Kurt Schwabe, Cassie Guarino, Bruce Link, and Samantha Ying

Despite its widespread presence in the continent’s geochemistry, manganese (Mn) concentrations in drinking water systems have never been regulated in either the United States or Canada. A nascent epidemiological literature from South Asia, China, Mexico and Canada suggests that while manganese is an essential micronutrient, excessive exposure is neurotoxic, especially to infants and young children. Field-based studies, particularly in Bangladesh and Canada, have found that elevated exposure to manganese in drinking water (WMn) is associated with impaired intellectual function, lower birth weight and/or higher infant mortality1. Unfortunately, there have been few studies investigating this potential association in the US. The primary aim of the proposed research is to determine if unregulated Mn in drinking water poses a public health threat in California. A secondary aim is to quantify the health costs of unregulated Mn in terms of depressed human capital accumulation in children, and to investigate the degree to which the distribution of these costs is skewed by socio-economic and/or demographic characteristics.

Early-life conditions hold a disproportionate sway on later-life well-being. The health economics literature shows that in utero as well as postnatal nutritional shocks, childhood disease, and early- life poverty tend to hold back cognitive development in children, and to depress adult productivity and earnings. By evaluating the health hazards of WMn on children, we can avoid the costs of overlooking a potential public health issue, which is also a poverty issue. Since the policy fix for removing Mn from drinking water systems requires no expensive technologies, this research has potentially far-reaching benefits.

We situate our research in California because its geochemistry offers sufficient spatial and intertemporal variation in Mn levels. A significant proportion of Californians depend on groundwater for their drinking water; among these, the communities that rely on private, unmonitored wells are likely to be more vulnerable to WMn. Frequent droughts often lead to the drilling of deeper agricultural wells, which may in turn affect the quality of drinking water available to disadvantaged communities adjacent to large farms. Given that one-in-eight Americans live in California, the state provides a diverse and large population, which is helpful for an observational study to detect statistically significant associations.

Dana Simmons

Associate Professor| History

What causes hunger? How does hunger drive behavior, motivation, fear, risk taking, and self-control? Do humans and animals experience hunger in the same way? How do evolution and genetic adaptation shape susceptibility to hunger, and the risk of metabolic disease? Scientists have grappled with these questions for well over a century. Their scope and importance goes well beyond the realm of physiology. Hunger is a field in which science and politics are indistinguishably melded. Politics shapes the nature of scientific experiments – where experimental subjects are driven by hunger to work or to hoard. Scientific ideas about hunger, insecurity and obesity, shape public health and welfare policy. This research project reveals the intersections of science and policy around hunger, food insecurity and food aid across the twentieth century.

This research project is a history of hunger and food insecurity in twentieth-century science and policy. This is a history of how: (1) hunger came to stand in for many basic human qualities and motivations; (2) people with food insecurity or obesity have come to see themselves as maladapted, as lacking in self-control, self-discipline, or as destined to suffer because of an unfortunate genetic or economic heritage; (3) hunger came to define the self in postwar America. At the very moment when consumer goods became available at a scale never before seen, hunger emerged as a political and scientific problem. This study is an attempt to figure out why.

Sarojini Hirschleifer

We aim to address a significant gap in the literature by studying the experimental impact on both worker outcomes (skill, wages, turnover, self-employment, job satisfaction) and firm outcomes (productivity, profits, and job creation) of providing technical skills training to workers. We plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of offering technical training to workers. We focus on a single industry—metal fabrication—which allows for careful measurement of worker training outcomes. Since we target the training to employees (rather than owners) we will be able to study: i) impacts on employees, who are relatively poorer, ii) how market outcomes differ for the newly trained employees, and iii) how labor market and managerial frictions affect baseline investments in training and result in heterogeneous impacts of training.

Tuppett Yates

Professor | Psychology

More than 15 million American children (~20%) live in poverty, with substantially higher rates among ethnic minorities. Poverty is a powerful contributor to academic and health disparities, yet many children evidence resilience, defined as competent adaptation despite serious threats to development. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that children who evidence competent adaptation in contexts of economic adversity may experience later problems.

Efforts to understand when and how children’s adaptive mobilization in contexts of poverty may exact heretofore unrecognized adaptive costs in later development have implications for risk identification and prevention efforts. However, extant research features several limitations. First, the extent to which these health costs generalize beyond the specific ecology of African American youth is not known. Second, we need to identify protective factors that can mitigate the negative effects of resilience on health to inform interventions. Third, we need to identify modifiable behavioral mechanisms that may explain how resilience undermines physical health.

[I will] address these limitations by testing the generalizability of the health costs of children’s resilience in poverty using a large (N=250) and diverse (50% female; 46.0% Latinx, 37.6% poverty, 32.1% near-poverty17) community sample that has already completed 7 multi-method, multi-informant laboratory and school assessments of risk and adaptation at ages 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 with outstanding retention (95.6% have returned for >1 follow-ups). This seed grant will support a new assessment to measure sleep and health at age 14 and answer the following questions to inform future interventions for diverse children in poverty.

