Rachel Inafuku
Why Hawaiʻi Has Less Inequality Than You’d Think
By Rachel Inafuku Living in Hawaiʻi is expensive, and lower-income households struggle the most to make ends meet. Yet despite the high cost of living, Hawaiʻi consistently ranks among US states with relatively lower levels of income inequality. A standard measure of income inequality is the Gini coefficient, which measures how much incomes differ from […]
Read MoreWhat Happens After Job Training? Preliminary Wage and Employment Insights from Good Jobs Hawai‘i
By Rachel Inafuku and Tim Halliday Hawai‘i’s workforce has long faced a persistent challenge: high living costs combined with a concentration of low-wage, low-skill employment. The Good Jobs Hawai‘i (GJHI) program is a tuition-free, non-credit training program offered through the University of Hawai‘i Community Colleges. It was launched to help local residents gain skills and […]
Read MorePublication: Vog: Using Volcanic Eruptions to Estimate the Impact of Air Pollution on Student Test Scores
We pair variation stemming from volcanic eruptions with the census of Hawaii’s public schools’ student test scores to estimate the impact of PM2.5 and SOM2 on student performance. Increased particulate pollution decreases test scores. These results are concentrated among schools with the highest long-term average levels of pollution. The effects of PM2.5 are larger for […]
Read MoreThe Hawaii Housing Factbook 2025
Hawai‘i remains in a severe housing crisis. High prices and mortgage rates have made homeownership unaffordable for most residents. Housing production remains slow, with county and state regulatory barriers posing a major obstacle to new construction. Meanwhile, shifts in the U.S. home insurance market have driven up costs, increasing homeowners’ association fees and further reducing […]
Read MoreCity partners with UHERO to launch Subsidized Housing Tracker
Addressing Oʻahu’s housing shortage and its impact on affordability, the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Housing, in partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization (UHERO), has unveiled the Subsidized Housing Explorer, a first-of-its-kind tool for the island. This interactive tracker consolidates data on government-subsidized housing units across Honolulu County, offering an […]
Read MoreOne year after the wildfires: Rising poverty and housing instability point to ongoing gaps in assistance
The Maui Recovery Survey: Housing & Jobs monitors the housing and economic recovery of fire-impacted households on Maui. This initiative, launched one year after the devastating Maui wildfires of August 2023, provides monthly updates on the socioeconomic conditions in West Maui and Kula on a public dashboard. The findings reflect the ongoing challenges fire-impacted households […]
Read MoreWhich College Majors Pay the Most in Hawaiʻi and the US?
By Rachel Inafuku and Tim Halliday Despite recent discussions in the popular press, a college degree is well worth its investment. In a recent UHERO report, we demonstrated that the lifetime earnings of graduates from the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) with bachelor’s degrees were 27% higher than those of observationally similar people who exited UH […]
Read MoreHow Expanding Access to Preschool Can Benefit Hawaii’s Future
By: Rachel Inafuku The State of Hawaii has identified a significant gap in preschool enrollment among its youngest learners. Of the 33,224 3- and 4-year olds in the state, only 55% are currently enrolled in preschool programs. While about 20% of families with children in this age group choose to opt out of preschool, there […]
Read MoreExploring the Gender Pay Gap in Hawai‘i
The US has made substantial progress in closing the historical earnings gap between men and women, but data from the American Community Survey (ACS) shows that from 2015 to 2022 full-time working women in the US earned 84 cents for every dollar a man made. In Hawai‘i, full-time women fared slightly better, making 86 cents […]
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