Urban Innovation Lunch Colloquium: New Mansueto Fellows Lightning Round Presentation

Описание: Each new Mansueto Fellow presented a 15-minute overview of their research to our academic community followed by a Q&A session.

Victoria Mooers, Institute and Harris School of Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow

Victoria studies how social networks shape information and behavior, with a focus on how social ties influence political knowledge and participation. Across projects, she is studying how patterns of connection affect processes ranging from democratic decision-making to the return of urban nightlife after the pandemic. Victoria will highlight a project examining how the alignment between social networks and congressional district boundaries shapes voters’ political knowledge and participation in House elections. Using Facebook’s Social Connectedness Index and an event-study design, she will show that when a larger share of a person’s friends lives within their district, they are more likely to know their representative, to vote, and to donate to candidates running in their own district. Victoria will then simulate how alternative district maps would affect the shares of informed voters across counties, suggesting that assessments of gerrymandering could consider not only partisan outcomes but also how boundaries shape who becomes informed.

Jonathan Tollefson, Institute and Department of Sociology Postdoctoral Fellow

Jonathan’s research investigates how social-environmental relations shape inequality, focusing on the historical roots and longitudinal transformation of environmental injustice in US cities. Jonathan’s talk will present a comparative analysis of environmental inequality formation in US cities, drawing on an original computational approach to map late 19th and early 20th century urban energy production. Results reveal a sustained and generalized escalation in exposure to environmental hazards among racialized populations, suggesting that racial-environmental inequality emerged much earlier than prior studies have shown – and that social-environmental processes likely played an important role in the racialization of the neighborhood. Findings further suggest several new directions to embed urban sociology within an environmental perspective.

Camilla Schneier, Institute and Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics

Postdoctoral Fellow Camilla’s research focuses on industrial organization and urban economics, primarily in commercial real estate and retail. Her ongoing work combined novel scraped data with economic theory to understand how supply-side factors contribute to and alleviate food deserts, the supply and availability of food, and consumer well-being. In this paper, she studies the welfare implications of exclusive dealing in the U.S. retail sector. Camilla documents widespread use of exclusive dealing contracts that exclude local entry by rival stores. Descriptive analysis suggests that stores with exclusive dealing contracts face fewer competitors and higher prices. Yet, most major grocers in under-served neighborhoods have exclusive dealing contracts, suggesting they might encourage entry in low-demand settings. She uses a structural approach to measure the counterfactual impact of a ban on exclusive dealing and finds that banning exclusive dealing would increase welfare for some households but would cause an increase in the number of households living in food deserts and harm consumers living in these under-resourced areas.