Allen Hyde Publishes Two New Articles

Posted November 18, 2019

Assistant professor Allen Hyde published two articles recently. In the first paper titled "Degrees of inequality: The Great Recession and the college earnings premium in U.S. metropolitan areas" coauthored with Angran Li and Michael Wallace at Social Science Research, the authors explored how the Great Recession affected the college earnings premium or CEP (or the gap in earnings for those with and without a college degree) in urban areas across the United States, net of social demographic and labor market changes. They show that the areas hit hardest by the Great Recession had the lowest CEP pre-Recession yet the Great Recession caused the CEP to increase rapidly in these communities such that the gap is relatively large in many US metropolitan areas now. 

In the second solo-authored paper called “Left Behind?” Financialization and Income Inequality Between the Affluent, Middle Class, and The Poor at Sociological Inquiry, explores how the growth of finance has affected income inequality in 16 affluent countries from 1981 to 2011 using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Consistent with previous research, I find that financialization has caused income inequality to rise by increasing the gap between the affluent and middle class; however, this research also shows that the gap between the middle class and poor is also increasing due to financialization, which has been understudied in the past.