Jessica Min was awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Grant in May 2024 to support her project “The Rising Cost of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance & Evolution of the U.S. Wage Structure.”  This project will study how the uniquely American institution of employer-sponsored health insurance impacts its wage structure.  The goal is to study the effect of rising costs of health insurance on the U.S. wage distribution, highlighting the key margins of adjustment by firms and workers that shape the distribution in equilibrium.

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) has established a dissertation research grants (DRG) program to support innovative and high-quality dissertation research projects that address questions relevant to RSF’s priority areas: Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context; Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity and Immigration; Immigration and Immigrant Integration; and Social, Political, and Economic Inequality.

Program for Research on Inequality 2024 grant recipients

Carolyn Tsao received an Inequality in Labor Markets grant to support her work: “It's Not (Just) About the Money: Evaluating Whether Teachers Earn Rents.”

Carolyn Tsao is in her final year of the Economics PhD program. Her job market paper focuses on understanding how much of the compensation public school teachers receive is actively compensating teachers for the declining quality of working conditions in schools, which is becoming a growing concern across the U.S. and especially in schools in low-income areas. 

“I am extremely grateful to the PRI for this grant, which supported me in my travel to access data that this paper would not be possible without.”

Maria Oaquim de Medeiros, a third-year PhD student, received a Racial Equity in the Economy grant to support her project: "Interracial College Peers and Nonwhite Workforce Hiring, ” which explores whether race-based affirmative action in Brazilian universities influences the hiring practices of white employers exposed to this policy while in college. The project will also evaluate whether affirmative action changed the racial composition of entrepreneurs in Brazil and, consequently, the workforce composition of these firms.is in her third year of the PhD program.  

The project is joint work with Javier Feinmann (Berkeley), Ursula Mello (INSPER), Sebastián Otero (Columbia), and Roberto Rocha (Berkeley). 

“The generous funding from PRI has helped me access Higher Education data, which is only available in a secure room in Brazil.”