The declining relative earnings of workers constitutes an important macroeconomic trend. This project will study a new potential explanation: changes in corporate governance. To do so, the author will use the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, Longitudinal Business Databases, Census of Manufacturers, and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers to analyze changes generated by activist hedge fund investors, then changes in equity-based compensation of managers, and their impacts on worker outcomes.

This project will utilize third-party scheduling data that is well-suited to investigate schedule volatility. Research in this area has been limited to surveys of workers, but with detailed time and attendance data from a payroll provider, this project seeks to document novel facts about worker schedules, evaluate the effect of predictive scheduling and minimum wage laws on schedule-related outcomes for firms and workers, and understand the welfare effects of schedule regulation on workers.

This project brings together two important U.S. economic policy areas: the housing shortage and market power. The author will use cutting-edge tools from industrial organization to test firm conduct and answer the question of whether market power among homebuilders can explain the under-supply of new housing, particularly entry-level units, or whether their economies of scale reduce costs.

Building on past research on the role of the Earned Income Tax Credit in supporting migration decisions, this research will evaluate the subsequent outcomes for both parents and children. Leveraging detailed linked administrative data—including the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and individual tax records—the author will conduct a longitudinal analysis of U.S. families’ migration patterns and economic outcomes. High-resolution geographic information provides information on the quality of neighborhoods families move to and from, with variables such as school quality, local poverty rates, incarceration rates, labor market opportunities, and measures of economic mobility. Linking individual tax records with survey data allows for an assessment of children’s educational attainment, employment, and earnings over time. Tax records provide information on family income, employment, and geographic mobility.

Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration policies are understood to have contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, wealth, and neighborhood opportunity in the United States, but systematic data on their mortgage activity is scarce. This project proposes to digitize and publicly release a dataset of FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed mortgages issued between 1935 and 1975 to assess the demographic and spatial distribution of these loans. Addresses will be geocoded, and names of borrowers matched to full-count Census data from 1930, 1940, and 1950 to identify borrowers’ demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. This project will assess who received these loans; how they were distributed across neighborhoods; and whether FHA and VA insurance accelerated White flight and exacerbated segregation.

This project proposes to estimate a structural equilibrium model of the U.S. child care sector to use for counterfactual subsidy design, with the goal of finding an optimal cost-neutral subsidy design. The project consists of two parts. First, the author will evaluate the effect of reimbursement rate policies on local maternal labor force participation, child care worker wages, child care prices, and quality of care. Second, the author will use the estimated model to simulate the effects of counterfactual subsidy policies on parent utility, worker wages, mark-ups, and the distribution of quality.