Pat Hastings was awarded The Tobin Project’s highly-competitive 2018 Prize for Exemplary Work on Inequality and Decision Making. His paper “Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments” was selected by a committee comprised of leading scholars of inequality who call Pat’s research “rigorous, systematic, and insightful,” explaining that the paper was exemplary in its ability to analyze both “the impact of income inequality on different aspects of parental investment and the mechanisms which could account for the resulting pattern.”

The prize includes a $20,000 award, and Pat has been invited to present at The Tobin Project’s inequality conference this spring. As stated in the award announcement, Pat and his Berkeley colleagues’ study offers an outstanding examination of how inequality manifests itself in individuals’ day-to-day lives, how individuals react to such inequality, and the possible consequences of their actions for the rest of society.

In May, ASA published Pat’s paper in American Sociological Review which was then featured in CSU’s Source. Pat has since been interviewed by the Institute for Family Studies, and his paper has been cited in U.S. News and World Report’s “The Growing Achievement Gap” and The Coloradoan’s “CSU research: Parent spending on children’s education is ‘an arms race,’ and poorer families are falling farther behind.”