Former PhD student Seula Kim and current PhD student Michael Navarrete have been awarded a research grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Seula graduated from UMD in 2023, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and will join Penn State University as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2024. Michael will graduate in 2024 and is now the Alice Rivlin dissertation fellow at the Brookings Institution. Their joint research project studies how spatial variations in market structures and inflation rates impact income inequality and create important policy implications. They find that the poorest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States have experienced higher rates of inflation than the richest MSAs since 2006. They specifically look at food price inflation and investigate whether local market concentration affects inflation and pronounces spatial inequality. They employ the 2015 bird flu episode as a quasi-experiment to determine whether market concentration affected egg prices. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is a non-profit research institution and a grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth.