On any given day, over 48,000 youth are confined in facilities away from home due to juvenile justice or criminal justice involvement and even a short time in detention can influence a child’s well-being. Recent work has found that diversion programs can reduce recidivism, but few studies have focused on justice system-involved youth. Economist Alberto Ortega will examine the effect of the Anne Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative on arrests and disciplinary outcomes.

In 2019, there were over 37 million housing-cost-burdened households in the United States, and the national discussion about the difficulty of finding affordable housing hinges, in part, on the idea that stable housing may be a prerequisite to stability and success in other domains in life. Economists Emily Leslie and Brittany Street will investigate the impact of access to public housing assistance on labor market and criminal justice outcomes as well as how these outcomes vary by racial group.

In response to the economic and social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal, state, and local governments enacted a wide variety of policies, including moratoria on evictions. Economist Rebecca Hsu will investigate the impact of eviction moratoria on the rate of eviction filings in 2020. She will utilize court data, American Community Survey data, and data from the SafeGraph Data Consortium for her study.

Research has shown that married mothers spend more than 50 percent more time caring for their children than fathers. This inequality is associated with gender inequalities in labor market outcomes, capital accumulation, and economic mobility. Economists Laura Gee, Kristy Buzzard, and Olga Stoddard will examine the extent to which mothers are more likely than fathers to be contacted by their child’s school and how this varies by stated parent availability. They will conduct a large-scale field experiment for their study. 

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted college, particularly for low-income and first-generation (LI/FG) college students. Economists Jane Fruehwirth and Krista Perreira and developmental psychologist Shauna Cooper will examine the effects of the pandemic on resilience, grade point average, credit hours, graduation rates, and post-graduation wages of LI/FG college students. They will analyze longitudinal survey data for their study.