This week in Class Notes:

• More generous tax credits improve mental health and reduce smoking and heavy drinking among single mothers, but higher SNAP benefits have the opposite effect.
• Piece-rate workers in Florida increased their productivity following an increase in the state minimum wage.
• The common finding of a drop in the share of couples where the wife earns a little more than the husband is explained in Finland by a high proportion of co-working spouses with identical earnings.
• This week’s top chart shows how the Tulsa Race Massacre had persistent negative impacts on Black Tulsans’ home ownership rates.
• Ross Douthat argues for family policy that is more generous but without neglecting marriage, employment, or households that do not use day care, in this week’s choice opinion.
• Check out our latest piece on the college enrollment and completion gaps among men.
• For your calendar: Virtual events discussing the economics of mobility, gender’s impact on life course events, and systemic racism and housing.

More generous tax credits improve mental health and reduce smoking and heavy drinking among single mothers, but higher SNAP benefits have the opposite effect

A more generous social safety net should alleviate some of the hardships faced by low-income single mothers. But which benefits help most? This can be hard to assess, because people can get assistance from multiple programs. Lucie Schmidt, Lara Shore-Sheppard, and Tara Watson use a unique multi-program calculator, that accounts for program interactions and eligibility requirements, to assess the impact of safety net generosity on mental health and risky behaviors for single mothers. They find benefits overall from a more generous package. But there are sharp differences between different programs, as well as in the timing of effects. In particular, tax credits give the most positive boost: a $1,000 increase reduces severe psychological distress by 22.5% and reduces smoking by 14.2%. These reductions are largely concentrated during the first half of the year when tax refunds are likely to occur. However, a similar bump in SNAP benefits increases the chances of smoking by almost 8%, and heavy drinking by almost 10%.

Piece-rate workers in Florida increased their productivity following an increase in the state minimum wage

On January 1, 2009, the state of Florida increased its minimum wage from $6.79 to $7.21. Hyejin Ku studies changes in worker effort in response to this raising of the wage floor using data from piece-rate workers on a Florida tomato farm. First, she notes that low-productivity workers have a greater incentive to increase effort than high-productivity workers. Consistent with this expectation, she finds a 4.6% increase in worker productivity among low-productive workers relative to high-productive workers. In addition, she finds that the minimum wage increase does not appear to lead to dis-employment among the lower-productivity workers. This increased worker productivity could offset about half of the rise in labor costs associated with the rise in minimum wage, she estimates, suggesting that higher costs are shared evenly between the employer and the workers.

The common finding of a drop in the share of couples where the wife earns a little more than the husband is explained in Finland by a high proportion of co-working spouses with identical earnings 

Past studies have found a discontinuity and decline in the share of married households when the wife earns more than her husband (greater than a threshold of 0.5). One primary explanation for this has been a gender identity norm, where women feel pressure to earn less than their husbands, and therefore reduce their labor supply when they out-earn their husbands. However, Natalia Zinovyeva and Maryna Tverdostup argue that this discontinuity actually results from a high proportion of couples who have identical earnings, resulting in a sharp drop off in the fraction of couples past the 0.5 threshold. Using data from an employer-employee matched dataset from Finland, the authors find that 15% of co-working spouses are either both self-employed or work at the same firm. For the self-employed couples, reporting equal earnings could reduce income tax liabilities, facilitate easier accounting, or avoid within-family negotiations. Finally, the authors find that, through co-working, female earnings increase above their earnings potential, which is something the gender norm hypothesis would not predict.

Top chart: The Tulsa Race Massacre had persistent negative impacts on Black Tulsans’ homeownership rates  

This week’s top chart shows the persistent negative impacts of the Tulsa Race Massacre on Black Tulsans’ homeownership. The researchers estimate that the massacre reduced the likelihood of homeownership among male household heads by 4.2 percentage points in the short-term. The direct effects are larger in 1940 and appear to remain constant until 1980, after which the adverse effect grows even more over time into the 2000s.

Chart source: National Bureau of Economic Research

Choice Opinion: The best family policy package is more generous without neglecting marriage, employment, or households that do not use day care   

“The best family policy deal would give progressives more of the money they want to spend, and give conservative ideas more influence over the way that money is spent…[One] possible compromise would attach a work requirement to the credit for parents with kids older than one, while offering the money free of strings to parents of infants. That would encourage single mothers, especially, to return to the workforce as their babies get older, without forcing them back at a moment when they’re particularly vulnerable and when children have the right to a parent in the home. [What you get is] a family policy that spends generously without disfavoring marriage, work or households that don’t use day care. In a better world, that’s what Republicans and Democrats would be negotiating together, but even in this one, it isn’t out of reach,” writes Ross Douthat.

Self-promotion: Younger men are less likely to enroll and complete schooling at every single level of the educational system  

Ember Smith and Richard V. Reeves explore the gender gaps in college enrollment and completion. Women are much more likely to enroll in college and now account for 59% of enrolled students. But there is also a completion gap among those who do enroll. Men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2013 were 10 percentage points less likely than women to graduate within four years. Six years after enrolling, the gender gap in graduation narrows to six percentage points. This leads to large gaps in the levels of education in the adult population. Among those born between 1985 and 1994, for example, men are eight percentage points less likely than women to have a BA or higher degree. We conclude: “Closing the gender gap in education will require interventions every step of the way…Some initiatives specifically focused on male students should be on the table.”

For your calendar: Virtual events discussing the economics of modern transportation, all things urban economics, and happiness and age during COVID-19

Economics of Mobility Meeting

NBER

October 22, 2021 11:30 AM – 5:30 PM EDT

Gender and the Economy Conference

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

November 8, 2021

10th Annual Housing Conference

AEI

November 17, 2021

      

So far we have traced the evolution of legal standards for sexual assault and sexual harassment, and their current defects and challenges. There is, however, a significant area of our national discussion that is not fully covered by these discussions, because it involves a complex and uneasy mixture of federal law (Title IX, discussed in Chapter 5) and informal tribunals: sexual assault and harassment on college campuses. Because my previous discussions have covered the most salient issues in each area of law, I need not devote a full chapter to this case, nor do I wish such a disproportionate focus to suggest that women who attend college deserve more attention than women who do not. Unequal access to higher education is already a major problem of justice in our society, compounding other disadvantages based on race and class. There is no reason to perpetuate the injustice by paying more attention to the problems of those women who have managed to arrive at a college or university. One of the great strengths of the traditions I have described is the fact that working-class and minority women (for example Cheryl Araujo, Mechelle Vinson, Mary Carr) have been among their salient plaintiffs.

Yet, because the institutional structures are different, the topic of campus assault requires separate treatment, albeit briefly. Nobody knows exactly how large a problem this is, but one recent survey by the Association of American Universities found that around 20 percent of female undergraduates are victims of sexual assault or sexual misconduct at some point during their college life.¹ Other studies have found frequent sexual abuse of males as well, amounting to 6 to 8 percent. Although there are disputes over methodology and definition, there’s no doubt about the severity of the issue. It would appear, however, that attending college does not make a woman more likely to suffer sexual assault.²

Sexual harassment and sexual assault have long included abuses of power between faculty and students, but on the whole, these cases have been understood as workplace abuses of power, and are dealt with under clear public rules, in much the manner of other workplaces. Thus, Chapter 5 has already basically dealt with these cases. In this Interlude I focus on student-student assault and harassment.

The literature on this topic is vast and controversies are heated, in part because the Obama administration guidelines have now been replaced by different guidelines developed by the Department of Education under the aegis of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. However, the controversies cross political lines. Thus the group of Harvard Law School professors who protested against the Obama guidelines as unfair to accused men, anticipating the DeVos critique (I’ll describe their intervention as Stage Two below) included some conservatives, but also faculty from the left and even extreme left of the faculty.

I’ll cover the salient issues briefly, without discussing all the ins and outs of all the controversies. Thus the intention of this brief discussion is to indicate, in a general way, how my overall view in this book’s detailed chapters would approach campus cases, rather than to construct a comprehensive argument.³

Alcohol

A large proportion of sexual assaults and alleged sexual assaults occur when one party, or usually both parties, have been drinking heavily. Heavy drinking makes memory gappy and adjudication very difficult. In general campuses need to do much better with alcohol education and treatment. But one recommendation that most college administrators would support is: lower the drinking age. This approach seems counterintuitive, but it is really sensible. Right now, if adults are present where there is under-age drinking (and most students are under twenty-one), they can be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So they refrain from providing badly needed supervision, including help for students who have passed out. If the drinking age were reduced to eighteen, adults could attend parties and be prepared to give assistance.

Another alcohol-related issue that needs addressing, in both education and adjudication: sex with a person who has passed out or is close to that point is an assault. This is a species of my point about affirmative consent, but it needs to be repeated again and again. The standard, however, is far from clear in application. Many cases before campus tribunals concern the thorny and as yet unresolved question of how impaired a person must be in order not to be capable of decision-making. Since the evidence comes, typically, from two impaired individuals, it is hard for them to remember how impaired they were. Third-party evidence is usually helpful, but is not always available.

