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RESEARCH
Economics researchers awarded 2025 SSHRC Insight Grants
Congratulations to professors Serena Canaan, Minjie Deng, Michael Gilraine, and Pierre Mouganie whose projects have been awarded .
Their projects investigate current social issues such as parental leave policies, public housing, government debt and economic sanctions. Read on for a summary of their research projects.
Serena Canaan
Parental Leave and Children's Long-Term Mental Health
The goal of this proposed research is to examine how extending the duration of parental leave offered to new parents affects their children鈥檚 treatment for mental health conditions in adolescence and early adulthood. To do so, I propose to evaluate the long-term effects of two reforms of the parental leave system in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC). The first reform which took effect in 1991, extended the duration of parental leave for which new parents were eligible from 18 to 30 weeks. The second reform, passed in 2000, further expanded the length of available parental leave from 30 to 52 weeks. I examine how parents鈥� eligibility for additional periods of leave under these two reforms affected their children鈥檚 long-term treatment for mental health conditions.
Data for this research will be drawn from three linked administrative datasets from Population BC Data: The Medical Service Plan (MSP), PharmaNet and BC Vital Statistics. My proposed research鈥檚 findings will contribute to the economics field by providing the first causal evidence on the impact of parental leave policies on children鈥檚 long-term mental health.
This research will contribute to our understanding of how early life interventions impact long-term mental health outcomes and provide the first causal evidence linking parental leave duration to children's mental health in adolescence and adulthood.
Minjie Deng
Government Debt and Private Sector
This project aims to explore the impacts of government debt on the private sector, specifically focusing on households and firms. Government debt is a critical issue that affects economic stability and growth. Despite its importance, the intricate ways in which government debt influences the behavior of private entities remain underexplored. Understanding these effects is crucial for both advancing economic theory and informing policy decisions.
For instance, does increasing government debt crowd out private investment, or does it lead to changes in corporate borrowing and investment behavior? Similarly, how does government debt influence household consumption patterns, savings decisions, or even migration choices?
Academically, this research will provide a better understanding of the private sector's response to government debt, bridging the gap between macroeconomic policy and microeconomic behavior. We will employ both micro-level and macro-level data to establish the relationships and develop quantitative macroeconomic models that specify the channels and quantify the impacts. From a policy perspective, our findings will provide findings to policymakers about the broader implications of government debt on the private sector. Understanding these impacts could lead to more informed decisions regarding debt management and fiscal policy, potentially guiding governments to adopt debt policies that consider their effects on private sector growth, household welfare, and overall economic stability.
Michael Gilraine
Public Housing and Crime
In many developing countries, urban residents often face difficult living conditions, with large numbers residing in slums marked by inadequate housing, limited public services, overcrowding, and high levels of insecurity. These environments act as poverty traps, sustaining cycles of poverty and crime across generations. Can big-push style interventions that provide wealth and stable housing break this cycle of poverty and criminality?
This research project studies how Colombia鈥檚 Free Housing program affected the criminality of participants. Colombia鈥檚 Free Housing program provided high-quality public housing units to 100,000 disadvantaged recipients for free. The transfer was incredibly generous: The market value of the housing units was roughly US$30,000, representing ten years of wages for the average recipient. First, the project leverages the fact that some individuals were randomly assigned to public housing via lottery to gauge the causal impact of receiving a public housing unit on the propensity to commit a crime.
However, the concentration of low-income individuals in housing projects raises concerns that these areas will become epicenters of criminal activity, fostering criminal behavior via social interactions among residents. This research project will also try to shed new light on this issue by leveraging the fact that public housing unit assignment within each housing project was random for all beneficiaries. We will therefore investigate whether the propensity for one to commit crime is related to the prior criminal history of your proximal neighbours, shedding light on how social interactions lead to crime.
Pierre Mouganie
Economic sanctions and political attitudes
Economic sanctions are an increasingly popular foreign policy tool, yet we still do not understand the full ramifications of this complex instrument on the populations living in sanctioned countries. While there is a newly established literature documenting the severe economic impacts of sanctions on countries' economies, less is known about how this foreign policy tool affects the political views, voting behavior, and protest activity of communities in sanctioned nations. This limitation is important given the possibility that sanctions may have unintended consequences, potentially strengthening rather than weakening the regimes they target through a "rally-around-the-flag" effect.
Our research will explore how economic sanctions causally affect the political attitudes and voting behavior of Iran's population by developing a novel econometric framework that captures county-level variation in sanction exposure, and by examining new evidence from Iran's most heavily sanctioned period over the past 40 years. One possible effect we want to study in particular is whether sanctions lead to increased support for the sanctioned government rather than the intended weakening effect, implying a political "backfire" that may be undermining the effectiveness of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument.
The research will contribute to our understanding of the determinants of political behavior under economic pressure as well as the trajectory of voting patterns, protest activity, and political attitudes following sanction implementation. It will also advance what we know about what factors shape citizens' political views over time, national identity formation, and trust in government institutions during periods of external economic pressure. Increasing our knowledge in these areas is not only of interest for economists, but also relevant for a wide audience in political science, policy makers, and the general public interested in the effectiveness of economic sanctions as alternatives to military intervention.
SSHRC Funding
The funding provided by SSHRC Insight Grants supports and fosters excellence in social sciences and humanities research. The program deepens, widens and increases our collective understanding of individuals and societies, as well as informing the search for solutions to societal challenges.