Michael Bates

Assistant Professor | Economics

The goal of this study is to understand how to attract and retain highly effective teachers in high-poverty schools. We will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the efficacy of financial incentives at each stage of teacher staffing. Specifically, we analyze the ability of incentives to affect: 1) the number and quality of applicants, 2) the quality of hires, and 3) teacher retention. We examine how changes in teacher mobility and search behavior impact the academic achievement of their students. By disentangling decisions made by teachers from those made by schools, we can provide insight regarding what policies and resources may be most fruitful in providing students with equal access to a high-quality education.

Amalia Cabezas

Associate Professor | Media & Cultural Studies and Gender & Sexual Studies

Impoverished undocumented Latina migrants are frequently compelled to accept jobs in places that provide sexualized entertainment. Such is the case of women who work serving beers to a predominantly Latino migrant clientele in East Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. This investigation is a case study of undocumented Latinas who work in cantinas (bars) and have been trafficked into the U.S. to serve beers, dance and provide companionship to male customers. The majority of the undocumented male clientele utilize this sexualized space of entertainment as a form of homosocial leisure. Cantineras earn a sales commission from beers bought by male customers and can potentially earn extra income by providing sexual services outside the cantinas (bars). They may be perceived as sex workers but selling sex is not part of the work they are hired to do. Instead, they operate in a gray area of sociality as women that are available for commercial sex but also for romance and marriage. Thus far, most of the research conducted with cantineras examines issues pertaining to their occupational health such as alcohol consumption, social stigma and the risks of sexually transmitted diseases (Fernandez-Esquer and Agoff 2012; Ayala, et al 1996). We know less about exploitation by supervisors and patrons, and other health stressors such as lack of immigration documents, migration-related debt, pressure to provide sexual services and threats of violence. Most investigations indicate that cantinas are a niche for human trafficking (Risley 2010; Ayala, et al 1996). Yet, given this assertion, the public nature of their labor, and the regular contact that they have with state agents, no research efforts have explicitly examined the trafficking aspect of their work.

Jade Sasser

Assistant Professor | Gender & Sexuality Studies

Nearly half the world’s population cooks their daily meals while coughing and spluttering through thick, dark smoke. Most of these cooks are women and girls carrying out daily household gender roles. Their kitchens fill with smoke from burning biomass- wood, animal dung, crop waste, or charcoal- used to fuel traditional open fires in poorly ventilated homes. International development actors around the world have responded to this problem by developing and marketing improved cookstoves as a “win-win” technology that offers co-benefits for public health, the environment, and gender equality (GACC 2011). Scholarship on cookstoves has primarily focused on questions of stove design, function, and effectiveness- largely technical questions that obscure the pressing social, cultural, and economic conditions that shape household cooking practices (Simon, Bumpus & Mann 2012; Simon 2014). While there is a nascent social science literature that explores the needs and priorities of stove users, this work has not addressed the central role of gender in shaping the dynamics of cookstove programs, from the development of the technology to questions of production, access, and adoption. This is a significant gap in the literature given that stoves are gendered technologies- tools that are shaped through, and play a role in affirming, unequal gender relations (Cockburn 1997). My hypothesis is that the NICP model, in not accounting for the barriers and constraints facing the poorest women in Ethiopia, reproduces these barriers, thus excluding the most economically disadvantaged women from participation. In this project, I will study: the role of poverty in women’s participation in NICP associations over time; the ways the Government’s framing of empowerment does and does not respond to the conditions of gendered poverty; and whether, and how, the Government and cookstove program stakeholders respond to poverty-driven barriers to program participation.

Carolyn Sloane

Assistant Professor | Economics
 

Over the last 30 years in the US labor market, returns to workers have become increasingly unequal. While disparity in any form appeals to our basic sense of fairness, the impact of rising wage inequality may have effects on society that are even more far-reaching. Rising wage inequality could affect the growth horizon of the US economy and limit the opportunity for upward economic mobility of its residents and citizens. The question that should be on lips of researchers interested in informing the policy debate on inequality is: Can we identify the causal impacts of rising wage inequality? To take a step back, an ideal experiment for testing the effects of rising wage inequality on a city-level outcome, such as local rates of college-going, may be to randomly assign differential changes in the Gini coefficient (or upper-tail inequality) to different US cities and observe what happens to enrollments. Our instrumentation strategy approximates this experiment by exploiting a form of randomization across US cities: initial industrial employment mix. Early examples of papers that use a similar strategy include Murphy and Topel (1987) and Bartik (1991). Most of this literature has used these instruments (referred to as “shift-share” instruments) to predict changes to mean wages by interacting the initial industrial employment share with changes in the within-industry mean wage at the national level. However, in thinking about answering questions about disparity, predictions of the center of the distribution are unsatisfying. We innovate on this strategy by interacting the initial local industrial employment share with changes in the within-industry distribution of wages at the national level. The rationale for constructing the instrument in this way is that a local wage distribution is a weighted sum of the local wage distributions of all of the industries that comprise employment in that city. For example, if all of the workers in Riverside were employed in manufacturing or services, the local wage distribution of Riverside would be a weighted sum of the wage distributions within manufacturing and services.