Five Student Scholars Awarded Stone Center Prize for Research on Socioeconomic Inequality

Abstract

Known as one of the most segregated cities in the United States, Chicago, Illinois, has instated a variety of policies in an attempt to address residential segregation. One of their most celebrated policies, the Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO), is an inclusionary zoning policy that intentionally tries to create more integrated communities. Though inclusionary zoning policies across the country have successfully increased the amount of affordable housing units, little is known about whether the policy is actually forwarding racial and socioeconomic integration. Using a mixed methods approach, I assess the implementation of the ARO and find that the policy is providing equity for Black Chicagoans, but that it is only effective at a small scale. Specifically, quantitative data reveals that a majority of the affordable units are going to Black individuals; however, my qualitative data reveals many aspects of the policy that are quite contentious. The findings I present here fill gaps in the literature about inclusionary zoning’s ability to break up residential segregation, and can help inform further improvements to the ARO and other similar inclusionary zoning policies. 

Awardee

Alexandria Porter graduated from the University of Chicago with a double major in Public Policy (with Honors) and Global Studies. Originally from the south suburbs of Chicago, she has focused on social policy issues, particularly education and housing, through the lens of racial and socioeconomic equity. Alexandria has had multiple opportunities to participate in professional experiences focused on policy research and social services, including internships at the Housing Authority of Cook County, Advance Illinois, and the LDF Thurgood Marshall Institute. At the University of Chicago, she has been heavily involved in the Institute of Politics as the Logistics Chair for Leaders of Color and a member of the Student Advisory Board. Post graduation, she aspires to have a career that combines her interests in policy research and advocacy. 

Abstract

The decline of domestic manufacturing since the late 20th century triggered place-specific disruptions in urban labor markets due to the spatial concentration of industrial capital. In today’s post-industrial economy, state and municipal governments have increasingly turned to incentive packages to attract large-scale corporate manufacturing investment. Bluestone & Harrison’s 1982 deindustrialization thesis argues that capital mobility has severed the modern corporation from spatial roots, rendering market-based policy tools insufficient for anchoring firms in place. Drawing on 37 stakeholder interviews and three mixed-methods city case studies, this research tests the premise of corporate place-agnosticism. Findings suggest that regional economic development organizations can strategically halt the cycle of capital mobility by leveraging five key drivers of investment—financial incentives as a threshold prerequisite for consideration, workforce viability, government partnership, parcel and property conditions, and regional narrative. Through the comparative analysis of incentive structures, development patterns, and stakeholder dynamics, this study contributes a grounded framework for assessing economic development strategy in post-industrial regions. 

Awardee

Lydia Palmer recently graduated from the College with a degree in Political Science and Economics, where she developed an interest in the intersection of business and government policy, specifically at the municipal level. Throughout college, she worked on projects across economic development, ESG investing, and local politics. Palmer interned for JPMorgan Chase’s Connecting Capital and Community initiative, which aims to promote minority homeownership in Chicago, and later joined Calvert Impact within Morgan Stanley’s ESG division, where she focused on Microfinance and small business growth funds. On campus, Palmer was involved in social impact consulting organizations and was a Teachers Assistant for the Harris class “The Business of Non-Profits and the Evolving Social Sector.” Outside of campus, she founded and runs a political consulting firm based in New York that provides full-service campaign management for municipal-level elections, including aldermanic, mayoral, and school board races. Palmer will begin her career in management consulting at Bain & Company’s Chicago office this fall. Her ultimate hope is to pursue an MBA/MPP dual degree and return to municipal economic development, working in a corporate-facing role to attract investment back to the regions studied in her thesis. 

Abstract

Concerns about the influence of misogynistic social media content on adolescent boys have become increasingly urgent in U.S. education, yet little research has examined how American high school teachers are responding to this growing epidemic. While studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada have explored school-based responses to online misogyny and sexist behavior, this thesis addresses a significant gap in the U.S. context. Based on 17 in-depth interviews with high school teachers in the Chicagoland area, this study investigates how educators perceive the influence of popular male social media influencers (“Manfluencers”) amongst boys, what they observe in the classroom, and how they respond. While most teachers acknowledged that online misogyny was shaping boys’ behavior and beliefs, their responses varied dramatically, shaped less by any shared framework or school policy than by their own identities, pedagogical orientations, and institutional constraints. Teachers differed on whether they saw misogyny as widespread or isolated, on their ability to respond, or whether it was part of their teaching responsibility to act at all. This variation reveals a deeper absence of institutional coordination as well as a lack of consensus about the nature of the problem itself. While some teachers proposed mandatory gender curricula or other types of interventions, others avoided engagement altogether. Beyond a simple binary of punitive versus restorative responses, this thesis argues teachers are navigating a broader landscape of uncertainty—one marked by unclear expectations and uneven support. Addressing this gap demands not just better resources, but a whole-school reorientation grounded in care, community, and social justice.

Awardee

Watson Lubin was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, South Florida. He was admitted to UChicago through the National College Match on a full-ride scholarship. He graduated from the College summa cum laude with a double major in Sociology and Human Rights, doing his BA research on how involuntarily celibate men (“incels”) talk about gender-based violence. At the end of his undergraduate years, Watson accepted a full-tuition scholarship to the MA Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), concentrating in Sociology, and pursuing an Education & Society (EDSO) certificate. Throughout his time at UChicago, Watson has worked extensively with the residential student organization, Ethics Bowl, as part of its founding membership in Autumn 2021 in addition to competing in national competitions; with the Writing Program as a CORE Writing Tutor and a Writing Lector with the Little Red Schoolhouse; and towards the tail-end of his time at the university, with the Committee on Education as a clerical research assistant, working to build enduring relationships connecting past and future EDSO cohort members. Watson has an abiding love for teaching, scholarship, and activism. His interests lie in the field of education, critical masculinity studies, and resistance theory with special attention paid to social reproduction, exploitation, and domination. Watson sees his role as an activist-researcher who has a lot to learn from those he works with in the field, tasked with furthering social justice right alongside them. He continues working at the Writing Program; will be teaching with Thrive Scholars, assisting first-generation, immigrant-origin high school students with college writing; and aiming to be part of the 2025-2026 Fellowship cohort with the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+), during which he plans to publish his research, further engage in activism in the city he now calls home, and apply to PhD programs in Education and Sociology. 

