Schooling choice can lead to persistent disparities if individuals in different groups have different levels of access to good schools or make different types of decisions about which schools to attend. This project investigates impacts on student outcomes, competitiveness and racial segregation as a result of the implementation of a new public-school choice system that was first approved in December 2001 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. In this study, Hastings looks at the consequences of winning one’s first choice school in a choice lottery.

Aizer, along with Laura Stroud in Community Health, is examining the role of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on maternal smoking in changing smoking behavior during pregnancy and how these changes spread across educational groups. Their results suggest that not only were the educated more responsive to the initial announcement but, consistent with a peer-effects model, smoking reductions among the educated were more dramatic in areas of high educational segregation.

Aizer (in collaboration with Laura Stroud and Stephen Buka in Community Health) explores the effects of maternal stress on child outcomes using a unique longitudinal data set. She finds that cortisol levels of low SES mothers are both higher on average and more variable, suggesting that prenatal stress may play an important role in explaining why relatively few children born into poverty are able to escape it as adults.

Foster, along with a former student, evaluates how race-based preferences and geographical distance affect nursing home sorting. He finds that the resulting segregation exacerbates racial disparities in the quality of nursing-home care. In addition to peer-reviewed academic papers, this project resulted in a repository of long-term care data and state policies, and a Web site providing access to policies, provider data, and a quality-based map of LTC providers by location.