Campus Tribunals

There is considerable confusion in the public mind over why campuses do not simply turn accusations over to the police. So it’s important to point out that campuses have membership conditions, usually spelled out in the admissions contract, that go beyond the letter of the law and that need to be enforced by the campus itself. Plagiarism, not attending class, cheating on exams–all of these things are likely to be punished, sometimes with suspension or expulsion, even though they are not crimes. Similarly campuses may adopt sexual requirements that go beyond the law. Some of these are extreme: honor codes at some religious schools penalize all non-marital sexual conduct. I think such restrictions are counterproductive, creating cultures of silence (if a woman discloses that she has been raped, she can be penalized for engaging in sex). But there are also some reasonable requirements, such as affirmative consent, that are not necessarily the law of the land.

Moreover, the criminal justice system takes a long time, and victims need swift justice in order to deal with the trauma and go forward as students.

Finally, if a perpetrator is convicted in the criminal justice system, that record is ruinous for future life and employment. Campus convictions come in degrees, and many involve mandatory counseling and other lesser penalties. For this reason, having the criminal justice system as the only option, would deter reporting and bringing charges, since victims often hesitate before ruining the perpetrator’s life, and yet they seek some measure of recognition. They want the wrong done to them to be acknowledged—both that it happened and that it was wrong—and they want accountability for the perpetrator; but typically they are not seeking maximal revenge. Nor do they want lengthy involvement with the formal criminal justice system.

These are reasons why campus tribunals are not replaceable by the criminal justice system. However, it must also be said that these tribunals often do their job poorly. Faculty and administrators who serve on them are rarely well trained, and they do not always understand the quasi-legal issues with clarity. Procedures are often poorly defined, and the accused, who typically lack legal representation, are at a disadvantage.

Procedural Issues for Tribunals

How, then, can these tribunals be made to work better?

In this section I’ll refer to several key stages in the debate. Stage One was the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Obama administration, laying out standards to which all universities must conform to receive federal money.⁴ Stage Two involved a series of objections to these standards, some issued by Betsy DeVos once she became secretary of education,⁵ but similar objections were raised earlier by legal professionals—most famously by a group of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, drawn from both the left and the right, in a letter published initially in the Boston Globe but widely reprinted.⁶ Next, in Stage Three, came the new Department of Education draft rule, which, like all administrative rules was subject to “notice and comment,”⁷ and received over 124,000 comments.⁸ Finally, in Stage Four (May 2020), the Department of Education issued its Final Rule, which is now legally binding on all colleges and universities that receive federal money.⁹ I’ll proceed issue by issue.

First, all involved need to get clear about the best burden of proof. This issue has been one of the largest political disputes. Three standards are currently in use in our legal system. The most stringent, used throughout the United States in the criminal justice system, is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Many countries do not use this standard for criminal trials, but our tradition has judged that convicting an innocent person is more heinous and more to be avoided than letting a guilty person go free. Together with this exacting standard, our criminal justice system gives the accused a constitutional right to the “effective” and cost-free assistance of legal counsel, although great disparities still exist between public defenders provided free of charge and the sort of lawyer that a more affluent defendant typically would engage—not always because of quality, but because public defenders are overworked and usually don’t have enough time to devote to each client. But at least there is cost-free representation. Furthermore, our Constitution’s “confrontation clause” gives accused parties the right to confront witnesses testifying to their guilt. Over time other rights have been inferred from constitutional guarantees, the most famous being the Miranda warnings that must be read to defendants on arrest, warning them of their right to counsel and their right to remain silent. So our system is protective of defendants in multiple ways.

In civil trials, the standard, instead, is “preponderance of the evidence,” which means anything over 50 percent. Obviously this is a much weaker standard. Nor are free lawyers always provided in civil cases (some states do, most don’t). Still, the civil litigation system has firm procedural structures that safeguard the parties—especially a lengthy period of “discovery,” which gives both sides a chance to examine the other side’s evidence. Without such structural safeguards, and without legal counsel assisting the parties, many people feel that the “preponderance” standard is likely to lead to error.

A third intermediate standard is “clear and convincing evidence,” which is used in ways specified by the relevant state laws, often in areas such as paternity and child custody. This standard is typically thought to mean that it is about 75 percent likely that the person did what is alleged.

Before the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Obama administration,¹⁰ most universities used “clear and convincing evidence” as the standard in sexual assault tribunals. The Obama administration insisted, instead, on the civil “preponderance of the evidence” standard. The Harvard Law School faculty letter, and DeVos in her own remarks, held that this standard was not protective enough of the accused. So far, it seems that nobody favors the “reasonable doubt” standard, which would be very difficult to apply in the informal and evidentially challenged situation of a tribunal. So the choice is between the other two standards, and in the end the Department of Education’s Final Rule gives every college that choice.

It’s important to be clear that a college tribunal will not take away a defendant’s liberty. That dire consequence is our legal system’s primary reason for choosing reasonable doubt. Courts, however, have repeatedly held that educational opportunities are economic or property interests, not matters of freedom. So it seems that there is nothing at all odd about using either the civil justice standard of preponderance, or the tougher standard of clear and convincing evidence. This is where the debate occurs.

In real life, both sides have merit. Preponderance defenders believe, rightly, that in the typical alcohol-fueled interaction any stronger standard will be very difficult to meet. However, it is also true that education, albeit a property interest, is one of special defining importance in our society. So it’s important to be protective of the accused. And the civil standard is probably a bad idea in a setting that lacks the procedural safeguards that are usually present in civil trials. Clear and convincing makes more sense, I believe; but if a school should opt for preponderance—as I said, the Final Rule ultimately, and rather surprisingly, gives institutions a choice between these two—a careful tribunal would probably think in terms of a kind of preponderance plus, not necessarily convicting someone where the evidence suggests a mere 50.5 percent likelihood of guilt. The 50.5 approach would really not be protective enough of the accused. Many preponderance-based tribunals actually interpret the standards somewhat more strongly. Whatever the standard, members of tribunals need better training about the whole issue of evidence and the burden of proof.

A second issue of great importance is the definition of sexual harassment. The campus process typically runs together the two things our legal system has carefully kept apart—namely sexual assault or abuse, and (workplace) sexual harassment. There is no harm in this combination so long as sub-definitions are clearly drawn. Sexual assault is typically defined as a single act, not a pattern of actions: you only need to rape a woman once to be guilty of rape! Sexual harassment, by contrast, has two forms. If there is a quid pro quo, a single act suffices. But in “hostile environment” harassment, the plaintiff needs to show a pattern of actions that are sufficiently “serious” and “pervasive,” as well as “unwelcome.” One demeaning comment or gross overture will not suffice. This distinction seems correct.

In terms of this legal background, the Dear Colleague letter was far from adequate. It defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, non-verbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature.” This meant in practice that one gross or demeaning comment, with no prior evidence of its unwelcomeness, would be actionable. The Department of Education’s Final Rule, by contrast (Stage Four), hews closely to legal standards accepted elsewhere in our legal system. There are three categories of sexual harassment: (1) “any instance of quid pro quo harassment by a school’s employee,” (2) “any unwelcome conduct that a reasonable person would find so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denies a person equal educational access”; and (3) “any instance of sexual assault as defined in the Clery Act [a federal statute dealing with campus security], dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking, as defined in the Violence Against Women Act.” In other words, a single unannounced act can still be sexual assault or a quid pro quo, but verbal harassment must form a pattern that meets the Supreme Court standard of pervasiveness and severity, as determined from the point of view of a reasonable observer. The Final Rule protects someone who makes a deeply offensive remark without advance notice of its unwelcomeness and who does not persist.

On most grounds the Department of Education’s Final Rule is an advance over the Obama administration’s rule, and also over the Department of Education’s first rule (Stage Three), under DeVos, which did not include dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking. The Final Rule is perhaps too narrow in its requirement that the accuser show that the harassment is not just severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, but that it also has a deleterious effect on the person’s equal educational access. Campuses are academic organizations, but they are also social organizations. Social harassment does not always affect someone’s ability to study, and why should that need to be shown? Why isn’t the poisoning of the person’s campus social life sufficient? There are other issues that have been raised, but on balance the “notice and comment” process seems to have worked pretty well.

I shall not go into the details of the various discussions of the questioning and confrontation process in the old and new rules. What I want to focus on, instead, is what I consider to be one of the largest problems with campus tribunals, which has not been addressed by any of these rules: the lack of access to free legal counsel for the accused. Most institutions not only do not provide a lawyer for the accused party; they actively discourage the hiring of lawyers. Typically the accused is permitted to have one supporter or advisor, but when the accused asks if this person can be a lawyer, they are usually discouraged. This is wrong. “Advisors” are typically faculty or administrators who have no legal training and who cannot do an energetic job of defending their client’s rights. And it is also wrong to require people to hire their own lawyers. Free legal assistance would go a long way to dispelling the worries of the twenty-eight Harvard Law School faculty members (Stage Two) about the system’s unfairness. Columbia University does provide free legal counsel for the accused, and so, now, does Harvard Law School (though not the rest of Harvard). My own university has recently begun to implement a policy offering free legal counsel to both defendants and plaintiffs. I have not been able to find out how many other institutions do this. And some federal grant money is available to support accused students at state universities. But the linchpin of our justice system is legal representation. Perhaps this requirement could be waived for minor offenses for which the likely penalty is alcohol counseling, for example; but in cases where the accused faces expulsion it should be mandatory, no matter what it costs. Colleges and universities have many doctors, nurses, and psychologists on their payrolls. And they do have a staff of lawyers, only not for this purpose. They should enlarge their legal departments to include lawyers at the service of students, for just this sort of problem.

