Today, two-thirds of Native Americans do not live on tribal lands. Research suggests that migrating away from low-income areas can mitigate the deleterious effects of growing up in a disadvantaged community and improve later-life outcomes for children and young adults. While experiments like the Moving to Opportunity program have been evaluated, economists have largely overlooked the federal program that subsidized the relocation of reservation residents to urban areas.
Recent research suggests that legal actions since the 1970s to reduce school spending disparities by race have had profound consequences for affected students. However, modern research methods have not yet been applied to study the later-life impacts of the reductions in racial gaps in school resources in the South before school desegregation began. Economists Elizabeth Cascio and Ethan Lewis will assemble and harmonize county-level panel data on school resources by race for 11 southern states, building on existing data from 1910 to 1940.
Questions about remote work arrangements have accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While about 20 percent of employees whose jobs could be done from home did so prior to the pandemic, in 2020, about 71 percent did, and 54 percent wished to continue working from home after the pandemic ends. At the same time, many employers expect workers to return to offices, often citing workplace dynamics and patterns of collaboration that they believe may have been impeded by remote work.
Companies have long experimented with automation to replace workers. For example, McDonald’s has been testing robots as cooks and servers, Amazon uses robots to haul products in its warehouses, and banks are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks like decision-making and anomaly detection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health risks and the implementation of safety measures have led to large-scale layoffs, suggesting that automation and AI might further reduce reliance on workers.
Recent research shows that economic opportunity is distributed unevenly by geography and that economic convergence across regions has diminished. Economically distressed areas are often rural and have experienced decreased labor force participation, decreased health, and increased deaths of despair. Two long-standing research questions are whether assistance should be focused on distressed places or the people in these places and whether or not policy should nudge people in distressed places to migrate to areas with more economic opportunity.
The U.S. adopted a nationality-based immigration quota system in the 1920s to reduce the inflow of Eastern and Southern Europeans (ESE) and to preserve the ethnic character of the nation. But these quotas may have had unintended negative consequences for American science and innovation by keeping out scientists and inventors from these ethnic groups. To what extent did the quotas prevent foreign-born scientists from entering the U.S. and to what extent did native-born scientists become less productive as a result of not being able to work with foreign-born colleagues?
In 1870, the average Black household held 3 percent of the wealth held by the average white household; 150 years later, Black households hold only 10 percent of the wealth held by whites. These disparities limit the capacity of Black households to invest in physical and human capital and to buffer economic shocks. While a large literature examines factors contributing to these inequities, few economists have examined the role of the Great Depression and associated policies in shaping Black socioeconomic mobility.
Police training is considered a key approach to reducing police violence and disparate treatment. However, few have studied the impact of training on the incidence of force and there is little evidence that such interventions will mitigate racial and ethnic disparities. Economists Matthew Ross and CarlyWill Sloan will examine police training programs and their impact on the use and escalation of force and the extent to which trainings mitigate racial and ethnic disparities.