The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing recession exacerbated economic vulnerabilities in part because the most advantaged workers retained jobs while the least advantaged faced declining employment prospects and financial insecurity. Although the 2020 CARES Act expanded eligibility for Unemployment Insurance (UI) and provided an additional $600 per week for recipients, workers experienced variation in UI receipt due to differences in state UI benefit levels, the efficiency of bureaucratic systems, and time-to-receipt of payments.

Co-funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York

In the U.S. criminal justice system, Black Americans are more likely to be arrested and spend time in prison than others. However, the literature on policing and the criminal justice system emphasizes the behavior of individuals (e.g., racially biased police officers, probation officers or judges who are responsible for disparities in arrests, parole decisions or sentencing), rather than the effects of criminal justice policies (i.e., the rules that jurisdictions use to implement the law).

The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 sparked mass demonstrations against police violence and racism across the country. While racial violence and racist ideology are associated with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the South, such violence is pervasive outside the South as well. Protesters across the country were motivated to join demonstrations against systemic racism in their communities.

Racially restrictive covenants, which prevented sale and rental of housing to several racial and ethnic minorities, were a common phenomenon in the first half of the 20th century in many northern cities in the U.S. In Minneapolis and suburbs. They were first used in 1911 and gained significant popularity after 1920s until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court made them unenforceable. This project will analyze what Minneapolis and suburbs would have looked like in 1940 if racial and ethnic covenants were not put into place.

This project will estimate the causal effects of Medicaid access on health, crime, and labor market outcomes for vulnerable populations—specifically, those with interactions in the criminal justice system. To do so, the researcher will leverage a newly implemented policy in Pennsylvania that enabled Medicaid-enrolled inmates to suspend their benefits while incarcerated, rather than having those benefits automatically terminated.

Segregation within the workplace lies at the heart of racial inequality in wages and employment. Segregation also carries potentially unintended costs to organizations by leading to the misallocation of worker talent. The costs of racial segregation, however, remain poorly measured by quantitative social scientists.

The objective of this proposal is to examine the impact of school shootings on the economic engagement and personal finances of residents of local communities where the shooting occurs. We first propose to the impact of school shootings on the number of tax returns (approximates the number of households), number of personal exemptions (approximates the population), and wages and salaries. We will then examine the impact of school shootings on the personal finance of local residents by analyzing their credit history.