Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s programs on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration and Social Inequality—along with new grants in the foundation’s special initiatives on the Social, Economic, and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act, Immigration and Immigrant Integration, Computational Social Science, and Integrating Biology and Social Science Knowledge—were funded at the foundation’s November 2018 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

The board also approved funding to Sean Reardon (Stanford University) for two additional small grants competitions to analyze data from the Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project (in collaboration with the William T. Grant Foundation), and funding for the 2019 Summer Institute in Migration Research Methods, organized by Jennifer Van Hook (Pennsylvania State University) and Irene Bloemraad (University of California, Berkeley).

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration

Peter Christensen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Christopher Timmins (Duke University) will study the effects of racial and ethnic discrimination on the residential decisions of would-be renters. 

Social Inequality

Bruce Western (Columbia University) will conduct a longitudinal study that explores the extent to which race, poverty, and related vulnerabilities raise the risk of incarceration. 

Social, Economic, and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act

Boris Shor (University of Houston) will conduct a study of the role of partisanship, ideology, and public opinion on state-level health care legislation. 

Immigration and Immigrant Integration

Julia Gelatt and Jeanne Batalova (Migration Policy Institute) will study the extent to which the loss of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) affects TPS holders’ economic and social integration and how it affects employers. Co-funded with the Carnegie Corporation.

Computational Social Science

Kasey Buckles (University of Notre Dame) and Joseph Price (Brigham Young University) will link data from a crowd-sourced genealogy platform to census data in order to examine the inter- and intra-generational transmission of inequality and mobility.

Gordon Hanson, Tajana Šimunić Rosing, Alexander Cloninger, and Jennifer Burney (University of California, San Diego) will create satellite-based measures of changes in local economic activity to increase the ability to measure changes in poverty and household income at high temporal and spatial frequencies. 

Integrating Biology and Social Science Knowledge

Daniel Notterman and Louis Donnelly (Princeton University), Professor Kalsea Koss (University of Georgia), and Professor Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (Columbia University) will examine associations between children’s DNA methylation, financial distress and children's wellbeing. Co-funded with the JPB Foundation.

Barbara Wolfe and Seth Pollak (University of Wisconsin, Madison) will investigate the extent to which poverty influences children’s brain development and the extent to which means-tested public housing subsidies might offset some of the negative effects. Co-funded with the JPB Foundation.