Research

How we do our research

A unifying principle in our approach to understanding the many dimensions of inequality is the role that individual memberships in different socioeconomic and political groupings play in determining overall inequality. 

Consider the connections one is shaped by, from families and friendships to neighborhoods lived in, to schools attended and places of employment. Then, the categories one may be defined by, such as gender, ethnicity, race, and religion. Finally, the memberships one has as a citizen of localities, states, and the nation. The basis upon which our society is constituted is the collection of these memberships, and each affects socioeconomic outcomes.

These memberships and how they interact can produce particular immobility for the most advantaged and disadvantaged members of our society. From this vantage point, segregation by income, education, and race plays a leading role in determining mobility and its persistence across generations.

We aspire to employ the understanding of the economic and social mechanisms that generate inequalities to help guide researchers and policymakers toward new and innovative solutions for bringing about systematic progress on these deep-rooted problems. We will achieve this aim through advancing work in twelve research areas and three broad directions:

1. Improving the Quality of Measurement for Inequality 
   • Any analysis of the reasons for inequalities and their susceptibility to policy intervention requires measures that appropriately capture inequality in all its dimensions. A leading example is mobility. Conventional measures of intergenerational mobility involve scalar measures, such as intergenerational correlations of the incomes of parents and children. Such measures need to be revised. The effects of families on children involve trajectories of influences through childhood and adolescence. A trajectory approach incorporates factors such as family income timing, family structure dynamics, and exposure to neighborhoods and schools. Further, it considers the highly nonlinear nature of intergenerational effects of families, neighborhoods, and schools. 
   • Moreover, societies can exhibit both poverty traps and affluence traps. Bottlenecks are often observed in inequality dynamics, where some family and social characteristics make upward or downward mobility very unlikely. It is critical that new methods are designed to identify how families can lock in success across generations without creating a de facto aristocracy, as well as how to avoid disadvantages from becoming persistent. 
2. Fostering the Interdisciplinary Study of the Multidimensional Facets of Inequality 
   • Social science studies of inequality tend to focus on one dimension of mobility at a time. With regards to disciplines, economists typically focus on income, sociologists on occupation, and psychologists on variants of cultural capital. In terms of specific phenomena, research on wealth mobility, for example, dichotomizes human capital and tangible wealth, and consequently, some studies focus on education dynamics while others focus on inheritance. The optimal approach is to treat parental education, income, occupation, tangible wealth, and cultural capital as joint factors whose levels in parents affect each of these outcomes for their children. This integrated approach allows for a general consideration of wealth dynamics, be it human, tangible, or capital variants involving social and cultural resources. 
3. Uncovering Systemic Barriers to Equality 
   • Understanding systemic differences requires a multidimensional perspective that exposes the systemic versus individual determination of inequality. Presently, we do not have a comprehensive set of ways to theoretically model and empirically evaluate the extent to which systemic factors such as class-based access to opportunities or ethnic or gender discrimination explain observed inequalities beyond differences attributed to family background. Additionally, differences between systemic discrimination versus individual acts of discrimination have yet to be well developed for formal theoretical or formal statistical models. This inquiry emphasizes that reducing inequality and improving mobility requires a portfolio of policies that are underpinned by rigorous research on the origins and outcomes of these complex phenomena.