The Washington Center for Equitable Growth announced today that it has awarded funding to seven scholars seeking to better understand the effects of economic inequality in the United States and who are interested in engaging beyond academia to inform evidence-backed policymaking. These researchers studying the impacts of economic inequality are all in the early years of their careers, either currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program or those who received their degrees in the past 8 years.

The funded research projects range in topic, from the housing crisis to child care to supply chain resilience. Below, we detail each grant awarded funding in this year’s cycle.

Ph.D. Students Researching the Impacts of Economic Inequality

The following projects are headed by students currently enrolled in Ph.D. programs at a U.S. university:

  • Market Power in Homebuilding and the U.S. Housing Shortage. Anna Croley at Yale University will study housing shortages and market power in the United States. She seeks to answer the question of whether market power among homebuilders can explain the undersupply of new housing, particularly entry-level units, or whether their economies of scale reduce costs.
  • Empirical Evaluations of Child Care Subsidy Policies. Serena Goldberg at Yale University aims to inform the policy design of child care subsidies for the U.S. child care sector to improve access to and affordability of high-quality care while also improving the wages of care workers. First, she will evaluate the effect of reimbursement-rate policies on local maternal labor force participation, child care worker wages, child care prices, and quality of care. Then, she will simulate the effects of counterfactual subsidy policies on parents’ use of child care, worker wages, mark-ups, and the distribution of quality.
  • Determinants of Irregular Worker Schedules. Whitney Zhang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will examine the impacts of schedule instability on workers. Utilizing third-party scheduling data that is well-suited to investigate schedule volatility, she seeks to document novel facts about worker schedules, evaluate the effect of predictive scheduling and minimum wage laws on schedule-related outcomes for firms and workers, and understand the welfare effects of the regulation of schedules on workers.

Read the full article about research on the impacts of economic inequality at Equitable Growth.