The newly founded Behavior and Inequality Research Institute has announced that the second Early-Career Behavioral Economics Conference will take place in Bonn, Germany on June 24-25, 2016. The first Early-Career Behavioral Economics Conference was held in July 2015 and was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation.

The goal of the conference is to allow researchers at the early stages of their career to present their work and receive feedback from peers and junior faculty members, who will serve as discussants. It will also help develop a strong community of junior behavioral economists. Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors who received their Ph.D. after Spring 2011 are all eligible to apply.

Click here to visit the Early-Career Behavioral Economist Conference home page for more information on the conference and on how to submit papers.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a key component of President Johnson's War on Poverty, was designed to aid low-income students and to combat racial segregation in schools. The newest iteration of ESEA, now titled the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), was just reauthorized on December 10, 2015, with bipartisan support. The ESEA has long served as the federal government's main source of leverage on states and school districts to enact its preferred reforms, including controversial measures such as standardized testing.

In a new open-access issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, an esteemed group of education scholars examine the historical evolution of the ESEA, its successes and pitfalls, and what they portend for the future of education policies. Edited by David A. Gamson (Pennsylvania State University), Kathryn A. McDermott (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), and Douglas S. Reed (Georgetown University), the nine articles include an investigation of how the ESEA helped accelerate desegregation in the South in the 1960s; a study of the ESEA's effects on high school graduation rates for low-income students; and several explorations of how renewals of the ESEA—including the No Child Left Behind Act—have reshaped public education, sometimes to the detriment of English-language learners and disadvantaged students. This issue serves as an excellent foundation for developing a better understanding of the new ESSA of 2015.

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

Future of Work:

Fast Food Franchises and Low-Wage Work
Rosemary Batt and Wilma B. Liebman (Cornell University)

Batt, Liebman, and a group of multi-disciplinary collaborators will extend a previous study on fast food franchises to investigate how the franchising business model affects job quality, pay, and labor law compliance, and how franchises are currently shaping low-wage work.