Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s programs on Behavioral Economics, Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, and Social Inequality were funded at the foundation’s June 2016 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

Behavioral Economics:

• Saurabh Bhargava (Carnegie Mellon University) will analyze a proprietary dataset that tracks job application data and search behavior for millions of adult job seekers to study both how individuals search for jobs and how the psychological consequences of unemployment affect their job searches. He will also conduct a field experiment that tests whether psychologically-informed interventions can help improve search efficacy.


• Leandro Carvalho (University of Southern California), Silvia Helena Barcellos (University of Southern California), and Patrick Turley (Harvard University) will investigate the extent to which the effects of schooling on socioeconomic status depend on individuals’ genetic makeup by combining a natural experiment—the Raising of the School Leaving Age (ROSLA) Order of 1972 in England—with a rich dataset containing the genetic information of more than a half-million participants.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration:

• Randy Capps (Migration Policy Institute) and colleagues at the Migration Policy Institute will investigate whether and how the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) affects the deportation process for all actors, from enforcement agents to immigrants and their communities. This mixed-methods study will include quantitative analysis of ICE administrative data on apprehensions and removals, and qualitative interviews with informants in several locations.


• Jens Hainmueller, Tomás Jiménez, David Laitin, Duncan Lawrence, and Fernando Mendoza (Stanford University) will use a regression discontinuity design, complemented by in-depth qualitative interviews, to assess the causal impact of temporary legal regularization through Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on immigrant family outcomes.


• James McCann (Purdue University) and Michael Jones-Correa (Cornell University) will expand prior research by tracking Latino immigrants over the course of the fall 2016 campaign cycle—during a presidential election in which immigration is particularly salient—and into the next presidential administration, to examine how and to what extent major national elections shape political orientation and engagement among the foreign-born.


• Natasha Kumar Warikoo (Harvard University) will study academic competition in two wealthy suburbs that differ in terms of their percent Asian population. She will explore how group boundaries, beliefs about success, youth culture, and conceptions of race change when upwardly-mobile Asian Americans enter the public school system in these higher-income, predominantly white communities.

Social Inequality:

• Susan Dynarski (University of Michigan) and Katherine Michelmore (Syracuse University) will use longitudinal school administrative data from Michigan and Florida to differentiate students who are intermittently disadvantaged from those who are persistently disadvantaged. They will then explore how the timing and duration of children’s economic disadvantage is associated with gaps in educational achievement and attainment.


• Peter Enns (Cornell University), Nathan Kelly (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Jana Morgan (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), and Christopher Witko (Saint Louis University) have been awarded supplemental funding to continue a 2012 study of how campaign contributions influence elite political rhetoric.


• Elizabeth Suhay (American University) will commission a series of questions in a cross-sectional survey of 2,000 citizens to study how race, socioeconomic status, and political orientation affect people’s beliefs about the extent to which genetic factors determine social inequality.