Research News

Faculty Affiliate Lauren Brinkley-Rubenstein, Professor of Population Health Sciences at Duke University, recently contributed two publications. She authored an op-ed in Health Affairs examining how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) budget surge has created a growing public health crisis, highlighting the consequences of prioritizing detention spending over community health. In addition, Dr. Brinkley-Rubenstein co-edited the…

Core Faculty Jorge Zumaeta, Senior Director of Continuing Education and Adjunct in the Department of International Business at Florida International University, recently published an article in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management. The study examined social preference parameters and financial decision-making among welfare recipients in Miami, Florida, comparing their behaviors to those of college…

Faculty Affiliate Sarah Gaither, Associate Professor in Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, recently co-authored a new article in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. The study examined how group identity and wealth status shape social preferences among children in Hong Kong. Researchers compared responses from 115 Chinese children and 84 ethnic minority South…

Faculty Affiliate Loneke Blackman Carr, Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, published a pilot study in Eating Behaviors evaluating a 12-week online intervention called SATISFY, designed to prevent weight gain by addressing emotional eating. In collaboration with Dr. Rachel Goode (UNC-Chapel Hill), the program combined appetite awareness training with lifestyle strategies…

A new working paper by Sungmee Kim, Ph.D., Cook Center Postdoctoral Associate, sheds light on a troubling consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic’s shift to remote learning: a rise in severe child maltreatment that went largely undetected by schools. Titled “The Unintended Cost of Distance Learning: An Analysis of Child Maltreatment,” the study is part of…

The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity is proud to celebrate the release of Stratification Economics and Disability Justice, a new book by Adam Hollowell, Ph.D. and Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Ph.D. Published by Cambridge University Press, explores how the activism of Black disabled leaders must be central to how we understand and address economic inequality…

Faculty Affiliate Sarah E. Gaither co-authored a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology titled, “Cross-cultural perceptions of racial ambiguity: Testing the universality of the ingroup overexclusion effect”. Dr. Gaither is the Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. Dr. Gaither an her…

The second edition of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, authored by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, has made Oklahoma’s best seller list. The book, published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2022, engages critically with economic injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive…

Cook Center Director William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr. and former Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) fellow Stephan Lefebvre published a new article in the AEA Papers and Proceedings titled “Root Causes of the Racial Wealth Gap: A Critique of the Fed View”. In this piece, Darity and Lefebvre challenge the Federal Reserve’s approach…

On May 14, 2025, the Duke Center for Child & Family Policy hosted the Triangle Economics of Education Workshop (TEEW) at the Sanford School of Public Policy. The event convened leading scholars to share and discuss empirical research on the economics of education. Among the presenters was Sungmee Kim, Postdoctoral Associate at the Samuel DuBois…