Category: Faculty Research

A columnist writing about the power of labor unions and the jobless recovery cites a recent blog entry by Nancy Folbre, professor of economics, in the New York Times. Folbre argues that the reason jobs aren’t being created as the economy recovers is that there is now a “borderless” and globalized economic system at work. For the full article, visit The Economist.

Nancy Folbre is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a writer for the New York Times blog, Economix. Recently, Folbre posted about recent research on women and the “motherhood penalty,” or the loss of wages upon having children, by faculty associate Michelle Budig, Professor of Sociology. Her primary comment regarding Budig’s research was that many high-income women running for office in this election cycle may be unaware of the trend of women with the lowest earnings suffering most from the motherhood penalty. For the full article, click here.

Folbre is a leading expert on care policy and is the author of several well-known books, including The Field Guide to the U.S. Economy. Other recent books include Saving State U: Fixing Public Higher Education; Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas; Warm Hands in Cold Age: Gender and Aging; The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values; and Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family. She also maintains a personal research blog, Care Talk, and is a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Folbre has consulted for the United Nations Human Development Office, the World Bank, and other organizations.

Economix puts economics, which the Times describes as “the study of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day,” in a simpler and more relatable manner for those of us who have forgotten everything we had learned from ECON101. Folbre writes for this blog weekly. For the full article about Budig’s research, click here.

A new co-edited collection by Linda Tropp, Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations, was published this week.  Tropp is associate professor of psychology at UMass Amherst and a CPPA faculty associate.  WMAC recently interviewed Tropp about the book.

Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of a day not only when racial tensions would subside in our country, but when genuine associations and friendships developed apart from considerations of race and ethnicity.  In a similar way, Tropp’s book explores how positive relations among different racial and ethnic groups can go beyond simply reducing prejudice.

The new 212-page volume collects writing by leading social psychologists who identify strategies for reaching across racial and ethnic divides.  The book examines motivation and processes that underlie our ability to develop meaningful relationship between groups and promote trust, empathy and forgiveness.

“What we’re hoping to do with this book  is go beyond social psychology’s traditional focus on reducing prejudice, and instead explore how people are motivated to actively engage with members of other groups,” Tropp says.

The need for this compilation came from Tropp and co-editor Robyn Mallett’s observation that increasingly, people report anxiety or uncertainty rather than prejudice or hostility when reflecting on what to expect or how to act with members of other groups. Though these concerns are often overlooked, they can act as formidable barriers to developing positive attitudes and relationships, she adds.

An award-winning researcher, Tropp is also the director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at UMass Amherst and a member of the Public Engagement Project Steering Committee. She has worked on national and state initiatives to improve race relations in schools and has evaluated programs designed to reduce racial and ethnic conflict.  Robyn Mallet is a professor at Loyola University of Chicago.

The eleven chapters in this book published by the American Psychological Association are organized in four broad sections: Reconceptualizing Intergroup Attitudes, Motivations and Expectations in Cross-Group Relations, Forging Cross-Group Relationships and Applications to Post-Conflict Reconciliation. This last topic points to similarities between processes that contribute to race relations in the United States and those that underlie conflicts in other parts of the world, such as between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East, religious communities in Northern Ireland, racial groups in South Africa and political factions in Post-Pinochet Chile.

“It is our hope that by bringing these perspectives together in one volume, we can begin to chart new directions for research that emphasize positive pathways to improved intergroup relations,” the editors state. “That is, rather than focusing on reducing prejudice and conflict, we can actually work to enhance mutual liking, trust and friendship between groups.”

Additional information about Tropp’s and Mallet’s new collection is available at the APA website.

MV Lee Badgett, Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration and Professor of Economics, was a featured guest in The Economist live debate over single-sex marriage on January 5, 2011.

Economist Debates transform traditional Oxford style of debating into a live, interactive, online forum. According to The Economist, “The format was made famous by the 186-year-old Oxford Union and has been practised by heads of state, prominent intellectuals and galvanising figures from across the cultural spectrum.”

The online debate begins with an assertion, in this case, “This house believes that single-sex marriage should be legal,” which is then defended and assailed by leading academic and professional experts, as well as interested lay readers and participants.  Featured guest commentary, like Badgett’s remarks,  provide necessary context and informed perspective on the subject.  Each side has three chances to persuade readers: opening, rebuttal and closing. The single-sex debate opened January 3 and will close January 10. Ultimately, the debate will be decided by a public vote.

M.V. Lee Badgett is an economics professor and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She also serves as research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law. Her most recent book, “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage” (NYU Press, 2009), addresses the core issues in the marriage debates in European countries and America. She drew on that work in her recent testimony in the Perry v Schwarzenegger trial challenging California’s Proposition 8. Her first book was “Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men”.

Joya Misra, professor of Sociology and Public Policy, presented research on work-family policies at three conferences in Madrid, Atlanta, and Dallas this semester. As a leading expert in the field, Misra was the inaugural recipient of the World Bank/Luxembourg Income Study Gender Research Award and, in 2010, was named editor of the premier journal Gender and Society.

In October, Misra took her cross-national policy work to the Juan March Institute Conference in Madrid. With Stephanie Moller and Eiko Strader, Misra presented “The Sources of Inequality Across the Globe” which presented findings from a National Science Foundation-funded project that examined cross-national effects of work-family policies on poverty for women and, particularly, mothers. Misra and collaborators sought to understand why poverty varies so dramatically cross-nationally — especially for single mothers and their children — and how poverty is related to differences in policy contexts including welfare policies for families with children, labor market policies, and work-family policies that might enable (or limit) mothers’ ability to engage in paid employment.

At the American Sociological Association conference in Atlanta in August 2010, Misra’s presentations explored the intersection of policy and gender.”A Cross-national Perspective on Gender, Parenthood, and Employment,” presented by Misra, Michelle Budig, and Irene Boeckmann, extended work which developed a database of Work-Family Policy Indicators for 22 countries.  With additional funding from the National Science Foundation, these researchers continue to examine how work-family policies, economic factors, and larger cultural forces may mediate wage and employment inequalities. With Jennifer Lundquist and Abby Templer, Misra also presented findings related to her UMass Administration-MSP Joint Work-Life Committee study in “Gendered Patterns of Work-Time and Care-Time among Faculty.” Additionally, Misra was the session organizer of “Race, Gender, Class Implications of Transnational Carework” and participated in an Author-Meets-Critics about  Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America (New York University Press, 2008) by Jeanne Flavin while at the conference.

Finally, In Dallas in April, Misra, Budig and Boeckmann presented “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood in a Cross-National Perspective: Relationships with Work-Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes” at the Population Association of America. The research presented here found that “despite the varying socio-political contexts of the countries in our analyses, social policies and norms that support new mothers’ continuous connection to the labor force are most strongly linked to reductions in motherhood wage inequalities.”

For more information on Misra’s research, visit her website.