The time that parents spend teaching and playing with their young children has important consequences for later life achievement and attainment. Previous research suggests that there are significant class inequalities in how much time parents devote to this kind of developmental childcare in the United States. Yet, due in part to data limitations, prior research has not accounted for how class inequalities in family structure, assortative mating, and specialization between partners may exacerbate or ameliorate these gaps. We match parental respondents within the American Time Use Survey to generate synthetic parental dyads, which we use to estimate, in turn, the contributions of family structure, assortative mating, and specialization to class gaps in parental time spent in developmental care of children aged 0-6. We find some evidence that accounting for class differences in family structure widens income gaps in total parental time in developmental childcare of young children. Further, we show that assortative mating of parents further contributes to educational gaps in developmental childcare, while specialization between partners does not offset these wider class divides. While the net effect of these three processes on income-based gaps in childcare time is more modest, accounting for these three processes more than doubles education-based gaps in total parental developmental childcare as compared to maternal time alone. Our findings from this novel empirical approach provide a more holistic view of the extent and sources of inequality in parental time investments in young children’s cognitive and social development.

Scholars have theorized how private parental investments of money and time in children may respond differentially to the loss of the public provision of schooling during the summer, based on parental socioeconomic status (SES). Importantly, the widening of SES gaps in parental investments of money and time in children during the summer could generate SES gaps in children’s learning during the summer. We investigate the seasonality of SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time using the 1996–2018 Consumer Expenditure Survey and 2003–2019 American Time Use Survey. We find SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time during the summer and SES gaps in expenditures are larger in the summer than during non-summer months. We find little evidence that these gaps have grown substantially over time, but we do find these gaps are larger for younger school-age children than for older school-age children. This research provides new evidence regarding the link between public and parental investments in children, addresses a key mechanism underlying the debate about the summer learning gap, and provides new evidence on how parents may target investments in children towards the ages when they are most consequential.

White-Black wealth gaps have widened in the wake of the Great Recession, suggesting that White households have disproportionately benefited from the post-Recession economic recovery. In this paper, I explore the role of rising house prices over this period in explaining widening White-Black wealth gaps. I combine geocoded longitudinal data on household wealth from the nationally-representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics with Census tract house price index data to estimate how the distributions of White and Black household wealth would have changed under a counterfactual scenario where house prices did not appreciate from 2013 to 2019. I find that rising house prices account for most of the increase in the White-Black wealth gap over this period. While Black homeowners did benefit from greater Census tract-level house price appreciation than White homeowners, White households benefited more from rising house prices overall due to having greater rates of homeownership and higher house values than Black households. Given the important role of institutional racism through the 20th century in explaining White-Black gaps in homeownership and house values, these findings demonstrate a pathway through which the legacies of institutional racism contribute to present-day racial inequalities.

Local restrictions on building new housing contribute to rising housing costs and racial residential segregation. I hypothesize that the spread of residential growth controls in the late 20th century was driven by White households to maintain racial residential segregation in the face of rapid non-White population growth at a time when de jure racial segregation could no longer be enforced. Previous research on this topic has generally been limited by failing to account for alternative explanations for the spread of growth controls and by the reliance on cross-sectional data on residential land use regulations. Using event-history models on panel data on residential land use regulations in California cities from 1970-92, I find evidence supporting myhypothesis. Cities that are Whiter than their surrounding metropolitan area were significantly more likely to pass residential growth controls. This effect appears to be primarily driven by cities that are less Black than their metropolitan area, suggesting that growth restrictions wereused as a tool to exclude nearby Black residents.

Precarious work, which has become more prevalent in the United States in recent decades, is disproportionately experienced by workers of lower socio-economic classes, and research suggests that the erosion of worker power has contributed to this class polarization in precarity. One dimension of precarious work of growing interest to scholars and policymakers is instability faced by workers in the amount and regularity of their work hours. However, we know little about the magnitude of month-to-month or week-to-week (intra-year) volatility in hours worked, the extent of class-based polarization in this measure of job quality, and whether worker power moderates this polarization. In this paper, we make novel use of the panel nature of the nationally-representative Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate intra-year volatility in the actual hours respondents report working in the previous week across four consecutive survey months. Using this new measure, we then show that, net of demographic characteristics and controls for occupation and industry, low-wage workers experience disproportionately greater work hour volatility. Finally, we find evidence that reductions in marketplace bargaining power--as measured by higher state-level unemployment rates--increase wage- and education-based polarization in work hour volatility, while increases in associational power--as measured by union coverage--reduce wage-based polarization in work hour volatility.