How post-Civil War segregation helped to shape the patterns of racial inequality that we see today

In the wake of recent tragic killings of blacks by whites in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, the issue of black-white segregation has come to the fore once again. In new research Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef examine the history of segregation in the aftermath of the Civil War. They find that in the North, as today, segregation was largely in the form of racialized African-American districts, while in the South, segregation was more fine-grained with black families relegated to side streets and alleys in more mixed communities, reproducing the racial inequality found under slavery. They write that examining early forms of racial segregation and how they varied by region may be useful in explaining regional differences in racial unrest in the contemporary United States

HOUSEHOLD ECONOMIES IN THE CONTEXT OF FINANCIALIZATION AND POPULATION AGING

This three-study dissertation examines how financialization of the U.S. economy and population aging have reshaped the economic lives of American households and the implications for their well-being and inequality at large, with the focus on both between- and within-household differences. First, I draw on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine varieties of household engagement with finance and its association with wealth in the 1980s, when financialization of the U.S. economy just started, and the late 2000s, when it was at a peak. Latent class analysis shows that in both periods, a wide range of financial practices and attitudes cohere to form distinctive configurations of investing, borrowing, and money management. Furthermore, the structure of household engagement with finance became more differentiated in the course of financialization, and the distribution of various forms of engagement with finance changed as well. Finally, engagement with finance exhibits independent associations with household wealth accumulation and wealth mobility in both periods, even after controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic attributes. Second, I propose and test a novel explanation for individual variation in financial risk-taking that operates at the organizational level. Specifically, I identify company compensation structures as an important predictor of employees’ financial risk-taking. Drawing on data from a survey of employees in fourteen American companies, I show that employees’ financial risk-taking indeed varies by company compensation structures, even after controlling for standard explanations, and the direction of association differs for different compensation plans and by attitudinal vs. behavioral risk-taking. Third, I shift the focus from economic inequality between families to gender inequality within families. Specifically, I focus on the gender division of elder care among adult children as an increasingly important component of unpaid family labor in the context of the aging of the U.S. population. Using the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of elderly Americans, I show that caregiving to elderly parents varies not only by an adult child’s own gender, but also by the gender of the siblings with whom caregiving is shared and by the gender of the parent to whom care is provided

Jim Crow, Ethnic Enclaves, and Status Attainment: Occupational Mobility among U.S. Blacks, 1880-1940

Demographic and ecological theories yieldmixed evidence as to whether ethnic enclaves are a benefit or a hindrance to the status attainment of residents and entrepreneurs. This article provides one possible theoretical resolution by separating the positive effects that may emanate among co-ethnic neighbors from the negative effects that may resultwith the concentration of racial or ethnic groups. The theory is tested by analyzing occupational wage attainment and entrepreneurship among African-Americans between 1880 and 1940, a historical context in which Jim Crow laws imposed segregation exogenously. Drawing on crosssectional and panel census data for representative samples of blacks in theUnited States, the results suggest consistent upward occupational mobilityamong residents with same-race neighbors, accompanied with downward mobility among residents who are concentrated in larger racialized enclaves. Both patterns are also observed in the distribution of entrepreneurial activity among blacks during the Jim Crow era