The goal of this study is to understand the welfare consequences from long-term skill mismatches due to childbirth and how maternity leave policies can help alleviate such mismatches. This research focuses on job match quality between men and women through joint decision-making, and its contribution to the gender wage gap. While the gender wage gap has been studied in relation to occupation or sector type, the job match paradigm within the context of household decision-making is less understood. Findings will be relevant to discussions of effective federal paid leave policies, among others.

This research will test a widely held perception that making ethnic information less prominent—rather than completely eliminating it—will reduce discrimination. The researcher will use a recent Airbnb policy change to empirically test this relationship empirically. Utilizing data from Airbnb, the research effectively builds on the literature using ethnic names on resumes to test for discrimination. This research will be able to focus attention on the continuing problem of racial discrimination for wages, particularly in the “gig,” or “platform,” economy

The political resonance of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment has reached a fever pitch in recent years, with calls for a return of manufacturing jobs. But how feasible is such a goal in light of structural changes in the U.S. economy, such as technological growth? This project will try to answer this question by developing a model that will decompose the total decline in manufacturing into decline due to structural change and decline due to increased international trade. It also aims to put the decline of manufacturing in a global perspective. It proposes to study cross-country patterns of structural change by studying 25 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, offering a new look at the current controversy of trade versus technology in employment.

According to its mandate, the Federal Reserve is required to foster maximum employment. The central bank tries to do this by affecting aggregate demand by loosening or tightening the flow of credit. The distributional impact of these decisions is unclear when it comes to the labor market. This research assesses how changes in monetary policy affect the demand for different kinds of workers and redistribute labor income and represents an exciting extension of recent literature on firm effects.

This project will look at how the concentration of corporate ownership and mergers and acquisitions affects inequality and workers’ well-being by evaluating the relationship between growing market concentration and the declining labor share of income. The research proposes to distinguish two channels by which greater concentration could matter: reduced product market competition, which would directly increase the profit share of gross domestic product and thereby reduce the labor share, and reduced labor market competition—which would directly reduce the labor share.

This project will take advantage of the unusually large changes in the statutory minimum wages in eight states and nine cities to analyze wage and employment impacts. There is intense debate over the efficacy of increased minimum wages to address growing income inequality, and this research will provide useful evidence, directly contributing to discussions of how to improve the design of current and future minimum wage policies.