Research on the consequences of mass imprisonment has shown just how common and unequally distributed the experience of imprisonment is among adult men and how common and unequally distributed parental imprisonment is among children. However, data quality prevents the estimation of the causal effects of incarceration on social outcomes.  One particular problem is high survey attrition among those experiencing incarceration, which may bias estimates of the effects of paternal incarceration on children.

Over the last 40 years, class divides—by household income and by parental educational attainment—in how parents spend time and money on children have widened considerably. This suggests that the rise in income inequality may be causally related to the growing class divide in parental investments. However, scholars have yet to test the empirical relationship between income inequality and class gaps in parental investment or to investigate the pathways associated with their relationship.

In the late 1990s, RSF funded research on job instability that culminated in On the Job: Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past? (2000), edited by David Neumark. The book concluded that it was “premature to infer long-term trends toward declines in long-term employment relationships, and even more so to infer anything like the disappearance of long-term, secure jobs.” Recent research, however, has documented decreasing job stability.