This research asks whether employers compensate workers for the implicit option of unpredictable and unstable schedules. It will use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, to analyze the labor market effects of unpredictable and unstable schedules. The project will focus on identifying marginal effects while controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity using fixed-effects or first-difference specifications.

Whether and how to involve workers in decision-making at the workplace is a fundamental question of the organization of firms and economies more broadly. This project proposes to use a novel research design to study a 1994 reform in Germany that sharply abolished employee board representation in newly incorporated firms with fewer than 500 workers in order to analyze the effects of shared governance on a variety of firm and worker-level outcomes, including wages, distribution of profits, and inequality of pay within a firm. The authors will use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the 1994 reform, supplemented with a difference-in-difference approach that compares changes among shareholder firms to changes among nonshareholder firms that were never subject to co-determination and thus were not affected by the reform. This will allow them to control for general economic trends that may have impacted firm and worker outcomes around the timing of the reform.

How does the availability of job options outside workers’ own occupations affect their labor market outcomes? This project uses Burning Glass data to define labor markets by the probabilistic occupational transitions that workers make. The research looks at the likelihood that a worker switches occupations based on location and other job determinants. In addition, the researchers will study differences based on the industrial composition of a location, local labor market shocks, and race and gender analyses, thus deepening our understanding of workers’ outside options in regard to the impact of labor market concentration.

This research will investigate how low-income and first-generation students respond financially and academically to financial aid austerity by exploiting a 2011 change that the U.S. Congress made to Pell grant eligibility that affected nearly 286,000 students. As a result, an estimated 12,000 students were eliminated from eligibility for a Pell grant, and 274,000 students received fewer grant dollars. The project will estimate the impact of this sudden unexpected loss in financial aid on college attendance, financial aid, and labor supply outcomes for low-income college students using a combination of restricted-use data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The researcher will use the panel nature of the data to track changes in outcomes for students from one academic year to the next. A regression discontinuity design will be employed to estimate the causal effect of the loss on various educational and labor market outcomes.

This research aims to empirically analyze potential explanations for gender wage gaps, glass ceilings, and differential labor market returns for women by looking at how gender gaps may be perpetuated within a firm. Using a dataset from a multinational firm employing 300,000 people that includes applications for promotions, as well as observed promotions, the project seeks to understand internal firm promotion processes that affect the gender wage gap over the career cycle.

This project consists of an empirical analysis using a county-pair design to examine the relationship between minimum wages and the quality of services provided by low-wage workers by examining safety inspections and patient health outcomes in nursing homes following minimum wage reforms.