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Faculty Recipients:

Will Dobbie and Crystal Yang — Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility

In this project, Dobbie, Yang, and collaborators are studying recent trends in economic mobility by race and socioeconomic class to understand the mechanisms underlying economic mobility. Building on their quantitative work that uses anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population, they will identify sites in the country that have experienced sharp changes in mobility by race and class in recent decades.  They will then conduct qualitative interviews in these sites to better understand the mechanisms underlying recent trends.

Will Dobbie is a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses broadly on the causes and consequences of poverty in the U.S. His recent work has examined racial bias in the criminal justice system, the labor market consequences of bad credit reports, and the long-run effects of charter schools.

is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is co-director of the Crime Working Group.   Professor Yang’s teaching and research interests center around empirical law and economics, particularly in the areas of criminal justice and algorithmic fairness. Her current research includes empirical projects on racial bias in the criminal justice system, human oversight of algorithms, the spillover effects of deportation fear, and delivery of health care in correctional facilities. 

Student Recipients:

Daniel Alain Evrard — Redistributing Power? Navigating Climate Change, Capitalist Development, and the Promise of a “Just Energy Transition”

Effectively combatting the climate crisis requires that societies around the world dramatically reduce the extent of their greenhouse gas emissions while leveraging the mechanisms of policy to mitigate the social and economic harms that these efforts will inflict upon fossil fuel-producing communities. Yet, because these efforts are in their infancy, scholars typically assume how the evolution of the energy sector might impact such places and then propose policies based upon those assumptions. Rather than engaging in further speculation, Evrard confronts this issue head-on by combining ethnography with in-depth interviewing to understand how a leading fossil fuel- and renewable energy-producing community in the U.S. is navigating, as well as being altered by, efforts to combat the climate crisis.

Daniel Alain Evrard is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Fellow in Inequality and Wealth Concentration. His work, which has been published by the American Review of Sociology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (MIT CEEPR), has previously received support from the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University and the Stone Foundation.
 

Kelsey Pukelis — Dynamic Enrollment in Public Benefit Programs: Evidence from Disaster SNAP

Does taking up government benefits due to a natural disaster make a household more likely to take them up in the future? Pukelis embarks on the first systematic, mixed-methods study of the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP) to understand mechanisms of dynamic enrollment in social safety net programs, including individual learning, group learning, and levels of stigma.

Kelsey Pukelis, a PhD Candidate in Public Policy, is a public economist focusing on the take-up, administration, and effects of U.S. nutrition assistance programs. Her current research focuses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), with projects investigating the impacts of work requirements, online grocery shopping, and stigma.
 

Shreya Tandon — Drivers of Intra-Household Labor Supply Complementarities and Implications for Women's Economic Opportunities: Evidence from India's Garment Sector

Tandon studies the labor supply decisions of rural-urban migrants employed in the garment manufacturing sector in India. Her research suggests that concerns about commuting safety, workplace safety, and bargaining power at work might be driving migrant couples to work together at the same factory instead of diversifying, which increases their exposure to income risk in an industry prone to export demand shocks. In future work, she aims to explore how working conditions in the garment sector shape migrant households’ labor supply decisions as well as intra-household bargaining.

Shreya Tandon is a PhD candidate in Political Economy and Government on the Economics track whose research focuses on labor market frictions, women’s labor force participation, migration, and tax administration with a focus on developing countries. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, India and an MSc. in Economics from LSE.
 

Jessica Urzúa — A Collective Action Puzzle: Union Membership in “Right-to-Work” States

To better understand the potential role for unions in reducing inequality, Urzúa's project investigates workers’ motivations for contributing to collective action beyond individual financial interest, and how this may be shaped by local context.

Jessica Urzúa is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. She is interested in how power and social structure in labor markets and higher education affect economic inequality, and how social policies may exacerbate or mitigate this inequality. She is particularly interested in examining how race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status can interact and jointly contribute to labor and educational inequalities.
 

Jessica Van Meir — The Sex Workers’ Rights Movement in Guatemala

Van Meir's dissertation focuses on the sex workers' rights movement in Latin America, asking when governments recognize sex workers as workers entitled to labor rights. Although the buying and selling of sex is not criminalized in most of Latin America, no country has passed legislation granting sex workers equal rights with other workers. Van Meir will compare two countries which have recognized a sex worker union, Colombia and Guatemala, with two which have not, Argentina and Ecuador, to understand what factors lead governments to treat people who sell sex as workers. She will conduct interviews with government officials and activists, participant observation with sex worker-led organizations, and document analysis on newspaper archives across these countries.

Jessica Van Meir is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy and Ashford Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School with a regional focus on Latin America studying sex work, informal labor, critical political economy, and social movements. A former Gates Cambridge Scholar, she has spent a decade studying sex work and human trafficking and is a founding member of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective. She has worked for multiple women's rights and trans rights organizations, including a feminist law firm where she worked with survivors of sexual abuse and employment discrimination.