I’ve said that tribunals are often poorly trained. The best solution to this problem, since membership of tribunals rotates, is mandatory sexual assault and sexual harassment training for all faculty and administrators. Such training is now required in most universities, as it is in most businesses. At the University of Chicago, each administrator and faculty member must complete the course online every year. It is not perfect, but it does supply a uniform level of awareness.

The Title IX Process

A welcome element of experienced professionalism is now supplied by the presence of Title IX offices on campuses. Typically they do face-to-face training as well as online training, though not as often. But they also play a crucial role through a strong norm of mandatory reporting, which is helping to close the information gap. If a student discloses sexual harassment or assault to any faculty member or administrator, that person is required immediately to inform the Title IX coordinator, giving the complainant’s name. The coordinator will then contact the complainant, typically promising her complete confidentiality and anonymity if she requests it. The complainant usually also has decisional autonomy: nothing will be done, and the alleged perpetrator will not be contacted, unless the complainant gives a go-ahead. Meanwhile the coordinator can advise the complainant about how the process works.

Mandatory reporting is controversial. Many have feared that it will discourage disclosures: the minute you open up to someone you trust, the information also goes to someone else you don’t know. But on the whole mandatory reporting seems wise. The Title IX staff, in my experience, behave with restraint and professionalism, protecting confidentiality. Once faculty and administrators have experience with the coordinators, my experience is that they do come to trust them. And faculty (and others) are relieved of a huge burden of dealing with the whole of a traumatized person’s subsequent life and choices. Faculty usually are not equipped to shoulder this burden, however well-intentioned they are.

The letter by the twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors objected to too much centralized power being vested in the Title IX office, in the scheme at first proposed by Harvard Law School in its attempt to institutionalize the Obama administration standards. The main problem they identified was that the Title IX office did both investigation and adjudication. Their letter was surely correct to say that this setup is very unfair and unwise. Harvard Law School quickly heeded their criticism, separating the two functions. The primary function of the Title IX office should be—and by now for the most part is—investigative and advisory. The tribunals themselves typically consist of faculty, and sometimes administrators, and are constituted according to procedures subject to faculty autonomy and faculty governance. They have many defects, but they are not an alien bureaucracy invading the campus, as the Harvard letter had feared.

We now need to address the gaps in the process that remain, particularly in the area of legal representation.

We have all learned a great deal from these somewhat painful debates. And progress has been made. Although in some ways DeVos has been a polarizing figure, the Final Rule adopted by the Department of Education under her aegis, thanks to the notice-and-comment process, is debatable but still arguably fair. It seems distinctly superior both to the draft rule and to the standards articulated by the Obama administration. We now need to address the gaps in the process that remain, particularly in the area of legal representation.

      

Men are much more likely to die from COVID-19 than women. This is true globally – where the death rate has been about 50% higher for men. Notably, this gap does not appear to be explained either by differences in the number of confirmed cases or in pre-existing conditions. With the pandemic cutting life expectancy of American men by more than two years, it is important to understand and mitigate risks associated with COVID-19 mortality among men.

Building on earlier work with Tiffany Ford from May 2020, “COVID-19 much more fatal for men, especially taking age into account,” we draw here on updated CDC data to examine the gender mortality gap by age, and over time in the U.S. Our main findings are:

• The overall death rate for men is 1.6 times higher than the death rate for women;
• The gap is widest in the middle of the age distribution, with 184 male deaths for every 100 female deaths.
• As death rates have fallen, the gender gap has narrowed slightly
• The gap is not explained by a higher number of cases among men, or differences in pre-existing conditions
• In Georgia and Michigan, Black men have the highest death rates, followed by Black women
• Improving access to care and addressing vaccine hesitancy, especially for Black men, should be a high priority

The gender gap in death rates

Men have had a higher crude death rate than women, as the chart using CDC data from February 2020 to August 2021 shows. By the end of August, over 65,000 more men than women had died from COVID-19 (362,187 male deaths and 296,567 female deaths).

The gender gap is even wider when differences in the male and female age distributions are taken into account, since there are many more older women than men in the population, and age is the biggest risk factor in COVID deaths. In 2021, mortality rates for men and women have dropped sharply, but somewhat faster for men than women, leading to a slight narrowing of the gap over time. More recently, though, death rates for men and women have risen again due to the spread of the Delta variant, with greater increases among men than women.

Middle-aged men are especially vulnerable

The picture varies across the age distribution, however. The gap is largest for those towards the middle of the age distribution. Among those aged 45 to 64, for example, the number of male deaths as of September 15, 2021, was 79,711, almost twice the number of female deaths, at 45,587.

We also calculate the ratio in death rates (male death rate: female death rate) in COVID-19 mortality for specific age groups. For all age groups, we calculate a similar ratio, but age-standardize the death rates. As of September 15, 2021, the overall adjusted male death rate was 1.63 times higher than the overall adjusted female death rate. This means that men make up 62% of all (age-standardized) COVID deaths. Again, the male-female gap is most prominent in those at or just past middle age: among those aged 45-64, there are 184 male deaths for every 100 female deaths.

COVID cases similar for men and women…

One possible explanation for the mortality gap could be that men are more likely to contract COVID-19. But while it is difficult to assess case counts due to access and demand for testing, raw data on the number of cases by age and sex from the CDC suggest very similar levels for men and women (note that the age brackets are not exactly the same as shown above, because of the way CDC data is presented).

In fact, women have slightly higher case numbers, possibly because they may make up a greater share of riskier jobs that are high-contact and inflexible, such as healthcare support, personal care and services, and food preparation (although it is important to acknowledge that men make up a greater share of those in high-risk jobs like meatpacking). Likewise, these industries might require more routine testing, leading to an over-reporting in mild/asymptomatic cases. On the other hand, men might be less likely to test for asymptomatic cases, leading to less reported cases overall. Correcting for these measurement issues would give a more accurate comparison of COVID-19 cases by sex.

…and pre-existing conditions do not explain the gap

Another possible explanation for the mortality gap is a higher rate of pre-existing conditions among men that make them more vulnerable to the virus. Again, some evidence suggests that this is not a major factor. One study of an Illinois hospital system by Joanne Michelle Gomez and co-authors, published in the Journal of Women’s Health, concluded that “male sex was independently associated with death, hospitalization, ICU admissions, and need for vasopressors or endotracheal intubation, after correction for important covariates.”

Another review of risk factors for hospitalization finds that men and women have similar rates of conditions associated with greater vulnerability, although there are some differences in specific conditions. For instance, “obesity, chronic kidney disease and hypertension were associated with higher rates of ICU admission among men, whereas obesity and heart failure were associated with higher rates of ICU admission among women.” These sex-specific differences make it important to better understand the relationship between sex, risk factors, and COVID-19 mortality, especially for different age cohorts and racial groups. As we discuss below, biological differences by sex are not the same across race, and there are additional factors at play that drive differences in death rates among women.

The gender gap has changed over the pandemic

The mortality gap has somewhat narrowed for some age groups since the start of 2021. Figure 5 shows that the death rate ratio for middle-aged adults was around 1.8 prior to February 2021. More recently, this ratio has leveled around 1.5, representing a decline of around 17 percent.

Black men fare worst of all

There are of course other gaps in vulnerability to COVID-19, especially by race. Our previous study from the earlier stages of the pandemic “Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear” showed for example that among middle-aged adults, Black and Hispanic or Latino death rates are six times higher than those for white people.

This means that while there is a gap between men and women within racial groups, race is often a bigger factor. Tamara Rushovich and her colleagues, drawing on data from Georgia and Michigan, find that while Black men have the highest COVID mortality rates – six times higher than for white men – the next most vulnerable group is Black women. They also find that the sex gap varies by race, especially in Michigan, where, as they report, “the mortality rate for Black men is 170% times the rate for Black women, which is significantly higher than the equivalent ratio among white individuals: the rate is only 130% higher for white men compared to white women.”

Interestingly, the authors also point out that the COVID mortality gap between Black women and white women is significantly greater than the gap between white men and white women. This suggests that the biological sex differences in mortality cannot be treated as constant across all racial groups.

Rushovich and her co-authors also do not put much weight on “individual behaviors and beliefs” to explain the race or sex gaps in mortality (or indeed sex gaps within race), pointing instead to “structural factors including occupation and access to healthcare.” This seems right, but it is nonetheless important to understand potential behavioral reasons behind the disparate death rates, especially as it relates to the decision to get vaccinated.

Get men (especially Black men) vaccinated

The gender gap in COVID-19 mortality is the result of a combination of factors, which may differ by race, class, geography and other variables. This is a stark reminder of the need for disaggregated health data to inform an intersectional approach to analysis. Gaining a better understanding of biological differences, case counts, and risk factors will be an ongoing task for scientific researchers.

