Research Thursdays - Daniel Auguste recently received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation

Daniel Auguste, assistant professor of Sociology, recently received a $30,000 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for his project “Race and Debt: Student Loans, Educational Attainment and Entrepreneurship.” Drawing on longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, Auguste will examine the extent to which student loan debt, race, and educational attainment affect business ownership and success.

“The continued rise in student debt has negatively affected socioeconomic mobility among young American adults, with Black Americans bearing the brunt of student debt burden. Though Americans romanticize entrepreneurship as a path to socioeconomic mobility, little is known about the consequences of student debt burden for business ownership and success, and how such consequences vary by race. While some research contends that higher education increases business ownership and success, we know little about whether and how this relationship varies by race.”
- Daniel Auguste

Auguste’s grant is one of 20 Pipeline Grant awards from The Russell Sage Foundation in partnership with the Economic Mobility and Opportunity program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The awards are for research projects by emerging scholars in a wide range of innovative research on economic mobility and access to opportunity in the United States. These particular grants are designed to support early- and mid-career tenure-track scholars who are underrepresented in the social sciences.

Auguste has also had two papers published this year. “The Precarity of Self-employment among Low- and Moderate-income Household,” co-authored with Stephen Roll and Mathieu Despard was published in Social Forces. In the paper, the authors argue that entrepreneurship is not necessarily a good thing for people in under-resourced environments. They also suggest that formal work arrangements with wages and benefits offered by an employer may promote greater economic stability among low- and moderate-income workers compared to informal work arrangements via self-employment. 
https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab171
 
“Varieties of Gendered Capitalism: Status Beliefs and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship,” was published in Social Currents. In the paper, Auguste shows how gender status hierarchy is linked to the gender gap in entrepreneurship, and this link is particularly strong at the early stages of the entrepreneurial process, when the identity of the entrepreneur is more salient. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965211053836

Auguste earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include inequality, stratification, economic and organizational sociology, and entrepreneurship. More specifically, his research agenda seeks to understand the structural forces determining who gets what, who participates and to what level they participate in the capitalist production process.

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