Seven new research projects were funded at the Foundation’s February 2015 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

The Foundation’s Future of Work program examines the causes and consequences of the declining quality of jobs for less- and moderately-educated workers in the U.S. economy and the role of changes in employer practices, the nature of the labor market and public policies on the employment, earnings, and the quality of jobs of American workers. The following project was recently funded under the program:

Minimum Wage Policies and Low-Wage Work: An Assessment of New Methods and Measures
Arindrajit Dube (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Jointly funded with the MacArthur Foundation

Economist Arindrajit Dube, who has been at the forefront of new minimum wage research, will assess the contradictory findings in the recent literature on whether increasing the minimum wage raises labor costs and leads to fewer jobs at the bottom of the labor market.

The Foundation’s Social Inequality program focuses on whether rising economic inequality has affected social, political, and economic institutions in the U.S., and the extent to which increased inequality has affected equality of opportunity, social mobility, and the intergenerational transmission of advantage. The following projects were funded under the Social Inequality program:

The Etiquette of Inequality in Democratic Spaces
Andrea Voyer (Pace University)

Sociologist Andrea Voyer will carry out an ethnographic study to augment our understanding of how social inequality persists despite efforts to remove explicit barriers to the equality of opportunity. The project will focus on how everyday practices and cultural differences between socioeconomic groups become social boundaries that reproduce social inequality.

Inequality, Threat, and the Social Fabric: Laboratory Studies on the Harmful Effects of Income Inequality on Social Relations and Well-Being
Serena Chen and Dacher Keltner (UC Berkeley)
Jointly funded with the MacArthur Foundation

Psychologists Serena Chen and Dacher Keltner will complete six different experiments that focus on the relationships between income inequality and several social and health outcomes. They will examine how increases in people’s awareness of income inequality—as well as laboratory-based, face-to-face experiences of simulated income inequality—shape their emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses.

"They Treat Us Like a Different Race": A Multi-City Project on Class-in-Race Inequality
Jennifer Hochschild (Harvard University) and Vesla Weaver (Yale University)

Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Weaver will explore the rise of economic inequality within racial minority groups, looking at whether affluent and poor non-whites are divided politically as well as economically and residentially.

How Rigid is the Wealth Structure and Why?: Intergenerational Correlations and Determinants of Family Wealth
Fabian Pfeffer (University of Michigan) and Alexandra Killewald (Harvard University)
Jointly funded with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Sociologists Fabian Pfeffer and Alexandra Killewald will assess the strength and pattern of wealth mobility across generations, exploring how intergenerational transfers, home ownership, and marriage affect the transmission of advantage between generations.

Inequality in Parental Investments by Biological Vulnerability: Implications for the Socioeconomic Gap in Children’s School Readiness
Rebecca Ryan and Anna Johnson (Georgetown University)
Jointly funded with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Psychologists Rebecca Ryan and Anna Johnson will investigate the potential interaction between socioeconomic status and parental investment in biologically vulnerable children. They will examine whether the socioeconomic status gaps in school readiness may be related to low-SES parents investing more resources in less vulnerable children while their high-SES counterparts invest more in vulnerable children.

The Foundation’s Cultural Contact program is concerned with the effects of cultural difference on the ways in which different groups in the population understand and interact with one another, with particular attention to the response of U.S. economic, social, political, and other institutions to increasing diversity in the U.S. population. The following project was recently funded under the program:

Identity Threats in Higher Education: Implications for College Outcomes of Under-Represented Students of Color
Sabrina Zirkel (Mills College), Mary Murphy (Indiana University) and Julie Garcia (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo)

Social psychologists Sabrina Zirkel, Mary Murphy and Julie Garcia will study the achievement gap between African American and Latino college students in STEM fields and their peers, focusing on whether and how stereotype threat cues impact the academic performance and persistence of black and Latino students. They will also explore the extent to which students’ perceptions of their instructors’ beliefs about the malleability of intelligence and ability interact with other forms of identity threat in the classroom.