More immediately, an urgent public health priority is to encourage and incentivize those most vulnerable to the virus to get vaccinated. Both race and gender matter here. As of September 21, 2021, Black Americans were six percentage points less likely than white Americans to have had at least one vaccine dose (41% compared to 35%). The racial disparity in vaccination rates is likely due to a combination of persistent barriers to access and structural inequities, which not only includes geographical access, but also logistics, methods of communication, timing, and registration. Many cities such as Philadelphia have facilitated better access to their underserved Black communities by partnering with community churches, opening alternative vaccination facilities such as local pharmacies, and using more direct methods of communication rather than with emails and Web portals. But while this has worked to some extent, there remain considerable gaps in vaccination take-up by race. Even among health care workers who had early and constant access to vaccines, Black workers were almost five times more likely than white workers to be hesitant about getting vaccinated. Our colleagues Sarah Reber and Cyrus Kosar also find that Black nursing home residents are likely to be in high-risk facilities with low vaccination rates, despite being one of the first few groups offered the vaccine.

What this means is that, in addition to improving access for underserved communities, we need additional research on the interventions that can effectively address hesitancy and increase demand for vaccine uptake. The Washington Post reports that “tapping into the communities where people live, drawing on information, outreach and vaccine administrators from those communities” is one good way to overcome hesitancy.

In addition to the racial gaps in vaccine rates, there is a gender gap too: 66% of women have had at least one vaccine dose, compared to 62% of men. Many states are also offering various vaccine incentive schemes – it may be worth seeing which have proven most effective with men. Especially with the spread of the new Delta variant, improving access and addressing vaccine hesitancy among the most vulnerable groups – including men, and especially Black men – must be a high priority for policymakers.

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment.  A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

      

Introduction

In response to President Biden’s Executive Order calling for a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a report in July that provides guidance to federal agencies about what methods they can use to assess the extent to which their work advances racial equity and supports underserved communities in the U.S. The report is ground-breaking in its recognition of “administrative burden” and lack of stakeholder engagement as factors that exacerbate inequality, such as when citizens interact with government technology and eligibility processes. Yet, the OMB report falls short of explicitly recommending the use of qualitative methods (or a combination of qualitative and quantitative investigations, also known as “mixed methods”) to assess equity. This is a missed opportunity as qualitative data can reveal nuances of experiences that quantitative analysis alone cannot.

This piece articulates the value of bringing qualitative methods more deeply into policy research and practice in the U.S. We argue that a mixed methods approach, and especially a deeper appreciation of what qualitative research can contribute, is critical for capturing and validating the wide-ranging experiences of Americans. Inadequately incorporating qualitative approaches into assessing equity in U.S. institutions and policies will make it harder to understand how structural inequities impact Americans in varying ways and to take meaningful steps to address them.

The difference between quantitative and qualitative research

Quantitative research is the dominant methodological paradigm in policy debates and social policy research. Rooted in the philosophical traditions of logical positivism, quantitative research focuses on explanation and causation, typically using statistics and modeling to assess the strength, significance, and generalizability of a given relationship. For example, the research question, “Does wearing masks reduce COVID-19 transmission?” is aligned with a quantitative research paradigm. Quantitative research methods often strive to isolate the causal effects of the specific variables the researcher is interested in observing (e.g., mask wearing, COVID-19 transmission) through the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methodologies that can divide people into “treatment” and “control” groups, and the use statistical techniques to examine whether these groups are statistically different from each other. Quantitative researchers try to maximize the sample size to identify general patterns and trends with a reasonable level of certainty. Typically, the researcher chooses a set of research concepts and categories to measure and test from the outset, informed by the existing literature, exploratory analysis, and available data.

A mixed methods approach is critical for capturing and validating the wide-ranging experiences of Americans.

In contrast, a qualitative research paradigm centers everyday human experiences and understandings of the world. It is rooted in meaning-making and shines in its ability to capture the richness and depth of the research context. Because of these goals, qualitative research is valuable for situating and interpreting findings in a specific context or capturing how a given issue may be understood from different positions or angles. For example, the research question, “How do gender roles and perceptions of social group identity in the U.S. South shape mask-wearing behaviors?” is aligned with a qualitative research paradigm. The process of conducting and analyzing qualitative research – which can include focus groups, interviews, discourse analysis, or observation – is agile and iterative, which allows the researcher to probe deeper into a given theme or social process. Researchers and administrators can choose from a wide range of qualitative methods along the spectrum of depth and breadth based on the common practices in their discipline, available resources, and the research questions and goals. Approaches can range from ethnographic studies that involve immersing oneself in a research context for more than a year to holding a set of one-hour focus groups.

There has been a general movement in U.S. policy research towards establishing a hierarchical categorization of “tiers” of evidence for policy studies, with experimental quantitative methods such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) positioned as the “gold standard” for making evidence-based policy decisions. Critics have highlighted the limitations of centering experimental methods alone (especially in social policy) and the consensus has started to shift more towards mixed methods.

Benefits of bringing qualitative research into policy

Rigorous qualitative data collection and analysis is not merely a way to bring life to quantitative evidence about policies or programs (although it often does that powerfully). Qualitative research allows the researcher to gather rich contextual insights into people’s lived experiences of policies, programs, and power dynamics. When it comes to advancing equity in policy, qualitative research can be a useful approach to understand how and why a given program or intervention may or may not work as intended (and for whom) and how to improve it from the perspective of a specific group of stakeholders. These insights present policy researchers and administrators the opportunity to steer policies and programs in a direction that is rooted in how people experience a program or service in practice and its influence on their day-to-day life and world view.

For example, a small business owner who has to fill out long application forms with confusing questions and reporting requirements to access a grant or loan may develop a perception that the program is more hassle than it is worth, which may discourage them to apply and give an advantage to larger companies that have the resources and time to comply with the requirements. Qualitative research, such as interviews or focus groups, could have been used to gather input from small businesses to design a process that is accessible and feasible for them, but that also helps meet the administrative needs of the program.

Qualitative analysis also allows policy researchers and administrators to embrace, rather than flatten, differing perspectives on the same concept, such as “middle class” or “empowerment.”

Qualitative analysis also allows policy researchers and administrators to embrace, rather than flatten, differing perspectives on the same concept, such as “middle class” or “empowerment.” This is critical in the formulation of equitable policy and practices, because people exist at the intersection of multiple identity markers and can experience and interpret the same policy in vastly different ways. Researchers and administrators can use qualitative methods to test and validate a priori conceptual categories (e.g., key concepts in the research questions), identify new variables (e.g., quantitative metrics included in a statistical model), and generate fresh hypotheses. This helps to ensure that the research is grounded in the ways that people understand their own realities and priorities, rather than only the realities and priorities of the researcher. Qualitative research then allows policy makers and administrators to target interventions for specific populations and, in the case of equity analysis in policy, to develop interventions that address dynamics that are important drivers of structural inequality.¹

For example, some economists have framed the debate about who should qualify for student loan debt cancellation in terms of family income and post-college earnings, making the argument that targeting forgiveness in this way would “benefit families that are poorer, more disadvantaged, and more likely to be Black and Hispanic.” However, the choice to propose a means test based on family income or post-college earnings rather than wealth fails to acknowledge the important role that generational wealth plays in a borrower’s economic security and mobility. The history of legally sanctioned practices such as redlining and blockbusting created unequal access to generational wealth in the U.S. on the basis of race, which kept Black Americans from building equivalent wealth through homeownership. With disproportionately low levels of family wealth, Black borrowers remain at a structural disadvantage for achieving home ownership, starting a business, or other wealth-generating activities even if they have high post-college earnings due to the lack of upfront capital to obtain financing. When researchers and administrators fail to consider how systems associated with one’s gender, race, and class shape differential impacts of such proposals, they risk reproducing structural inequality rather than addressing it. In this case, structural inequality in wealth is a key concept to focus on when designing a student loan forgiveness policy which advances equity. Qualitative research that engages student borrowers would be uniquely suited to reveal the differential impacts of student loan debt on specific populations of borrowers as it would enable the researcher to gather rich information about what factors or combinations of factors shape their economic mobility and well-being.

Case study: using qualitative data to design policy for the middle class

The Future of the Middle Class Initiative (FMCi) at Brookings launched in 2018 with the goal of better understanding how to improve the quality of life of America’s middle class and increase access to it. From the beginning, FMCi relied on nationally representative quantitative data on how the middle 60% of the income distribution (how the Initiative defines the middle class) has been doing over time. For example, the team analyzed Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data to reveal that middle-class income growth is lagging behind income growth for rich and poor people, and Census data² to demonstrate that middle class marriage rates were declining. Money and relationships are two factors understood to contribute to well-being; however, the available quantitative data on these, and other key pillars of well-being, in our work did not allow the research team to understand the contextual factors that shaped how middle-class Americans perceived their own well-being, examine power dynamics within the middle class, or appreciate the wide range of experiences of middle-class Americans.

