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.

This research asks whether vertical disintegration strategies, such as outsourcing and franchising, are merely efficiency-enhancing or if they are also strategies to manipulate the legal boundaries of the firm to gain greater revenues and shift risk onto less powerful suppliers, contractors and franchisees. The research focuses specifically on franchises and proposes to build a unique new dataset based on financial data from court cases. Particular areas of exploration include questions of bargaining power, risk, royalty rates, and contract terms.

A structural change in the United States economy—huge new flows of personal information stemming from technological innovation—has enabled companies to classify, sort and rank individuals in ways previously unimaginable. This research proposes to use big data from car insurance providers to predict market decisions by looking at how regulators, members of industry and other key actors together establish the market rules by which personal data determines economic opportunity. It asks on what grounds policy and market actors conclude that it is fair to treat people differently in the marketplace based on their personal data “traces,” and seeks to show how some, but not other, ideas get embedded in markets over time.

The rate of unionization remains low in the United States, and as new forms of worker representation emerge, we need to better understand what workers want from labor organizations and how employee preferences differ across industries and occupations. This project will field a relatively large-scale survey, with embedded survey experiments, to examine what aspects of labor organization are preferred by workers and management.

There is growing evidence that wage differences between industries and firms are a primary source of contemporary wage inequality. Similarly, evidence suggests that gender segregation at the industry, occupation, and firm levels has persisted even as gender differences in human capital have declined. This project will draw a connection between the contribution of between-industry wage differences to overall wage inequality on the one hand, and occupational/industrial gender segregation and the wage penalty for care work on the other. The researchers will compare employment and wages, by gender, in the care versus financial sectors, thereby capturing the dynamics of gender by occupation in sectors that are the bookends in the structure of wages and wage inequality, tracking the extent to which the gender gap has grown or subsided in these two extreme groups.