Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s programs on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration, Social Inequality, and Behavioral Economics were funded at the Foundation’s February meeting of the Board of Trustees. Four new projects in the special initiative on the Social, Economic, and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act were jointly funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration:

Ethnicity and English-Language Proficiency and Experiences with Crime and Police: A Multi-Level Analysis of Restricted Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey
Eric Baumer and John Iceland (Pennsylvania State University)

Baumer and Iceland will analyze restricted-use survey data on incidents of crime and crime reporting, along with demographic Census data and police department data, to explore whether and how ethnicity and English-language proficiency correlate with immigrants’ crime reporting and law enforcement’s official responses to those reported crimes.

Cast as a Criminal: How Moral Typecasting Leads to Racial Prejudice
Kurt Gray (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Keith Payne (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi (University of Kentucky)

Gray, Payne, and Brown-Iannuzzi will explore whether moral typecasting can help explain aggressive law enforcement tactics towards non-whites, especially black men. They will examine the role of typecasting in situations of heightened ambiguity, such as adolescence (not a child but not an adult) and whether this leads law enforcement to be biased against black adolescent males.

Social Inequality:

Recovering and Coding Occupational Data in U.S. Tax Returns
Michael Hout (New York University) and David Grusky (Stanford University)

Hout and Grusky will use machine-learning techniques to develop an algorithm and protocol that will exploit the under-utilized occupation fields available in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return data and to code the occupational information in a way that allows researchers to simultaneously measure occupational mobility and income mobility.

Intergenerational Transfers and Wealth Inequality
Lisa Keister (Duke University) and Richard Benton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Lisa Keister and Richard Benton will examine the extent to which intergenerational transfers influence wealth concentration and the role of transfers in maintaining inequality. They will focus on how wealth transfers have changed over time and how those changes differ at various levels of the wealth distribution. They will also the association between government policies and wealth inequality and mobility.

Trends in Couples’ Work Patterns after Childbirth and Implications for Inequality: Evidence from the SIPP and Administrative Earnings
Kelly Musick (Cornell University), Pilar Goñalons-Pons (Goethe Universität), and Christine Schwartz (University of California, Los Angeles)

Musick and colleagues will investigate the extent to which higher family earnings—and in turn, rising earnings inequality—depend on how couples adjust their market work patterns within partnerships. They will focus on the transition to parenthood as a critical turning point, estimating couple-level changes in the division of labor in the decade following childbirth, assessing variation in these changes across the earnings distribution, and linking these changes to aggregate trends in social inequality.

The Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project: Learning how to Reduce Educational Inequality from Detailed Educational Data
Sean Reardon (Stanford University)
Jointly funded with the William T. Grant Foundation

Reardon and his colleagues have assembled a large-scale administrative database that covers every public school and school district in the United States and includes 200 million test scores from all public school students in grades 3-8 from 2009-2012. Reardon will fund a number of researchers using this data to investigate issues and policies relevant to educational inequalities.

Behavioral Economics:

Behavioral-Economic Phenomena in Group Decisions and Decisions for Others
John Ifcher (Santa Clara University), Homa Zarghamee (Barnard College), and Jeremy Shapiro (Princeton University)

Ifcher, Zarghamee and Shapiro will use an 18-item experimental instrument to explore the discrepancies between individuals making decisions on behalf of themselves, on behalf of others, and on behalf of groups.

Social, Economic, and Political Effects of the Affordable Care Act:
Jointly funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Employer Sponsored Insurance Under the Affordable Care Act And Comparisons with Insurance in the Exchanges
Jean Abraham (University of Minnesota) and Anne Beeson Royalty (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis)

Abraham and Royalty will explore how the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has affected employer provision of health insurance, focusing on which employers have changed the insurance they offer and how the newly-available health plans on the market compare to employer-sponsored insurance.

Can the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions Protect the Creditworthiness of Low-Income Americans?
Heidi Allen and Tal Gross (Columbia University)

Allen and Gross will use the variations in Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act across different states to examine how Medicaid eligibility affects the credit standing of low-income adults.

Accounting for the Impact of the Affordable Care Act on Poverty
Sanders D. Korenman and Dahlia Remler (Baruch College, City University of New York)

Korenman and Remler will use a new measure, which they call the Health Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM), to assess the antipoverty impacts of Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and employer-based insurance.

Health Care and the Financial Wellbeing of Low-Income Families
Sarah Miller (University of Michigan), Robert Kaestner (University of Illinois, Chicago), and Bhaskar Mazumder (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)

Miller and her colleagues will use a new dataset of individual credit reports linked with individual-level data on enrollment and utilization to analyze the effect of Michigan’s Medicaid expansions on the financial outcomes of low-income families, ranging from late payments and type and levels of debt to bankruptcy and foreclosures.