This project seeks to answer the question of which labor market frictions prevent workers and communities from smoothly adjusting to local employment shocks and the extent to which investments in human capital address existing frictions. The author looks at this in the context of the transition to clean energy, focusing on the coal industry. She will merge worker-level administrative data with institution-level data on enrollment and completions from 2- and 4-year colleges to explore whether spatial proximity to postsecondary institutions serves to mollify longer-term earnings and employment outcomes.

This project will estimate exactly which individuals benefit when firms become more  productive and whether these are the same individuals who bear the costs when firms do poorly. The author will use novel linked worker-owner administrative data from the United States. Specifically, he will use data covering the universe of pass-through firms in the United States to identify each firm’s workers and owners, and measure their total compensation from the firm. He will link these data to quasi-experimental, firm-specific productivity shocks to estimate the distributional effects of productivity changes. This will allow for an understanding of how productivity shocks affect workers and owners in various ways.

Policymakers are grappling with how to support the child care sector after the COVID-19 public health crisis. Problems with the child care sector were apparent well before the onset of the pandemic: Parents paid high care costs, care workers were underpaid and left the field in high numbers, child care programs experienced unsustainable operating costs and closed their doors, and child care quality suffered. Without access to safe and affordable care, parents work less and have less income, and businesses struggle to retain qualified workers. This project will study a new initiative to increase public funding for U.S. child care workers via a wage supplement program with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. In 2022, the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin substantially expanded the statewide REWARD program, which provides financial support to early childhood educators, and the City of Milwaukee Early Childhood Workforce Stipend Program. The expanded programs dramatically increased stipends available to eligible caregivers. The authors will examine the extent to which increased wage supplements keep qualified workers in the field and reduce turnover in the childcare workforce. Evidence from similar programs in other states finds a significant reduction in teacher turnover, indicating that wage subsidies could be effective. Given the dearth of research on the effectiveness of stipends, this research could provide more evidence to shape policy solutions.

This project studies how firms collude in labor markets, studying an overlooked potential mechanism: common leadership, in which the same person holds high-level leadership positions in two competing firms. Common leadership is prohibited by antitrust law, but until the past few years, enforcement was nearly nonexistent. This study focuses on collusion in labor markets in the form of no-poach agreements—specifically, how entry into such agreements affects worker mobility and career trajectories. Preliminary results find entry into collusive agreements in the years following connection through common leadership. No-poach agreements are extremely difficult to study since they are secret in nature. The author will use the largest known case of labor market collusion to overcome this data challenge. In the late 2000s, more than 50 tech companies entered into no-poach agreements. She will use three primary sources of data: court documents, data on worker histories, and biographical data on company executives.

This project aims to fill the gap on the impact that private-equity-owned child care businesses have on the structure and functioning of the early child care market. The author seeks to answer the following questions: How does private equity affect the market for early career and education? In particular, how different are private-equity-backed child care centers from other child care centers? How do centers change when taken over by a private equity firm? How does the entrance of a private-equity-backed center impact other private and public providers? This research is poised to fill a large void in the child care literature: the role of for-profit providers and, in particular, the effects of new entrants and private-equity-owned operations into child care markets.   

This project will examine the housing consequences of Interstate 10 in New Orleans. Specifically, the author will examine whether the construction of Interstate 10 resulted in differential housing outcomes in Black neighborhoods, compared to White neighborhoods. The author has created historical interstate data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and additional census tract characteristics, including racial demographics, total housing units, owner-occupied housing units, and median home value. This study has the potential to shape the multidisciplinary literature examining the impact of highways, public railways, and other types of transportation infrastructure on neighborhoods.