Recent and Ongoing Research Projects

The U.S. debt collection industry has grown in tandem with rising household indebtedness. Prior research on debt and mental health mainly treats debt as a resource and liability, rather than a power relationship between creditors and debtors.

Older Americans represent an increasing share of the nation’s poor and racial-ethnic inequality in later life poverty is persistent. While lack of employment is often cited as a structural source of racial-ethnic poverty inequalities, surprisingly little is known about the role of employment quality in maintaining racial-ethnic poverty gaps.

Many older Americans partially self-insure against the risks of older age by accumulating assets, the most significant for many being home equity. A series of projects co-authored with Stephanie Moulton, Donald Haurin, Cäzilia Loibl, and colleagues investigate how housing wealth and mortgage debt influence the health and well-being of older adult homeowners.

Labor unions reduce labor market inequality by increasing wages, compressing the wage distribution, stabilizing working hours, and offering more comprehensive and generous non-wage benefits. However, less is known about whether and how unions influence workers’ financial advantages beyond the labor market, for example in credit and consumer markets.

Credit and social safety net benefits are among the most important resources that households rely on when facing income shortfalls and other forms of economic scarcity. Theorists have described a credit-welfare state tradeoff where credit markets become particularly important where safety net benefits are less supportive.

During the early 2000s rates of college enrollment and completion rose for young adults from rural backgrounds at the same time that rising college costs and stagnating family incomes increased rates of student loan borrowing.

Do Right to Work (RTW) laws unleash economic dynamism? RTW has been the focus of political contestation for 3/4 of a century and has been an important contributor to the geographically uneven decline of union membership since the labor movement’s peak in the mid-1950s.

The effects of labor unions on wage attainment are well documented. Yet few studies have connected union membership to household wealth accumulation. Synthesizing insights from life course sociology and power resources theory, research on the labor market benefits of union coverage, and expanded approaches to wealth measurement, this ongoing project develops a novel framework that accounts for cumulative career union coverage in the estimation of the wealth returns to union membership.