A growing body of evidence demonstrates the impact of one’s neighborhood on a variety of outcomes that can accumulate across generations, which raises concerns about whether minority groups may be disadvantaged by discriminatory steering and exclusion. However, it has been extremely challenging to disentangle the effects of discrimination from preference-based sorting in evaluating persistent disparities.

Co-funded with the JPB Foundation

About 20% of children live in a household with income below the official federal poverty line, and more than 40% live in poor or near-poor households. Children living in poverty exhibit worse outcomes than their better-off peers, including poorer health, lower scores on standardized tests, lower grades and lower levels of educational attainment, and higher incidences of behavioral and emotional problems. These gaps persist into adulthood and are associated with lower lifetime earnings, worse health, and reduced psychological wellbeing.

The United States measures gross domestic product (GDP) over short time horizons for the nation, but it does not produce high-frequency measures of changes in economic activity for smaller geographic areas. This inhibits analyses of how communities adjust to economic shocks related to business cycles, technological progress, climate change and other events. Existing data sources are limited not only in their spatial resolution, but also in their temporal frequency.

One challenge for inequality and mobility research is the limited availability of data that follows people and their descendants over the life course and across generations. Recently, restricted-use data with Social Security numbers have linked tax records across generations, but these data are restricted to recent cohorts. Some scholars have used machine learning techniques to link historical records by matching names and other identifiers. 

U.S. employment law prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, race, or sex. However, studies have found evidence of illegal discrimination by randomly assigning names that signify race or other protected characteristics to fictitious resumes submitted to actual job vacancies. Several of these experiments reveal substantially lower callback rates for names associated with minority groups.

Co-funded with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth

The employment of prime-aged men has been declining since the 1980s. Economists have focused on the role of stagnant or declining real wages in discouraging work and on the underlying causes of those declining wages. However, they have paid little attention to the long-term patterns and dynamics of male prime-age non-employment and the long-term consequences of non-employment for individual men. 

Co-funded with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Research on the effects of family leave laws shows that, on average, the availability of paid leave increases leave taking. However, the evidence on the effects of paid leave on parents’ careers or their children’s outcomes in the short term for families at different places in the income distribution is limited. There is also a lack of research on the long-run effects of these programs on parents’ careers, childbearing, and marital stability.