This project will undertake a quantitative, rigorous assessment of financial regulation in the United States, an underdeveloped area of research within the social sciences. While there is an extensive literature on regulatory politics, the focus on financial regulation has eluded many political scientists (and most economists as well). Moreover, research on the effects of unequal influence has largely focused on representation and legislation, with minimal attention paid to the final, critical step of rulemaking in the “sausage factory” of policymaking. This project will create a new database on financial rulemaking covering the past three decades, with a particular focus on the pre- and post-Dodd Frank Act. The dataset will be publically available and include rules changes, comments, and linkages of these variables to financial enforcement and appointments data. The possibilities for influencing the rules through lobbying of various sorts are enormous and may significantly contribute to economic inefficiencies, rent seeking, and inequality, which in turn have implications for growth.

U.S. states and municipalities have increasingly granted targeted financial incentives to individual firms, arguing that upfront investments by governments will lead to job creation and increased tax revenues. Yet such policies increase inter-firm inequality by targeting a subset of firms while excluding others, and can distort local economic development by shifting scarce resources to individual firms. This project will explore the implications of these policies for state and local communities—including their effects on the distribution of tax burdens, budgets, and income inequality—through data collection aimed at documenting changing patterns of government spending and taxation across U.S. cities and states.

Economic inequality research has long focused on household income and wealth or individual earnings. Recent evidence suggests that the share of total income is increasingly diverting from labor to capitol. Yet the reasons for the declining labor share of income are not yet clear. This project examines several potential causes for this decline, particularly looking at differences in skills among workers and how those skill differences affect firms’ decisions about production.

Through an intervention with the major U.S. retailer, The Gap, this project tests whether shifting hourly workers to more stable, predictive schedules, and providing them with additional hours result in cost savings and increased productivity for businesses. In the first year of work, Williams and her team made significant progress, including the launch of a pilot program that will test schedule-stabilizing practices to inform the larger intervention.

This project seeks to better understand the Federal Reserve’s efforts to identify and achieve an inflation target. Through a historical study, the author will determine and analyze periods in which the Fed prioritized stimulating growth and maximizing employment, versus the periods when it instead sought to control inflation. As the national debate over the U.S. Federal Reserve’s dual mandate continues, this novel historical perspective has the potential to inform the conversation on a fundamental economic institution in important ways.

Has rising income inequality affected income mobility over the course of a working lifetime? This research project will uncover what has happened to earnings mobility during the era of rising earnings inequality, and will explore the underlying causes driving those shifts. The researchers will use an underexploited dataset from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to estimate long-run intragenerational earnings mobility trends, with particular attention to differences in trends by race, gender, and education. They will estimate how much various key changes in the labor force—shifts in demographics, human capital, and returns to skills—have contributed to the mobility trends. This research will help researchers understand the relative importance of different factors to higher earnings mobility over a lifetime.