To address these gaps, the team added a qualitative research component, called the American Middle Class Hopes and Anxieties Study. This study, stratified by race and gender, allowed the team to gain a richer understanding of middle-class experiences. In focus groups, Black and Hispanic participants reported frequent experiences of discrimination at work and racist interactions with police or, as one Black man called it, the “injustice system.” These participants shared that their widespread and repeated experiences of racism shaped their overall well-being. If researchers or administrators develop policy interventions that fail to address the pervasive negative effects of racism, the qualitative evidence suggests that they are unlikely to see meaningful improvements in well-being for Black and Hispanic middle-class Americans. The qualitative evidence also provided information about how to prioritize interventions, such as increasing the policy focus on policing and the criminal justice system.

These same data were used to expand our understanding of the middle-class time squeeze. Previously, our colleagues’ quantitative analysis centered dual-earner middle-class families with children, based on the assumption that these households face a particularly tight time squeeze due to the rise in women’s labor force participation and the prevalence of dual-earner married households with children in the middle-class. Follow-up mixed methods analysis demonstrated that a much wider range of middle-class Americans experienced a time squeeze – including Americans from different occupations, unmarried individuals, and a wide range of Americans of different races, ages, and genders. There was an overarching pattern among participants indicating that most middle-class Americans in our focus groups felt pressed for time to do the things that bring their lives meaning – spending time with their families, time on self-care, or time in leisure. Many participants described their work as the primary driver of how they structure and think about their time. Our qualitative findings suggest that the middle-class time squeeze may have deeper social impacts than is widely understood, and therefore it allowed the research team to generate new hypotheses about the importance of workplace culture, norms, labor protections, and a worker’s sense of autonomy in shaping well-being.

Understanding quality and rigor in qualitative research

When researchers or organizations are new to qualitative research, they often run into major stumbling blocks and are hesitant to adopt qualitative or mixed methods deeply into their work. At best, a novice may see qualitative insights as useful for narratives that can help reach wide audiences because it helps personalize numbers and statistics (akin to journalism). Yet they often express concerns that qualitative research is “unscientific” and susceptible to bias. However, it is problematic to simply copy and paste a quantitative framework for assessing the quality and rigor of a given qualitative research framework. Qualitative research paradigms are rooted in different philosophical traditions, with different goals and priorities. As such, the norms for achieving generalizability, validity, and quality in qualitative research are different.

For example, a common critique of qualitative research is that sample sizes tend to be too low to maintain rigor in qualitative research. However, as noted earlier, qualitative research prioritizes meaning making and understanding social processes. Qualitative researchers therefore place more priority on maximizing the depth of the data collected than they do on the size of the sample, per se. The aim is to gather information from different perspectives (i.e., triangulation of multiple qualitative methods, a wide range of informants) in a specific context until they reach saturation – the point at which further research fails to produce new themes relevant to the research questions. While there is no set minimum sample size, most researchers aim for a minimum sample of 15 to 20. If there is a lot of variation across informants or if the scope of questions is very broad, more research will be necessary to reach saturation.

There are other norms in qualitative research that quantitative researchers may not expect. For example, although qualitative researchers are also expected to be transparent about methodological choices and limitations, objectivity is neither assumed, nor is it typically viewed as possible to fully achieve. A recent debate in response to a piece that claimed that objectivity in and of itself is harmful highlights the sensitivity around the topic of objectivity and researcher bias, and what it means for the ways that rigor is approached in different fields of research. Although we do not view objectivity as harmful (and in fact, it is important to strive towards it in order to reduce researcher bias), the fact that many researchers or administrators believe that their work is inherently objective without critically examining their own biases and a priori assumptions can be harmful, inaccurate, and can lead to policy interventions that have unintended effects. For example, the American Middle Class Hopes and Anxieties Study work discussed above helped the research team to unpack race-gender dynamics within the middle class that many research team members were not previously attentive to, in part because it was not a salient part of their own experience. Qualitative researchers often start their research from the assumption that all knowledge is partial and situated, meaning that any individual researcher approaches their work from the position of their own privileges, biases, and lived experiences.

Like quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers are expected to be attentive to ethical obligations in research. In a qualitative research setting ethical dilemmas tend to occur due direct engagement with research participants on detailed and sometimes sensitive information. In qualitative research, it is especially important to consider when the research involves uneven power dynamics between the research team and research participants, sensitive or potentially dangerous research topics, vulnerable populations, or the potential to disclose identifying information that could lead to economic, social, or physical harm for the research participant or their community. Critically examining the power relations between the researcher and research participants and how the researcher shapes the research context and findings is typically an important element of producing quality work.

Finally, while quantitative researchers often strive to reduce complexity in pursuit of understanding causal relationships (e.g., by controlling for several variables to isolate the effects of a variable of interest), qualitative researchers prefer to dive into complexity to understand the social processes more comprehensively. This is one of the reasons why combining qualitative and quantitative methods in mixed methods projects can generate a deeper understanding and open up new areas of inquiry that neither method could reach alone.

Combining qualitative and quantitative methods in mixed methods projects can generate a deeper understanding and open up new areas of inquiry that neither method could reach alone.

Towards a mixed-methods approach to policy research

As powerful as rigorous quantitative research may appear on the surface, it can only ever offer a limited perspective on equity. Qualitative research can capture complex dynamics or variables that would otherwise be undetectable, help researchers and practitioners gain critical insights into their own blind spots and biases, and explore the ‘how’s and ‘why’s of interventions, program outcomes, and human experiences.

The Biden Administration has called to center equity in policy in order to reduce systematic inequality in U.S. laws, policies, and institutions. To fulfill the executive order, agency staff and policy researchers should require mixed-methods approaches in any equity assessment to capture policy-relevant dynamics and perspectives that otherwise would be excluded. There are existing resources, handbooks, and toolkits that practitioners can draw from, as well as resources from applied fields such as human-centered design. Bringing in qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups) also requires additional expertise and adequate budgets to support recruitment, site visits, collection and analysis, incentives, and ethical review processes.

A deadly pandemic, national protests, and a global climate crisis have all had disparate impacts on the most marginalized members of our society. Policymakers, researchers, and administrators must make a concerted effort to better understand lived experiences, the social processes that shape them, and how that manifests in U.S. policy and programs – especially if the goal is to address systemic, complex forms of inequity in ways that have a meaningful impact on the lives of all American people.

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment.  A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

      

The Child Tax Credit has been part of the federal income tax code since 1997. It has been expanded many times, most recently as part of the American Rescue Plan. Under this plan, for the year 2021, the maximum Child Tax Credit amount is increased from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for children below the age of 6 and to $3,000 for children under age 18.  This credit amount is phased out at high levels of income in two steps. The increased credit is phased down to the previous credit amount starting at income of $112,500 for single parents and $150,000 for married parents; that reduced amount is then phased out completely, beginning at income of $200,000 for single parents and $400,000 for married parents. In addition to the increased credit amount and expanded range of qualifying income up the income distribution, for 2021, the credit is fully refundable. This means that parents receive the full credit amount, regardless of the amount of taxes they owe. This has the effect of extending the credit to families with no taxable income. These changes result in a child benefit, administered through the tax code, that is nearly universal and unconditional on parental work status.

House Democrats have proposed extending this expanded Child Tax Credit through 2025. Other policy makers have expressed reservations about this proposed extension, citing concerns about having a credit payment that is unconditional on work and on extending a payment to high income families. A consideration of the pros and cons of a nearly universal, unconditional child tax credit or benefit amount raises a host of issues. It is useful to consider these issues within the framework of the optimal design of a social safety net system. Within this broad framework, there are six specific points about the desirability of such a payment.

1. We should have social insurance against child poverty.

In this country, we provide social insurance to people who find themselves in what economists call “the bad state of the world.” We have disability insurance for people who find themselves unable to work and earn a substantial amount of money in the labor market. We have unemployment insurance for people who lose their jobs. We have social security old age payments for people who live beyond their working years and are either no longer able to work or have not saved enough. This is social insurance against elderly poverty.

However, we have no social insurance for kids who—through no fault of their own—find themselves living in a home with material deprivation. I think if most of us were going to design a system of social insurance from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance—meaning, we were going to design a world that we’d like to be born into before knowing our place in that world—providing social insurance against child poverty would be the first type of social insurance we’d provide.

From the perspective of social insurance and a reasonable social welfare function, there is a strong case for a basic guarantee of income for kids and in particular social insurance against child poverty. (This is something I wrote about in an article for Brookings last October.)

2. From the perspective of government spending as an investment, this would yield a positive social return.

Here I am implicitly equating a tax credit with a spending program. Conceptually they are the same. In practical administrative terms, they are not the same thing. There are practical challenges with running social policy through the tax code, but for the moment, I want to set those considerations aside and focus on the social return to government “spending”—whether that “spending” comes in the form of foregone tax revenue, tax credits, or an explicit spending program.

Spending on children, especially children from low-income homes, has a large social return. We have a lot of evidence showing that increasing the income and material resources of low-income families with children leads to better school performance, better child and maternal health outcomes, and better long run outcomes for children. We are vastly underinvesting in our nation’s children currently and a child allowance or expanded child tax credit would go some way toward rectifying that. (This is something Diane Schanzenbach and Hilary Hoynes and I highlighted in a piece we wrote for the Conversation earlier this year.)

