The Russell Sage Foundation recently approved 29 research grants in its programs on Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context; Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration; and Social, Political, and Economic Inequality and in its special initiatives Immigration and Immigrant Integration and Implications of the 2023 Supreme Court Decision to Ban Race-Conscious Admissions at Colleges and Universities for Educational Attainment and Economic Mobility. Two of the grants were co-funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Hewlett and William T. Grant Foundations. 

Following is a list of the recent grants. Please click on each for a brief description of the research project.

Behavioral Science and Decision-Making in Context

Tanner Eastmond and Richard Patterson (Brigham Young University) and Amanda Bonheur (RAND Corporation) will examine the extent to which the share of job applications from women and underrepresented racial groups can be increased by including encouraging and informative language around qualification requirements in job ads.

Terrill Taylor (University of Maryland, College Park) and Royel Johnson (University of Southern California) will conduct a pilot study to develop and test a digital storytelling intervention aimed at counteracting the effects of racial oppression and criminal stigma among justice-involved people of color.  

Future of Work

Stav Atir (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Hannah Birnbaum (Washington University in St. Louis) will examine the extent to which women and racial minorities use formal cues as a sign of professional legitimacy and whether those who enact formality are penalized, especially under informal workplace norms.

Jennie Brand (UCLA) and Xi Song (Columbia University) will use new data sources to better understand career trajectories and mobility chances due to recent changes in the structure of occupations.

Peter Ganong (University of Chicago) will examine firm-level and managerial sources of pay volatility and its relationship to consumption volatility by linking data from a national payroll processing company to bank account data from JP Morgan Chase.

Michelle Jiang (University of Massachusetts, Boston) and Alexandra Opanasets (Census Bureau) will test the extent to which underrepresented minority groups are less likely to apply to high reward/demanding jobs due to failure sensitivity and/or anticipated discrimination.

Beatrice Magistro (Northeastern University) will examine how people understand the economic effects of artificial intelligence and how that is associated with their labor market policy preferences related to technological change.

Germán Reyes (Middlebury College) and Joaquín Serrano (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) will examine firm-level adoption of generative artificial intelligence and its employment effects.

Jeremy Reynolds (Purdue University) will examine racial and gender differences in stress, the ability to meet earnings targets, and control over work hours among microtask workers on MTurk and Prolific.

Immigration and Immigrant Integration

Breno Braga and Hamutal Bernstein (Urban Institute) will study of how transitions to legalized permanent residence status and naturalized citizenship affect adult and children’s outcomes. This grant is co-funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Race-Conscious College Admissions Ban

Payton Small (Vassar College) will examine how students, guidance counselors, and admissions officers are responding to the evolving landscape of racially colorblind admissions following the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious college admissions. This grant will is co-funded by the Hewlett and the William T. Grant Foundations.

Social, Political, and Economic Inequality

Kristen Brock-Petroshius (Stony Brook University) and Neil Lewis and Jeff Niederdeppe (Cornell University) will evaluate the effectiveness of race- and class-based messaging strategies across racialized policy domains to better understand how communication about racialized policy issues operates.

Charlotte Cavaillé (Toulouse School of Economics) will conduct an experimental study of whether moral intuitions vary with class, geography and partisanship.

Matthew Chao (Williams College) and Jonathan Chapman (University of Bologna) will conduct an experimental study of the extent to which, and under what conditions, Americans prefer to equalize opportunities.

Stacy Dickert-Conlin (Syracuse University), Michael Conlin (Michigan State University), and Katie Harris-Lagoudakis (Iowa State University) will estimate the effect of a Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) online redemption program on WIC redemption rates.

Penny Edgell (University of Minnesota) will examine the association between Christian nationalist beliefs and attitudes regarding economic inequality and deservingness.

Alexander Gazmararian (University of Michigan), Sabrina Arias (Lehigh University), and Christopher Blair (Princeton University) will examine how climate-related disasters and insurance industry practices shape two climate adaptation responses: exit (relocation) and voice (political mobilization).

Laura Gee (Tufts University), Olga Stoddard (Brigham Young University), and Kristy Buzard (Syracuse University) will examine the causes, consequences, and inequalities of invisible household labor—the cognitive, emotional, and managerial work essential to family functioning.

Joe LaBriola, Robert Manduca and Pablo Mitnik (University of Michigan) will use a nationwide dataset of residential market values to measure age- and race-based inequalities in property tax burdens and the effects of assessment caps on these inequalities.

Timothy Layton (University of Virginia), Adam Leive (University of California, Berkeley), and Adrianna McIntyre (Harvard University) will study the causal effect of SNAP work requirements on labor market outcomes, program participation, nutritional and health outcomes, and economic security.

Kevin Loughran (Temple University) and James R. Elliott (Rice University) will study the residential trajectories of the people and places affected by federal relocation of homeowners living deep within local flood plains and how experiences and perceptions vary by the social positions and contexts in which they occur.

Tali Mendelberg (Princeton University) will investigate public opinion about affordable housing using novel measures that capture support for policies directed specifically at low and middle-income residents.

David Rothwell and Hyein Kang (Oregon State University) will examine the implementation of Oregon’s paid family leave (PFL) policy to understand who uses paid leave, and how PFL affects labor market outcomes and safety net use.

Lisa Servon (University of Pennsylvania) will conduct a mixed methods investigation of two recent Oklahoma House Bills that reduce criminal legal debt to understand their impact on those who are unable to pay and their families.

Crystal Shackleford (Yale University) will examine how experiences with discrimination and inequality influence how people from minoritized groups relate to one another and the conditions under which they view each other as allies versus competitors.

Darrian Stacy (United States Naval Academy) will conduct a mixed methods study of how personal wealth among U.S. Senators shapes patterns of lawmaking, committee activity, and political representation.

Winnie van Dijk and John Eric Humphries (Yale University), Amrita Kulka (University of Warwick), Kate Pennington (U.S. Census), and Ingrid Ellen (New York University) will examine the long-term and intergenerational impacts of Urban Renewal, a landmark federal program established in 1949 that promoted urban redevelopment to clear “blighted” areas.

Emily Walton (Dartmouth College) will examine residential migration in New England to exurbs and its consequences for community social life, both in the small towns receiving more affluent newcomers and in the suburban districts that may have been left behind. 

Emma Zang (Yale University) will develop a multidimensional index of neighborhood disadvantage and examine which neighborhood features are most salient for public school students’ educational outcomes in North Carolina.