Nine new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s Behavioral Economics, Social Inequality, Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, and Future of Work programs, and two projects in RSF’s special initiative on the Affordable Care Act were recently approved at the Foundation’s November 2016 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

The Social, Economic and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act

Sayeh Sander Nikpay (Vanderbilt University), Helen Levy (University of Michigan), and Thomas Buchmueller (University of Michigan) will investigate the impact of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act on household economic wellbeing by analyzing data on consumer spending. Co-funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Lara Shore-Sheppard, Lucie Schmidt, and Tara Watson (Williams College) will study how Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act has affected low-wage workers’ participation in safety net programs and employment outcomes. Co-funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Future of Work

Andrew Barr (Texas A&M University) and Ben Castleman (University of Virginia) will explore whether providing workers with personalized and simplified information about jobs can reduce behavioral bottlenecks in the job search process, improve the matching of potential employees and employers, and result in faster and more stable reemployment.

Fatih Guvenen (University of Minnesota) and Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University) will investigate the evolution of income inequality within firms, using longitudinal matched employer-employee data sources to evaluate the role of firms in shaping inequality.

Social Inequality

Jesse Rothstein (University of California, Berkeley) will study the role of education in the intergenerational transmission of inequality, focusing on whether geographic regions that show strong intergenerational transmission in income also show strong relationships between parental income and children’s test scores and other developmental outcomes.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (University of California, Berkeley) will create Distributional National Accounts that combine tax, survey, and national accounts data in a comprehensive and consistent manner for the U.S. in order to measure income inequality and study the impact of government on the distribution of economic resources.

Jesse M. Shapiro and Justine S. Hastings (Brown University) will expand their prior study on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to examine how households’ participation in SNAP affects the amount and composition of food they purchase.

Cindy K. Soo and Sarah M. Miller (University of Michigan) will evaluate the role of low-income individuals’ neighborhoods on their financial wellbeing and credit use by analyzing the financial outcomes of participants of the Moving to Opportunity experiment.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration

Yan Chen, Ann Chih Lin, and Kentaro Yoyama (University of Michigan) will conduct a randomized field experiment in Detroit to analyze how three different identity-based de-biasing techniques can reduce prejudice against and among Muslim Americans in the area.

Jennifer Lee (University of California, Irvine), Janelle Wong (University of Maryland), Taeku Lee (University of California, Berkeley) and Karthick Ramakrishnan (University of California, Riverside) will use data from their 2016 National Asian American Survey (NAAS) to explore Asian Americans' attitudes toward affirmative action and the ways that they position themselves in the U.S. ethnic-racial hierarchy, focusing on how how socioeconomic status, experiences of discrimination, and generation shape their views.

Behavioral Economics

Manasi Deshpande and Rebecca Dizon-Ross (University of Chicago) will explore how supplying information on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) to recipients of the program influences their decisions to participate in human capital investments, such as vocational rehabilitation.