Research

Poverty Requires Disaster Relief

Social Capital and Inequality: The Significance of Social Connections

The study of social connections and their consequences is central to social psychology and represents a growing field of inquiry in the social sciences more broadly. It is linked to the analysis of social networks and to what is called “social capital,” a term made popular by Robert Putnam. A major dimension of inequality in society is the extent of access to social capital, to connections that matter. Differential access to such resources is one of the most enduring features of social inequality and a key reason for its reproduction across time and space.

The Economic Returns to Higher Education in the BRIC Countries and Their Implications for Higher Education Expansion

This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to higher education have not conformed to the diminishing returns to capital theory, which says that rates decline with level of education and that this pattern holds as countries develop economically and educationally.

Spatial Assimilation in U.S. Cities and Communities? Emerging Patterns of Hispanic Segregation from Blacks and Whites

This article provides a geographically inclusive empirical framework for studying changing U.S. patterns of Hispanic segregation. Whether Hispanics have joined the American mainstream depends in part on whether they translate upward mobility into residence patterns that mirror the rest of the nation. Based on block and place data from the 1990–2010 decennial censuses, our results provide evidence of increasing spatial assimilation among Hispanics, both nationally and in new immigrant destinations.

Minimizing the motherhood penalty: What works, what doesn’t and why?

Unpublished

Determined to Succeed? Performance Versus Choice in Educational Attainment

In many countries, concern about socio-economic inequalities in educational attainment has focused on inequalities in test scores and grades. The presumption has been that the best way to reduce inequalities in educational outcomes is to reduce inequalities in performance. But is this presumption correct? Determined to Succeed? is the first book to offer a comprehensive cross-national examination of the roles of performance and choice in generating inequalities in educational attainment.

Income Inequality and Income Segregation

Both income inequality and income segregation in the United States grew substantially from 1970 to 2000. Using data from the 100 largest metropolitan areas, we investigate whether and how income inequality affects patterns of income segregation along three dimensions—the spatial concentration of poverty and affluence; race-specific patterns of income segregation; and the geographic scale of income segregation. We find a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families.

How Ethnoraciality Matters: The View Inside Ethnoracial “Groups”

The color line is still a central problem in the United States, as Du Bois declared more than a century ago. But economic, demographic, and social trends have subdivided it in ways that Du Bois could not have foreseen, creating tremendous intra-ethnoracial group diversity. A challenge for twenty-first-century scholarship is to make sense of the implications of growing intra-group diversity for the boundaries and meaning of group identity. Meeting this challenge requires treating intra-group diversity not merely as an outcome of various social processes.

The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations

In this chapter I examine whether and how the relationship between family socioeconomic characteristics and academic achievement has changed during the last fifty years. In particular, I investigate the extent to which the rising income inequality of the last four decades has been paralleled by a similar increase in the income achievement gradient. As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened? The answer, in brief, is yes.

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