Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
In her 2023 Nobel Lecture, Claudia Goldin surveys the entry of women into the workforce, the decrease in the gender gap in earnings, and the relevance of childbirth to the remaining gender gap in earnings.
This essay summarizes how women historically became an economic force and why, despite being vital to the world’s economies, they still earn less than comparable men even in nations with family-friendly policies and gender-neutral laws, norms, and values.
Although the housing vouchers offered in the Moving to Opportunity experiment reduced childhood poverty, they did not increase subjects’ adult voting participation.
Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.