The investment aspect for the Child Tax Credit is harder to make the further up the income distribution you go. The current expansion of the Child Tax Credit up the income distribution means many high-income families are receiving this additional income. We have very little evidence that supplementing the income of higher-income families has a positive social return, so you’d need to lean on other arguments to justify expansions up the income distribution.

I think there is a very compelling social investment case to be made for the anti-poverty aspects of the Child Tax Credit coming from the expansions in credit amounts to lower-income families. That case falls apart the father up the income distribution we go.

3. Providing income assistance to children regardless of their parents’ work status would fill a hole in our current safety net.

To my mind, the key benefit of introducing an unconditional child allowance or child tax credit is because there is a gaping hole in our safety net. We don’t have any meaningful source of income support for kids whose parents don’t work and who don’t qualify for categorical income assistance, say, through a medical eligibility that qualifies them for Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

An unconditional child allowance or refundable child tax credit differs from a policy that conditions benefit or credit receipt on work, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) does. The EITC does two things—it supplements the wages of low-income workers and it also transfers money to families with children. These are two laudable goals, but they don’t have to be accomplished with the same program.

I like the idea of divorcing the supplementation of wages of low-income workers and transferring money to children. These policy goals can be separated so that kids whose parents have very low or no earnings are not left without government assistance. An unconditional child allowance or tax credit rightly fills in this gap in our safety net.

4. A nearly universal child tax credit or allowance limits work disincentives.

On the one hand, as I’ve mentioned, there is little investment rationale for extending this type of benefit payment up the income distribution. On the other hand, a near universal design limits work disincentives. The usual work disincentives of transfer programs come from both substitution effects, which come from the fact that benefits are clawed back as people’s earnings income, which provides a disincentive to work, and income effects, by which people might choose to work less because they have more money.

A nearly universal child tax credit means that the credit is not clawed back as people earn more money (except at very high levels of earnings), so there is only an income effect. Those who worry about the work disincentives of transfer programs should find this design appealing. On net, we should expect to see less work reduction from this design than we would from a more typical transfer program design, like in the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.

5. There is a case to be made for additional cash benefits to supplement existing in-kind program benefits.

There is a strong case to be made for providing more cash assistance to low-income families with children, supplementing our existing panoply of programs that provide health insurance, food and nutrition assistance, and limited housing assistance. (I would argue we need more housing assistance as well.) This would help families meet the different needs that they face, which arrive at unpredictable times, and are hard to meet with the various siloed programs that currently exist.

The criticism of this approach is that some worry that some parents will not spend money in ways that benefit kids. But we have good evidence from a variety of income shocks—things like EITC expansions, for example—that low-income children generally benefit from the additional income coming into the family. So even if there are some parents who might not spend the money in the ways that would most benefit their children all the time, in general, we can expect that the money will be spent in ways that improve children’s outcomes.

6. This is just not that expensive relative to the likely social benefits.

The final point to make is about the fiscal costs of an expanded child tax credit. This is just not that expensive, relative to the benefits we will get from that government spending. Estimates suggest that the Child Tax Credit costs about $118 billion a year; the temporary Child Tax Credit expansions under the America Recovery Act are projected to cost about $105 billion a year.

Another option would be a child benefit or allowance (as opposed to a tax credit), something like what I proposed in a simple thought experiment I wrote up in a Brookings post last October. I noted that if we gave each child living in poverty the average Social Security benefit received by a Social Security recipient age 65 and over (about $17,000 per year), the rate of childhood poverty in this country would fall to less than one percent. If we gave each child living in poverty half the average Social Security benefit ($8,556 annually), the rate of childhood poverty in this country would fall to about 3 percent. The cost of this dramatic reduction in child poverty would cost $179 billion for the full benefit award and $90 billion a year for the half benefit award.

To put that money in perspective, let’s compare this to a Universal Basic Income (UBI), a policy idea that has gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of years. A UBI would guarantee a meaningful level of income to every adult in the United States. A payment of $10,000 per year to every US adult would cost $2.5 trillion.  Why are we even having that conversation when we could essentially eradicate child poverty in this country for $180 billion? Even if we reduced the UBI award to be $10,000 a year to adults who make less than $20,000 and then phased out at 30 percent, it would still cost $1.5 trillion per year. A targeted child allowance would cost a fraction of that, and constitute an investment in the next generation.

To conclude, for these main six reasons, an unconditional child tax credit or a child allowance fits into a well-designed social safety net in our country.

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment.  A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

      

This week in Class Notes:

• Two-year community colleges in Texas provide net upwards mobility, but still divert students away from immediate four-year entry.
• Intergenerational social mobility rates are much lower with corrections for measurement and sampling errors, especially for Black Americans.
• Low-wage health care workers were up to five times more likely to be food insecure than other health care professionals.
• This week’s top chart shows that, in Germany, women’s wages drop by 35% more than men after losing their job and the gap is still visible five years later.
• In this week’s choice opinion, Allison Schrager argues that the lag in male college enrollment should prompt more investment in alternative routes for men to thrive in the economy.
• Check out our latest piece on the disproportionate number of Black nursing home residents in high-risk facilities with low vaccination rates.
• For your calendar: virtual events discussing the economics of modern transportation, all things urban economics, and happiness and age during COVID-19.

2-year community colleges in Texas provide net upwards mobility, but still divert students away from immediate 4-year entry 

The impact of two-year colleges on upward mobility has sparked debate, especially given President Biden’s hopes to make community college free. Jack Mountjoy uses an instrumental variables approach and longitudinal administrative data spanning the state of Texas to estimate the causal impact of attending two-year college. Overall, he finds a net positive impact on years of schooling (by an additional year), a bump of 10 percentage points in bachelor’s degree attainment, and a similar rise in later earnings. The positive results are driven by the two thirds of students who would not otherwise have gone to college, who are largely from low-income families. But those who were diverted from four-year entry into a two-year institution ultimately do worse overall. Notably, women primarily drive the results.

Intergenerational social mobility rates are much lower with corrections for measurement and sampling errors, especially for Black Americans

Estimates of intergenerational mobility are often biased due to measurement error of fathers’ occupations, and samples that are primarily white. Using linked census samples of fathers and sons from 1850 to 1940, Zachary Ward finds that correcting for these issues can double estimates of intergenerational persistence (i.e., less mobility), especially for historical cohorts. Specifically, he finds that after addressing measurement error in the father’s observations, white families only closed less than 50% of initial economic gaps across generations, making historical America significantly less mobile than what it seems. Including Black families in the sample increases the father-son association by up to 45% more. These increases are mostly explained by large, persistent gaps between white and Black families. Finally, Ward finds a decrease in intergenerational persistence (i.e., more mobility) since the mid-19th century, likely due to institutional changes that improved outcomes for children from poorer backgrounds.

Low-wage health care workers are up to 5 times more likely to be food insecure than other health care professionals

Mithuna Srinivasan and her co-authors link food insecurity status with health care occupational categories, using 2013-2018 data from the National Health Interview Survey. They find that a large share of health care support workers are women, and Black or Hispanic, unmarried, home renters, and have annual incomes less than $35,000. Compared to health technologists and practitioners, the odds of being food insecure were up to five times higher for health care support workers. The disparities were wider still for support workers in nursing and residential care facilities. The authors argue for a $15 minimum wage, which would reduce poverty among female healthcare workers by as much as 50%, a higher EITC for low-income households, and more employer-sponsored programs with community organizations.

Top chart: In Germany, women’s wages drop by 35% more than men after losing their job and the gap is still visible 5 years later

Our top chart shows that wages drop significantly for German workers after a job displacement, but with much greater losses among women. Re-weighting observations to directly compare women and men from similar jobs and firms, the gender gap widens further—and persists even five years after the displacement.

Chart source: National Bureau of Economic Research

Choice Opinion: The lag in male college enrollment should prompt more investment in alternative routes for men to thrive in the economy

“We need to allow for a more dynamic economy that allows for independent work, including providing benefits to contract workers, and reducing the number of non-compete contracts and unnecessary licensing requirements. These steps would empower men without college degrees to pursue work in a modern economy, unconstrained and on their own terms,” writes Allison Schrager. “We can also provide more education options that feel more relevant and offer immediate value, [such as entailing] more apprenticeships, sectoral employment programs and reviving trade schools at the high school level. Also, most critically, we must respect all jobs and drop elitist talk that presumes some work is pointless or that some jobs are less prestigious because they didn’t require a college degree…More women in college may not signal the end of men as much as it signals an economy in transition, where some men will flounder and others will find a way to adapt and thrive.”

Self-promotion: Black nursing home residents are likely to be in high-risk facilities with low vaccination rates

While COVID-19 vaccination rates have been correlated with political ideology for subsets of the population, the relationship is much weaker for the elderly and those living in nursing homes. Sarah Reber and her colleague Cyrus Kosar instead find a strong relationship of COVID-19 vaccination rates with pre-pandemic flu vaccination rates. This suggests that for this population, existing causes of under-vaccination are at play, such as barriers to access, worries about side effects and efficacy, and medical distrust due to health racism. In particular, about 20% of Black residents are in facilities where vaccination rates for residents and staff members are low. These are predominantly in the South where overall vaccination rates are lower. This makes it increasingly important to provide better access to vaccine hubs, educate health care workers, and incentivize workers through bonuses or paid time off.

