Mary Eschelbach Hansen is currently researching policies affecting the quality of life of persons with disabilities.
She previously researched topics in the economic history of bankruptcy, equality for LGBTQ+ persons, child welfare policy, and the development of the U.S. economy in the 19th century.
Hansen is currently studying policies affecting the quality of life of persons with disabilities. The work spans historical topics (for example, the origins of policies supporting care and work for persons with intellectual disabilities) and current issues (for example, the impact of changes in the minimum wage on employment of persons with disabilities).
Together with Michael Martell (Bard) and Leanne Roncolato (Franklin & Marshall) , Hansen studied the impact of formal institutions (for example, marriage equality) and informal institutions (for example, tolerance of homosexuality) on the economic lives of LGBTQ+ persons.
Hansen's work on bankruptcy uncovered the ways that federal and state law shaped the increasingly complex relationship between debtors (both business and personal) and creditors in the rapidly evolving financial markets of the 20th century.
A major facet of her work was the construction of new data sets from a sample of published statistics and from original court files of bankruptcy cases. Replication files for published work, aggregate bankruptcy statistics, and US district court boundary files are online at ICPSR. For information about the sample of original case files, select the link above.
It's all in Bankrupt in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020).