Recent studies have found that transferring income to disadvantaged families improves outcomes for children, including cognitive development, socio‐behavioral development, and educational attainment. For example, an extra $1000 from the Earned Income Tax Credit has been shown to improve child test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation. However, one income source that has received little attention are Social Security benefits, for which the number of child beneficiaries has been increasing.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program is HUD’s largest low-income housing subsidy program, aiding 2.2 million households. It provides subsidies for renting units on the private market, with the goal of improving access to stable, affordable housing and neighborhoods that have greater opportunities for upward mobility. However, the program too often fails to provide recipients with meaningful choices in housing and neighborhoods, and many recipients cannot find a landlord who will accept their vouchers.

Many researchers and policymakers have expressed concerns that new technologies will lower the effective cost of capital and lead firms to replace workers with machines, especially those with limited skills. Will increasing capital accumulation increase inequality between skilled and unskilled workers? Does capital investment increase employment or leads firms to substitute between capital and labor? Suárez Serrato, Curtis and Ohrn will study the effects of capital investments on worker outcomes.

In recent decades, U.S. manufacturing employment has declined sharply, leading to a reduction in middle-income jobs and resulting in earnings losses for many displaced workers.

Economists Sari Kerr and Kristin Butcher will examine the effects of paid family leave on firm and worker outcomes. They will utilize employer-household panel data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database and analyze the extent to which paid leave policy alters the earnings gap between men and women, and if there is a net cost or benefit to the firm from providing such policies.

Co-funded with the W. K.

Behavioral economist Linda Babcock and a team of three psychologists will investigate the impact of stereotype threat on college students’ decision making that can lead to educational disparities across categories such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. They will examine how stereotype threat impacts students’ attitudes toward risk (risk aversion), how students weigh losses versus gains in evaluating risky situations (loss aversion), and how they spend their time on activities where the benefits will accrue now versus in the future (present bias).

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) included provisions to support breastfeeding, including requiring employers to provide "reasonable break time" and "a place, other than a bathroom," for employees to express breast milk for up to a year after giving birth. Another provision, established in 2012, required health insurance plans to cover breastfeeding supplies and support services.

While the topic of labor income inequality has been at the center of recent economic and political debates, researchers have focused mainly on wage data. However, nonwage benefits now account for about one-third of workers’ total compensation. Economists Grace Gu and Eswar Prasad will document and analyze the evolution of compensation inequality over the period from 1982 to 2018 and examine the extent to which different components of nonwage benefits exacerbate or mitigate wage inequality.

Every recession since 1973 has led to a persistent decrease in earnings per capita in local areas where the recession was particularly severe. The consequences of this finding depend on why recessions lead to persistent declines in local economic activity. Local economic activity could decline because high-income workers are more likely to migrate away from places experiencing large negative economic shocks, or because employers change their production process or shut down.