For your calendar: Virtual events discussing the economics of modern transportation, all things urban economics, and happiness and age during COVID-19

Economics of Transportation in the 21st Century, Fall 2021

October 8, 2021, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EDT

NBER

15th North American Meeting of the Urban Economics Association

October 14 – 16, 2021

Urban Economics Association

Happiness and Age Conference

October 29 – 30, 2021

International Centre for Economic Analysis

      

In 1972, when the U.S. government passed the landmark Title IX laws to promote gender equality in education, there was a 12 percentage-point gap in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women. By 1982, the gap had closed. Nobody predicted what happened next: the gap started to widen rapidly in the opposite direction. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor awards was wider, at 14 points, than it had been in 1972 — but the other way round. (We are not claiming here that Title IX had much impact, however).

Similar trends can be seen in every stage of the education system, and in almost every country in the world. Carol Frances, the former Chief Economist at the American Council on Education, describes it as “phenomenal,” “surging,” and “spectacular.” Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, senior analyst at the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, says it is “astonishing…people can’t believe it.” To Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, it is “the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”

Importantly, there is a gender gap not only in rates of college enrollment, as we described earlier in the year, and recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, but also in rates of completion among those who do enroll.

College enrollment is falling, mostly among men

Enrollment rates over the past decade are declining, a change almost entirely driven by men. Women are now much more likely to enroll in college than men, and the gender gap widened significantly in 2020. Figure 1 shows the number of students enrolling in college (represented by bars) and the percent change in enrollment rate from the previous year (represented by lines) by sex.

College enrollment has steadily declined following the Great Recession, with total enrollment among both men and women decreasing each year from 2012 to 2020. But many more women than men were enrolling in college when rates began to fall in 2012 (11.6 million women were enrolled at the time, compared to 8.6 million men). If the relative decline among men and women had been similar, we would expect the gender gap in enrollment rates to remain constant. Instead, the fall 2020 decline in male enrollment eclipsed the decline in female enrollment for the fifth year in a row and the gender gap in enrollment is widening. COVID-19 accelerated this trend.

Total first-time student enrollment was 13% lower in fall 2020 than in fall 2019. The decline seems to have been driven largely by a drop in total male enrollment, which was over seven times larger than the drop in female enrollment (-5.1% and -0.7%, respectively). Male students now make up a smaller share of all enrolled students in the United States than ever before — just 41% of students enrolled in a postsecondary institution in fall 2020 were men.

Women graduate high school and college at higher rates

The gap in college enrollment is now getting overdue attention. But this is just one part of the story. Men are also less likely to graduate high school in the first place and less likely to complete college after enrolling. The ten percentage point gap in four-year college enrollment is only compounded by the gap in college completion rates. Figure 2 shows the graduation rates for high school, two-year college, and four-year college by sex and time to complete degree. Note that data shown represent the most recent cohorts for which data are available and are not necessarily comparable across categories. For example, two-year college completion rates (those who receive an associate degree or certificate from their initial institution of attendance) are based on the cohort of students who first enrolled in 2016 and the four-year college completion rates are based on the cohort who first enrolled in 2013. All four-year college completion rates are based on the 2013 entry cohort.

At every level, men are graduating at lower rates than women. Men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2013 were ten percentage points less likely than women to graduate within 4 years. Six years after enrolling, the gender gap in graduation narrows to six percentage points. Six-year college completion rates have modestly increased among both men and women over the past decade, but the gender gap has remained about the same.

With men less likely to enroll and graduate conditional on enrollment, it is no surprise that there are big gaps in the college degree attainment in the adult population, especially in younger cohorts. Figure 3 shows the portion of degrees conferred to men by level.

Over 1.1 million women received a bachelor’s degree in the 2018-19 academic year compared to fewer than 860,000 men; put differently, about 74 men received a bachelor’s degree for every 100 women. Even fewer men graduate with an associate or master’s degree, relative to women. Doctoral degree conferral is the most gender-balanced, though even here 54% of degrees are conferred to women. Although women are more likely to graduate college at each level, men are still overrepresented within many fields with high earnings potential, such as engineering or computer science.

Education gaps across the lifecycle

So far, we have focused on the most recent cohorts. But the gender gap wasn’t always this dramatic (or even in this direction). Figure 4 shows the portion of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree in 2019, by sex and age group. Men born from 1955 to 1974 (ages 45-64 in 2019) who likely wrapped up their postsecondary education decades ago, attained bachelor’s and graduate degrees at a similar rate to women in their age group. By contrast, older men born before 1955 had higher educational attainment than women, and younger men born after 1974 seem to be consistently outpaced by women their age.

Among those born before 1955 (ages 65 and over in 2019), men are nine percentage points more likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree than women. This is the only age group for which a traditional gender gap favoring men holds. It is worth noting that women live longer than men on average, so the average age of women over 65 is higher than the average age of men over 65. The gender gap in that age range may therefore appear slightly larger than it would if the age distribution were the same by sex. Among those born between 1985 and 1994 (ages 25 to 34 in 2019), on the other hand, men are eight percentage points less likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher than women.

A similar trend holds when looking at bachelor’s degree attainment and at graduate or professional degree attainment separately: Men over the age of 65 are four percentage points more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than women and five percentage points more likely to have a graduate or professional degree, whereas men ages 25 to 34 are four percentage points less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than women and four percentage points less likely to have a graduate or professional degree.

Class, gender and the education gap

It is important to underline the fact that socioeconomic and demographic factors strongly influence a student’s decision to attend college, quite apart from gender. For instance, 84% of students from the top income quintile enroll in any college in the fall after high school graduation compared to 72% of students in the middle class and 63% of students in the bottom income quintile. Similarly, white and Asian students are over five percentage points more likely to enroll in any college after high school graduation than their Hispanic and Black counterparts. In future work, we will be investigating the gendered effects of socioeconomic status and race on college enrollment.

The underperformance of boys in the classroom — especially Black boys and those from poorer families — damages their job prospects and their chances for upward economic mobility. But there is also a basic fairness question here. Inequalities of this magnitude are a cause for concern, regardless of their direction. Women’s wages still lag behind men’s, and recent progress on the pay gap has slowed. But inequity in the workplace shouldn’t mean we disregard inequity in classroom, especially when many vulnerable boys are falling behind. We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time.

Closing the gender gap in education will require interventions every step of the way. College enrollment is important. But it is at least as important to focus on helping male students to complete their college education, preferably within a reasonable time period. Some initiatives specifically focused on male students should be on the table.

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment.  A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

      

The debate among Congressional Democrats over the $10,000 cap on the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) continues. Here we offer a proposal that could give the SALT caucus something in the short-term; save almost a trillion dollars over the budget window; and put the tax system on a path to greater fairness.

The two options under consideration are apparently to eliminate the cap for two years or lift the cap to some higher amount over ten years.

These are both really bad ideas, wasting money on a highly regressive tax break. If forced to choose, we’d have to say the first is even worse than the second. Especially if cuts have to be made on other policy fronts, many of which would help less advantaged families, this will be hard to justify. Here we critique the proposals that seem to be on the table, before describing our own.

Full repeal of the SALT cap is the worst option of all

Repealing the SALT cap for two years would cost about $85 billion per year. As we and others have pointed out multiple times, this represents a massive windfall to the rich and affluent. Despite what the SALT Caucus claims, SALT cap repeal is no middle-class tax cut. Ninety-six percent of the benefit would flow to the top 20 percent of the income distribution with the top 0.1 percent getting a tax cut of $154,000 per year, on average. To be fair, the middle class does get something. The middle 60 percent of the income distribution would receive, on average, a tax cut of $37 per year. Even in high-tax states, the middle class gets little. In New York, the top 1 percent would get a tax cut of about $103,000, on average. For those in the middle class, the benefit is just $90, on average. So repealing the cap is regressive and delivers little to no social benefit. As the Democrats wrangling over the budget know, there are dozens of better ways for the federal government to spend $85 billion, for example:

1. An array of social polices. We can’t put it any better than Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: “For the annual cost of the SALT cap repeal, policymakers could enact the President’s plans to offer universal pre-K, free community college, paid family leave, affordable child care, and an Earned Income Tax Credit expansion. Not just one of these policies, but all of them together.”
2. A year of the expanded child tax credit (CTC). As part of the American Rescue Plan, the CTC was expanded and made fully refundable—meaning low-income families can receive the full benefit—for one year. The annual cost for this expansion is about $100 billion relative to the previous law. From June to July, the expanded CTC slashed monthly child poverty by 25 percent. The expanded CTC is also likely to boost social mobility in the long run, as we have argued previously.
3. Doubling (or even tripling) Pell grants. Pell grants help students from low-income families pay for college. On our own pages, Philip Levine finds that doubling the maximum Pell grant amount is a rare win-win for policy: it promotes economic efficiency and social equity. Matthew Chingos of the Urban Institute estimates that this would cost about $35 billion per year, roughly doubling the current cost. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the maximum amount could even be tripled (with money left over) for the same price tag as SALT cap repeal.
4. Universal baby bonds. The racial wealth gap and the Black-white gap in multigenerational poverty are alarming. Racist policies have helped to create these gaps, and intentional public policy is needed to ameliorate them. One option is baby bonds. Effectively a trust fund for children that will provide the most help to those from low-wealth families, this proposal would, on average, especially benefit Black beneficiaries. The government would seed money into accounts for children at birth, which would grow over time from continued government contributions and returns on safe investments. Upon turning 18, beneficiaries access these funds to pay for college or a down payment on a home, for example. With many potential structures, baby bonds would cost around $82 billion annually.

