2024 Program for Research on Inequality (PRI) research grants awarded to six Princeton students - Princeton University

Kaan Cankat

Kaan Cankat’s research project, "The Origins and Distributional Consequences of the Property Tax Revolts of the 1960s and 1970s," aims to understand the connections between our system of local public finance (i.e. who pays taxes for what services provided by the government) and inequality in the United States.

Cankat became interested in this research area after the topic of property tax revolts in America in the 1970s came up across several books he had been reading for other projects. He states, "I was fascinated by the fact that starting in the 1970s, there were a series of grassroot movements that significantly transformed how local public goods were financed in the United States." This led him to question why these revolts came about and who stood benefit from the reforms they wanted to put in place. Cankat continued, "these were really wide sweeping policies and many of them are still in place, so I was also drawn to how these revolts might still shape American inequality today."

"The PRI grant will allow me to have the resources to digitize new historical data sources that will bring light to these questions," Cankat said.

Federica Carannante

Federica Carannante's research project, "Reducing Information Asymmetries: The effect of Pay Transparency on Labor Market Outcomes," studies the equilibrium effects of pay transparency mandates on wages and workforce composition and aims to explore potential policy interventions that could improve equilibrium outcomes.

Co-author Pablo Zarate (another PRI grantee) and Carannante became interested in the topic as pay transparency laws have gained significant traction in the U.S. over the past five years, with many states requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings.

"The PRI grant enables us to access a dataset crucial to develop the analysis," says Carannante.

Agustín Barboza Da Rosa

Agustín Barboza Da Rosa's research project, "Unionization Dynamics Across the Firm Size Distribution," aims to better understand the dynamics of labor market power in the US economy by studying the evolution of unionization rates across the entire firm size distribution, with a particular emphasis on the largest firms in the country. Barboza Da Rosa and his coauthor Dhruv Gaur, a PhD student at MIT, are focusing on unionization as it is a fundamental institution through which workers have historically fought for better pay and working conditions.

He became interested in the topic after observing that despite the United States economy being increasingly dominated by "superstar" firms, many of these firms have very low unionization rates (e.g., Amazon), and, in some cases, not even a single union member despite employing hundreds of thousands of employees (e.g., Walmart, Home Depot and Target).

"The grant will allow us to hire research assistants to carry out the significant data work that this project entails. Furthermore, the grant will provide us with the resources necessary to buy data and travel to meet with labor organizations and see firsthand the challenges they face when trying to organize in a large firm," Barboza Da Rosa said. "The support from PRI will be fundamental to prepare this project for its next step, where we will continue working on this project using restricted access data from the Census Bureau."

Pablo Zarate

Pablo Zarate's project, "Job Prospects, Informality and Long-Term Labor Market Outcomes for Youth: Evidence from Chile," aims to investigate the long-term effects of labor market entry through informal employment on workers' subsequent career trajectories in the context of Chile. Early career conditions and initial labor market experiences have persistent effects on workers' long-term employment trajectories. Whereas this phenomenon has been extensively studied in the context of developed countries, the existing evidence for developing countries remains scarce. In contrast to the case of advanced economies, the interplay of a large mass of unskilled young adults with pervasive yet unproductive informal jobs might create a trade off for disadvantaged labor market entrants in developing countries.

A joint project with Valentina Andrade and Bernardo Esteves, Senior Research Specialists at Princeton, they became interested in this idea after noticing that the long-term effects of informality on young adults' careers still is an understudied topic in the context of developing countries.

"In order to pursue our research question, we will leverage a rich long-spanning (and still ongoing) household survey dataset from Chile that tracks individuals' labor market trajectories in both formal and informal sectors throughout more than twenty years. We then intend to complement this survey with Chilean administrative records containing detailed geographic information on workplace location and residential histories for the survey respondents," Zarate said. "The generous grant from PRI will thus allow us to merge the existing survey data with administrative records in Chile."

Renjie Bao & Ranie Lin

Working together on their research project, "Pharmacy Deserts and Cross-Subsidization," Renjie Bao and Ranie Lin were motivated by the recent wave of closures of many retail pharmacies across the U.S., which has received widespread news coverage and attention from health policy researchers. In particular, these closures are often in lower-income or rural areas, exacerbating the issue of "pharmacy deserts" where patients in underserved areas have little access to nearby pharmacies.

They decided to develop a framework to study this phenomenon with an emphasis on how retail pharmacies typically serve two markets (prescription drugs for patients and non-health related goods), which can generate within-store demand spillovers. "We want to quantify the magnitude of this mechanism and understand its contribution in generating spatial inequality," Lin said. "We can then use our framework to evaluate various policy proposals to address pharmacy deserts."

"The PRI grant will be used to cover our data expenses (primarily the pharmacy claims data) and other research-related activities. After acquiring the claims data, we plan to generate a set of empirical results documenting disparities in pharmacy access," Bao and Lin said. "In the long term, we will estimate a model that incorporates the aforementioned cross-market effects and conduct policy evaluations."