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Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education

Edna B. Chun and Joe R. Feagin issue a challenge to professionals working in higher education to look more critically at the context in which “diversity” work is done, and to look at the systemic underpinnings of racial (and gender) inequality in higher education in general, and specifically at Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs).

Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments

Exclusionary attitudes—prejudice toward outgroups and opposition to policies that promote their well-being—are presenting challenges to democratic societies worldwide. Drawing on insights from psychology, we argue that non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations can facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes. We support this argument with evidence from three pre-registered field experiments targeting exclusionary attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants and transgender people.

Raising the Stakes: Inequality and Testing in the Russian Education System

Sociologists have argued that high-stakes tests open the door to high levels of educational inequality at transition points: in a high-stakes testing regime, parents and students are able to focus all energy and resources on test preparation, thus enhancing pre-existing inequalities in academic performance. But arguments about a special role for high-stakes tests are often prosecuted without explicit comparisons to other types of tests and assessments, usually because information on other tests is not available.

Measuring the Effect of Student Loans on College Persistence

Governments around the world use grant and loan programs to ease the financial constraints that contribute to socioeconomic gaps in college completion. A growing body of research assesses the impact of grants; less is known about how loan programs affect persistence and degree completion. We use detailed administrative data from Chile to provide rigorous regression-discontinuity-based evidence on the impacts of loan eligibility for university students who retake the national admission test after their first year of studies.

Forever Homes and Temporary Stops: Housing Search Logics and Residential Selection

Residential selection is central in determining children’s housing, neighborhood, and school contexts, and an extensive literature considers the social processes that shape residential searches and attainment. While this literature typically frames the residential search as a uniform process oriented around finding residential options with desired characteristics, we examine whether individuals may differentially conceive of these searches in ways that sustain inequality in residential attainment.

The Decline of Intergenerational Income Mobility in Denmark: Returns to Education, Demographic Change, and Labor Market Experience

Although there is some evidence of declining intergenerational mobility in wealthy countries, the sources of these changes are not well understood. This paper examines the changes in intergenerational mobility in Denmark, which has one of the highest levels of intergenerational mobility in the world.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality

The economic downturn caused by the current COVID-19 outbreak has substantial implications for gender equality, both during the downturn and the subsequent recovery. Compared to “regular” recessions, which affect men’s employment more severely than women’s employment, the employment drop related to social distancing measures has a large impact on sectors with high female employment shares. In addition, closures of schools and daycare centers have massively increased child care needs, which has a particularly large impact on working mothers.

Expanding and Diversifying the Pool of Undergraduates who Study Economics: Insights from a New Introductory Course at Harvard

There is widespread concern that economics does not attract as broad or diverse a pool of talent as it could. For example, less than one-third of undergraduates who receive degrees in economics are women, significantly lower than in math or statistics. This article presents a case study of a new introductory undergraduate course at Harvard, “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems,” that enrolled 400 students, achieved nearly a 50-50 gender balance, and was among the highest-rated courses in the college. We first summarize the course’s content and pedagogical approach.

Distributing Personal Income: Trends Over Time

This paper constructs a distribution of Personal Income for the United States (2007-2016) to investigate the relationship between inequality and macroeconomic growth. We extend a perspective first presented in Fixler and Johnson (2014) and further developed in Fixler et al. (2017) and Fixler, Gindelsky, and Johnson (2018, 2019) to develop a national account-based measure using a decade of publicly available survey, tax, and administrative data.

Culture and Gender Allocation of Tasks: Source Country Characteristics and the Division of Non-market Work among US Immigrants

There is a well-known gender difference in time allocation within the household, which has important implications for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We ask how malleable this gender difference in time allocation is to culture. In particular, we ask if US immigrants allocate tasks differently depending upon the characteristics of the source countries from which they emigrated.

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