Abstract

This dissertation examines how social interactions, institutions, and public policy shape young people’s preferences and decisions, using experimental and quasi-experimental methods across diverse settings.

Distinct group identities can create barriers to trade, investment in public goods, and social learning—barriers that educational institutions may help overcome. The first two chapters use lab-in-the-field experiments to understand the costs and benefits of group integration. The first paper studies how integration impacts productivity and cohesion in settings with broad linguistic diversity, where language differences may deepen the divides created by group identities. We randomly assign high school students to same- or different-ethnicity partners to play a cooperative video game in Macedonia, where students are segregated by ethnicity. We measure productivity using video game scores and assess social cohesion with two measures: the willingness to pay for a same-ethnicity partner(via an adaptive choice experiment) and ingroup bias (via a dictator game). We find that inter-ethnic contact improves social cohesion without affecting productivity. To examine the role of language, we exploit random variation in the language skills overlap within pairs. We find that shared language skills are associated with greater inter-ethnic cohesion gains and lower non-pecuniary costs. These results reflect both a match effect (i.e., sharing a language is beneficial) and a correlation between language skills and positive potential outcomes. Additionally, cross-ethnic pairs either match on one partner’s home language or on a third, neutral language. Cohesion gains are largest when the shared language is the participant’s own home language; if anything, matching on a neutral language yields lower gains than matching on the partner’s home language.

The second paper asks how segregation influences social learning. On one hand, if one group has information that is beneficial to another, segregation may harm learning by preventing information flow. On the other hand, if individuals learn better from in-group members, segregation may increase learning. We formalize this tradeoff with a theoretical model and design a network-based social learning game to test how integration and segregation affect learning under different conditions. We have students in multi-ethnic Macedonian high schools play the game in groups of 6 and find two results that support the theory. First, we find that when a larger proportion of players exhibit bias, the potential learning loss from segregation is smaller. In low-bias groups, students learn more in the integrated networks than in the segregated networks, avoiding echo chambers, but the same is not true in the high-bias groups. Second, integration leads to more learning than segregation in games in which one ethnicity gets mostly incorrect signals and the other ethnicity gets mostly correct signals. Finally, we fit our model to the experimental data and find that, on average, students downweigh information from different-ethnicity players 45 percent more than same-ethnicity Players.

The final paper shifts focus to U.S. federal financial aid policy and study one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain access to Title IV aid, the “Return of Title IV” funds policy, referred to as R2T4. Students receiving Title IV aid who withdraw from college before completing the academic term are subject to an R2T4 calculation that could require the student or college to pay back any unearned Title IV funds to the federal government. We estimate the causal impacts of the R2T4 policy using a regression discontinuity design. The identification leverages a cutoff in the federal formula that determines whether a student or their college must return aid. We find that students at our threshold, who earn 60 percent of the federal aid to which they were entitled, must return $1,600 on average. This unexpected debt reduces the likelihood of re-enrollment by nearly four percentage points compared to students who narrowly avoid the repayment threshold in the following year and by 2.6 percentage points within 4 years. These results are driven by students in the bottom half of the sample’s income distribution, who experience persistent enrollment declines of roughly 5.5 percentage points. Our findings add to a growing body of literature revealing the detrimental impacts of complex administrative processes on student outcomes, particularly for students from marginalized communities interacting with federal policies.

Awardee

Ari Anisfeld holds a PhD in Public Policy from the Harris School and will join the University of Arkansas as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2025. He holds a MS Computational Analysis and Public Policy form the Harris School, a MA in Secondary Teaching from the University of New Mexico and a BA in History from Grinnell College. During the PhD he served as a Research and Policy Fellow at the Office of Federal Student Aid of the U.S. Department of Education. Before pursuing the PhD, he taught middle school math in Thoreau, New Mexico, and served as a Research and IT Fellow at Gobabeb Research and Training Center in Namibia.   

Abstract

Finance plays a central role in the organization of the global economy. Not only has the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector become increasingly important in the circulation of capital over the past 40 years, but non-financial companies also increasingly deal in open financial markets. While finance has recorded massive profits over this period, overall rates of economic, productivity and wage growth have stagnated since the 1970s as part of a “long downturn” in the capitalist core. In addition, the lives of households and individuals are increasingly mediated by financial markets, especially in the realms of housing, savings for retirement, and healthcare. While prior research has explored the possible causes of “financialization” and its effects on certain outcomes, including inequality, economic growth, debt expansion, and economic crises, the effects of financialization on class politics have been understudied. I use survey data from the United States and United Kingdom to explore how different kinds of exposure to financial markets, in particular employment in the FIRE sector and homeownership, affects individual political attitudes and how such effects differ across employment-based classes. This work sheds light on the changing possibilities for class conflict and class formation in the developed West over the last several decades. 

Awardee

Jake Burchard is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago. He successfully defended his dissertation, “Financialization and Class Politics in the Long Downturn,” in May of 2025. Before that he completed a BA in mathematics at Cornell University. He is primarily interested in economic and political sociology, social theory, and quantitative methodology, especially social network analysis. His work is published or is forthcoming in Socio-Economic Review, Social Networks, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, and other outlets. Starting in September 2025 he will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria.