About

Dr. Laura Tach is a sociologist specializing in urban poverty and family life. Her research employs mixed-methods approaches to examine how neighborhoods and families reproduce inequality and how public policy influences these processes. She co-directs Cornell Project 2Gen, an initiative of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, which serves as a hub for research, policy, and practice aimed at supporting vulnerable caregivers and children. Dr. Tach received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2010 and previously held the position of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on poverty, public policy, family demography, neighborhood inequality, and social mobility, contributing to the understanding of how structural factors shape individual and family outcomes.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Economic growth
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Business
• Demography
• Gender studies
• Finance

Selected publications

• Do Federal Place-Based Policies Improve Economic Opportunity in Rural Communities?

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 31 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economic growth

  The U.S. federal government has invested considerable resources in place-based programs to improve local economies, amenities, and infrastructure. Although urban place-based policies have received the most attention, place-based approaches have long been central to efforts addressing rural poverty as well. Using a novel dataset, we document a substantial increase in place-based funding to rural counties from 1990 to 2015. We then assess the association between exposure to place-based funding and socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We find that living in counties that received more place-based funding is associated with higher educational attainment and greater earnings, but only for those who migrated in adulthood. We conclude that place-based investment may improve economic opportunity via geographic mobility for rural American youth.

  DOI

• School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods

  Sociological Science · 2020 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics

  The expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. In this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. We find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. Private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-Hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. Increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents' residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. Selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kathryn Edin

  Princeton University

  45 shared

• Danya E. Keene

  36 shared

• Robert Aronowitz

  36 shared

• Andrew Deener

  36 shared

• Jason Schnittker

  36 shared

• Sarah Halpern‐Meekin

  26 shared

• Jennifer Sykes

  University of Southampton

  19 shared

• Alicia Eads

  University of Toronto

  13 shared

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• Olivier Elementoh-150
• Andy Clarkh-142