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Discussion Paper
The Role of Educational Attainment in Household Debt and Delinquency Disparities
This post concludes a three-part series exploring the gender, racial, and educational disparities of debt outcomes of college students. In the previous two posts, we examined how debt holding and delinquency behaviors vary among students of different race and gender, breaking up our analyses by level of degree pursued by the student. We found that Black and Hispanic students were less likely than white students to take on credit card debt, auto loans, and mortgage debt, but experienced higher rates of delinquency in each of these debt areas by the age of 30. In contrast, Black students were ...
Discussion Paper
Was the 2021-22 Rise in Inflation Equitable?
In our previous post, we discussed how the labor market recovery—the “maximum employment” half of the Federal Reserve System’s dual mandate—featured not only a return of overall employment rates to pre-pandemic levels, but also a narrowing of racial and ethnic gaps in employment rates. In this post, we take up the second half of the dual mandate—price stability—and discuss heterogeneity in inflation rates faced by different demographic groups during the rise in inflation in2021-22. We find that, in contrast to inequalities in employment rates, disparities in inflation rates have ...
Discussion Paper
Racial and Income Gaps in Consumer Spending following COVID-19
This post is the first in a two-part series that seeks to understand whether consumer spending patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic evolved differentially across counties by race and income. As the pandemic hit and social distancing restrictions were put into place in March 2020, consumer spending plummeted. Subsequently, as social distancing restrictions began to be relaxed later in spring 2020, consumer spending started to rebound. We find that higher-income counties had a considerably steeper decline and a shallower recovery than low-income counties did. The differences by race were also ...
Report
The Affordable Care Act and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis
Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across the Medicaid expansion frontier. We find that (1) health insurance changes discontinuously at the frontier, (2) COVID-19 testing is discontinuously larger in Medicaid-expanding states, and (3) the fraction of beds occupied in ICUs is discontinuously smaller in Medicaid-expanding states. We also find ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in COVID-19: Essential Workers
This is the fourth and final post in this series aimed at understanding the gap in COVID-19 intensity by race and by income. The previous three posts focused on the role of mediating variables—such as uninsurance rates, comorbidities, and health resource in the first post; public transportation, and home crowding in the second; and social distancing, pollution, and age composition in the third—in explaining the racial and income gap in the incidence of COVID-19. In this post, we now investigate the role of employment in essential services in explaining this gap.
Journal Article
Understanding the Linkages between Climate Change and Inequality in the United States
The authors conduct a review of the existing academic literature to outline possible links between climate change and inequality in the United States. First, researchers have shown that the impact of both physical and transition risks may be uneven across location, income, race, and age. This is driven by a region’s geography as well as its ability to adapt. Second, measures that individuals and governments take to adapt to climate change and to transition to lower emissions risk increasing inequality. Finally, while federal aid and insurance coverage can mitigate the direct impact of ...
Report
Understanding the Linkages between Climate Change and Inequality in the United States
We conduct a review of the existing academic literature to outline possible links between climate change and inequality in the United States. First, researchers have shown that the impact of both physical and transition risks may be uneven across location, income, race, and age. This is driven by a region’s geography as well as its adaptation capabilities. Second, measures that individuals and governments take to adapt to climate change and transition to lower emissions risk increasing inequality. Finally, while federal aid and insurance coverage can mitigate the direct impact of physical ...
Discussion Paper
Unequal Burdens: Racial Differences in ICU Stress during the Third Wave of COVID-19
A critical risk during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the possibility of the hospital system becoming overwhelmed. COVID-19 not only has killed nearly 2 percent of people with confirmed infections but causes many more who contract it to develop severe complications that are potentially fatal if not treated in an intensive care unit (ICU). As ICU capacity is based on typical needs for intensive care before the pandemic, a surge of COVID-related ICU patients may leave no room for individuals requiring intensive care for other reasons—such as heart attacks—or may exceed the total ICU ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in Commuting for Work Following COVID-19
The introduction of numerous social distancing policies across the United States, combined with voluntary pullbacks in activity as responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, resulted in differences emerging in the types of work that were done from home and those that were not. Workers at businesses more likely to require in-person work—for example, some, but not all, workers in healthcare, retail, agriculture and construction—continued to come in on a regular basis. In contrast, workers in many other businesses, such as IT and finance, were generally better able to switch to working from home ...
Discussion Paper
Uneven Distribution of Household Debt by Gender, Race, and Education
Household debt has risen markedly since 2013 and amounts to more than $15 trillion dollars. While the aggregate volume of household debt has been well-documented, literature on the gender, racial and education distribution of debt is lacking, largely because of an absence of adequate data that combine debt, demographic, and education information. In a three-part series beginning with this post, we seek to bridge this gap. In this first post, we focus on differences in debt holding behavior across race and gender. Specifically, we explore gender and racial disparities in different types of ...