People can reasonably disagree about the pros and cons of these various policies. But it is hard to argue that any of them are a worse way to spend taxpayers money than on a tax break for the rich is a better use of this money.

Raising the cap is also a bad idea

The second option under consideration, lifting the cap to some higher dollar threshold, is still regressive. If the cap was raised to, say, $30,000 for couples and $15,000 for singles, more than two-thirds of the benefit would go to the top 5 percent of the income distribution, and less than 4 percent to the middle 60 percent. Even in high-tax states, the affluent reap most of the benefits. In New York, almost half the benefit would flow to the top 5 percent.

Recent reports indicate that Democrats are attracted to the revenue-neutral potential of raising the cap. Since the $10,000 cap is scheduled to expire at the end of 2025, keeping the cap in place for those later years would raise significant revenue, relative to current law. In other words, the up-front costs would be paid for by later revenue. It’s a good idea to think about the longer-term, but there is still a better approach; one that is not just revenue-neutral, but raises money.

Lift the cap then phase it out: a win, win, win?

If Democrats really must do something about SALT, they should consider raising the cap (not eliminating it), but then phasing it down to $0 over ten years. For example, they could raise the cap to $20,000 for married couples filing jointly and keep the $10,000 cap for singles. This would give some short-term relief for the families with state and local tax bills slightly above the current limit. Again, we don’t think this is necessary, but there is clear political pressure for something here.

Each of these caps could then be reduced annually by $2,000 and $1,000, respectively, eventually reaching zero. By 2032, while the SALT deduction would still technically be in the tax code, it would have effectively been removed altogether, which we have argued for previously.

The advantage of this approach is that rather than removing the cap overnight, it is phased out gradually. This allows time for households and the housing market to adjust. It would also provide time to put in place alternative, superior ways for the federal government to support states, such as the State Macroeconomic Insurance Fund proposed by the Tax Policy Center’s Len Burman, Tracy Gordon and Nikhita Airi. It’s worth noting that the UK took a similar approach with its version of the mortgage-interest deduction, cutting its value in successive years from 1994 to 2000 (and note there was a change of government in 1997).

Gradually reducing the value of the deduction over a full decade would provide some much-needed policy stability in an area that could otherwise become a political football for years to come. Contrast our proposal for a steady removal with the timeline of the SALT cap if Democrats decided on temporary full repeal:

• No SALT cap up to 2018
• A $10,000 SALT Cap from 2018-2021
• No SALT Cap from 2022-2023
• A $10,000 SALT Cap from 2024-2025
• No SALT Cap from 2026 onwards

This sequence could appear on page one of a textbook titled On How Not to Make Tax Policy.

Our proposal would also raise money. We estimate that lifting the cap from $10,000 to $20,000, but then gradually phasing it out, would net about $900 billion over the ten-year budget window. The reason the savings are so great is that the SALT cap is currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2025, so our proposal to keep phasing it out instead results in some big savings.

Hopefully the approach we propose here, which takes the long view of how to deal with a regressive tax deduction, while recognizing current political pressures, could also find some bipartisan support.

In short, our proposal would provide some policy stability, give SALT-focused members a short-term win, make the tax code simpler and fairer in the long run, and raise lots of revenue for big ticket progressive goals. How does that sound?

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

      

This week in Class Notes:

• Unionization reduces both employment and average earnings, because of a change in the composition of the workforce towards those with lower skills or less experience.
• The EITC strongly boosts employment among mothers with toddlers, cutting poverty rates.
• Ending affirmative action in California reduced both equity and efficiency in higher education.
• This week’s top chart shows that the pandemic caused significant drops in math and English test scores for Ohio students.
• In this week’s choice opinion, Sheryll Cashin argues for investment of resources and care into Black neighborhoods.
• Check out our latest piece on how the new permanent increase in SNAP benefits will help low-income children.
• For your calendar: virtual events exploring efforts to address health inequities, racial disparities in today’s economy, and the economics of mobility.

Unionization reduces both employment and average earnings, because of a change in the composition of the workforce towards those with lower skills or less experience

Historically and theoretically, unions win higher wages for members, but at the expense of employment for union “outsiders.” Brigham Frandsen uses an employer-employee matched panel dataset to examine the impact of a vote among workers to form a union, drawing in particular on data from firms in which the vote was close. Unionization leads to a drop in employment. More surprising, average worker earnings also fall, by up to 4 percentage points. These effects are not driven by wage cuts for existing workers, but by changes in composition of workers following unionization. Specifically, younger, lower-paid workers are more likely to be hired following a union victory, while higher-paid workers are more likely to exit. This is caused by a shift in the relative return to experience and skills, which make union jobs more attractive to those with less experience, but less so for those further along their careers.

The EITC has the strongest impact on maternal labor supply for those with children under 3 years old

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has boosted the labor supply of lower-income workers, particularly mothers. However, given that maternal employment is strongly influenced by the age of children, the impact of the EITC may vary. Katherine Michelmore and Natasha Pilkauskas explore this age gradient with a sample of unmarried mothers from the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. They find that the EITC increases employment the most for unmarried mothers with toddlers, with decreasing, though still positive, impacts as children age. For those with children under 3, a $1,000 increase in average EITC generosity increases weekly work hours by an average of 3.4 hours and pre-tax earnings by $2,400. It also reduces poverty in this group by around 5 percentage points. This employment increase is paired with greater use of childcare services for toddlers, particularly informal rather than center-based care.

Ending affirmative action in California reduced both the equity and efficiency in higher education

In 1998, the California state legislature passed Proposition 209, banning race-based affirmative action at public state (UC) universities. With a newly constructed administrative longitudinal dataset from 1994 to 2002, Zachary Bleemer estimates the impact of this policy on underrepresented minorities’ (URM) academic and labor market outcomes. Prop 209 led URM students to enroll in lower-quality colleges and universities and less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree, an undergraduate STEM degree, or a graduate degree. This finding is contrary to the “mismatch hypothesis” that URM outcomes will improve when they enroll in less-selective schools where they can better “match” their peers. The worse educational outcomes translate into a 5% average annual decline in Hispanic—but not Black—applicants’ wages in their early thirties. For those non-URM applicants who benefited from Prop 209, the long-run educational or wage benefits were small by comparison to the declines for URM students.

Top chart: Pandemic caused significant drops in math and English test scores for Ohio students

This week’s top chart shows how student scores in math and English in Ohio declined significantly due to remote learning and school disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors estimate that the decline in math scores for 5th graders is equivalent to half a year’s learning, and a full year’s learning for those in middle and high school.

Chart source: The Ohio State University

Choice opinion: Invest resources and care into Black neighborhoods

“Anti-Black habits of disinvestment and plunder continue to this day. Government at all levels overinvests in affluent white space and disinvests in Black neighborhoods, with the exception of excessive spending on policing and incarceration” writes Sheryll Cashin, who described the residents of those neighborhoods as “descendants” of generational inequality.

“Applying a humane lens to descendants frees policymakers to innovate and focus on evidence-based strategies that might be cheaper and certainly more effective than punitive strategies borne of racial dogma…Perhaps follow the lead of Lawrence, Massachusetts, which made bus lines from its poorest neighborhoods free, as have other cities. Invest in well-resourced, culturally competent education, with reduced class sizes, in high-poverty neighborhood schools. And allow descendants to be first in line in any lottery for accessing great, integrated schools and neighborhoods. Invest in parks and neighborhood centers that offer recreation and human services in poor Black neighborhoods — free services for the freedom and liberation of descendants who have been intentionally trapped in hyper-segregated poverty,” she writes.

Self-promotion: Increase in SNAP benefits will help low-income children

Under new rules, monthly benefits for SNAP have increased by around $36 per person from a pre-pandemic amount of $121 to reflect changing family needs over the past 50 years. Our Center Director Kristin Butcher describes how this long overdue update will benefit low-income children. Increasing benefits to help families eat a healthier diet that is also less time-costly is a longer-term investment for children, she argues. In her own research, Kristin finds that “children on SNAP grow up to be healthier, live longer, are more likely to complete high school, have better economic outcomes, and are less likely to be incarcerated compared to similar people not covered by these benefits.”

For your calendar: Virtual events exploring efforts to address health inequities, racial disparities in today’s economy, and the economics of mobility

Leveraging community expertise to advance health equity

Monday, September 27, 2021 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT

Urban Institute

Racial disparities in today’s economy, 64th annual conference

October 4-6, 2021

Boston Fed

Economics of mobility meeting, Fall 2021

Friday, October 22, 2021 11:30 AM – 5:30 PM EDT

NBER