hastings College of the Law, Susan Lambert of the University of Chicago, and Saravanan Kesavan of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flager Business School will continue research on whether shifting hourly workers to more stable schedules results in cost savings and increases business productivity.

One doctoral grant will support further research on governance and institutions:

• Ellora Derenoncourt of Harvard University will use online lab experiments and employee-employer matched data to look at labor market decisions, testing for individual social preferences over payoff distributions.

For more details, please see the presentations of the 2016 grantees’ projects. And check out our 2014 and 2015 grantees’ project descriptions for a wide range of examples of the types of work that we fund.