Russel Sage Foundation

Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s core programs were funded at the Foundation’s June meeting of the Board of Trustees.

Awards approved in the Behavioral Economics program:

Mental Accounting and Fungibility of Money: Evidence from a Retail Panel
Jesse Shapiro (Harvard University) and Justine Hastings (Brown University)

Jesse Shapiro and Justine Hastings will complete a project that provide new tests of "mental accounting," or how households represent money in their financial decision-making. They will draw from unique panel data on seven years of customer purchases from a large grocery retailer in order to glean new insights into mental accounting through a real-world scenario.

Behavioral Biases and the Design of Student Loan Repayment Schemes
Lesley J. Turner, Kathleen Abraham, Emel Filiz-Ozbay, and Erkut Ozbay (University of Maryland)

Lesley J. Turner and colleagues will investigate the factors that affect students’ loan repayments, including the relationship between students’ expected earnings and their preference for income-based repayment plans, and whether students’ repayment behavior is affected by whether they voluntarily choose income-based plan or are instead assigned to one.

Award approved in the Future of Work program:

Implementing Effective Work-Family Interventions: Supervisors and Organizational Policy Implications
Ellen Kossek (Purdue University) and Leslie Hammer (Portland State University)

Psychologists Ellen Kossek and Leslie Hammer will research the effects of retail employers providing work-life support to front-line supervisors. They will look in particular at how "soft" training interventions, aimed at raising the level of awareness and competency in managing work-life balance, affect these supervisors and, by extension, their employees.

Awards approved in the Social Inequality program:

How Do the Rich Rule? Public Opinion, Parties, and Interest Groups in Unequal Policy Influence
Matthew Grossmann (Michigan State University)

Matthew Grossmann will examine the mechanisms by which high-income citizens influence policymaking, looking at how the Democratic and Republican parties, along with liberal and conservative advocacy groups and business lobbies, provide distinct routes for the influence of high-income citizens’ opinions on policy adoption.

GxE and Health Inequality Over the Life Course
Dalton Conley (New York University)

Dalton Conley and Lauren Schmitz will carry out a project that tests for gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions in cognitive and health outcomes using new methods that address the methodological flaws of prior models that have been used to explore GxE effects in population-based samples.

College and Intergenerational Mobility: New Evidence from Administrative Data
John Friedman (Brown University), Raj Chetty (Harvard University), Emmanuel Saez and Danny Yagan (University of California, Berkeley)

John Friedman and colleagues will use administrative data to examine the role of college in the intergenerational transmission of economic inequality. Among other factors, they will analyze the extent to which the correlation between parental and child incomes is explained by the college the child attends. They will also examine the effect of higher education policies on later-life success for low-income students.

Economic Mobility: The Impact of Individual, Parent and Spatial Factors Using National Survey and Administrative Data
John Haltiwanger (University of Maryland), Fredrik Andersson (U.S. Treasury), Mark J. Kutzbach (U.S. Census Bureau), Henry Pollakowski (Harvard University), and Daniel H. Weinberg (DHW Consulting)

John Haltiwanger and his colleagues are developing new federal data for the study of intergenerational economic mobility. Among other factors, the investigators will examine how intergenerational mobility differs across geographic locations for individuals of different races and ethnicities.

The Dynamics of Racialization: How Welfare Evaluations Reproduce Racial Stereotypes and Aggravate Symbolic Racism
Paul Goren (University of Minnesota)

Paul Goren will undertake a study to better understand the connections between racial prejudice and public opposition to means-tested welfare programs, including looking at whether racialized media coverage of welfare and poverty are likely to sustain and reinforce racial stereotypes and biases.

Neighborhoods, Schools, and Academic Inequality
Joshua Cowen (Michigan State University) and Deven Carlson (University of Oklahoma)

Cowen and Carlson will draw from a unique data source that allows them to jointly estimate school and neighborhood effects on student achievement. Using administrative data, they will analyze how schools and neighborhoods contribute to student learning, given different student characteristics, such as age, race and class. They will also look at how differences in school and neighborhood effects contribute to racial and economic achievement gaps.

Awards approved in the Immigration program:

Effects of Immigration Policy on Inequality Among Children in the United States
Julia Gelatt and Heather Koball (Urban Institute)

Sociologists Julia Gelatt and Heather Koball will test the effects of state immigration enforcement policy on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage in immigrant families. They will build a comprehensive database of state-level policies toward immigrants and merge these data onto data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) in order to study how such policies affect immigrant families’ material hardship.

Race and Ethnic Discrimination in Labor Markets: An International Meta-Analysis
Lincoln Quillian and Larry V. Hedges (Northwestern University)

Lincoln Quillian and Larry Hedges, along with a team of American and international experts in labor markets and field experimental research, will undertake a cross-national meta-analysis of field studies in racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring.

State-Level Immigration-Related Bills, 1990-2015: Database Completion, Data Cleaning and Analyses
Alexandra Filindra (University of Illinois, Chicago) and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz (University of Rhode Island)

Alexandra Filindra and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz will finalize data collection and develop new measures for a study of how economic factors, political processes and institutions, public opinion and prevailing ideologies, interest groups, and state demographics affect immigration policy-making at the state level.