Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Prize for Exemplary Work on Inequality and Decision Making

The Tobin Project is pleased to announce that the 2018 Prize for Exemplary Work on Inequality and Decision Making has been awarded to Orestes Patterson Hastings (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Colorado State University) and Daniel Schneider (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley). In their paper with Joe LaBriola, “Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments,” Hastings and Schneider identify a correlation between increased income inequality at the state level and different patterns of parental expenditures on children, which could lead to greater income-based gaps in children’s educational and extracurricular opportunities. More information about the prize and the winning research can be found here.

Hastings and Schneider’s paper was selected by a committee comprised of leading scholars of inequality: Nancy Adler (Lisa and John Pritzker Professor of Medical Psychology, University of California, San Francisco), Marianne Bertrand (Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business), and Christopher Jencks (Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Emeritus, Harvard Kennedy School). Professor Adler observes “the papers submitted for consideration for this prize reflected wide-ranging interest in the impact of income inequality…The number of applications and quality of the research among young researchers in a range of disciplines bodes well for this area of work.” The Tobin Project is hopeful that the 2018 prize will encourage scholars to examine important, unanswered questions in the field of Inequality and Decision Making and dedicate themselves to research that helps illuminate the challenges inequality poses to our society and how they might be addressed.