This project will partner directly with a warehousing firm in order to: document the risks of certain schedules for subjective well-being and self-reported health for workers and specific demographic groups; document the relationships between work schedules and turnover for workers and for specific demographic groups; quantify the costs of current scheduling practices for the organization by building a more systemic view of the interdependencies of scheduling, absenteeism, productivity, and turnover; and develop and evaluate a workplace intervention targeting workers’ control over their schedules using a cluster-randomized trial.

This project aims to understand how firms accommodate increases in the minimum wage by using granular compensation data that the research team will construct by merging the individual tax returns of all employees and contractors of a firm to the business tax return of the firm. These data allow for an exploration of how changes in the minimum wage affect the full distribution of employee and contractor compensation within affected firms, including changes in employment and income. They will look at which kinds of workers, if any, lose or gain employment following increases in the minimum wage and how the incomes of covered and uncovered workers, as well as firm owners, are affected. Notably, the 17-year data panel will enable them to study dozens of minimum wage increases legislated at the federal, state, and substate level.

This grant is co-funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. This research seeks to empirically disentangle and quantify job moves that occur within versus between employers. It utilizes two main sources of data: the Current Population Survey and restricted versions of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The project investigates the extent to which aggregate trends in wage inequality are the result of increased within-organization job mobility and whether this shift has disproportionately benefited high-income/high-skill workers. It will also account for heterogeneity of outcomes among low-skilled/low-educated workers by exploring under what conditions less-educated workers benefit from internal labor markets and whether these conditions vary systematically by industry, occupation, or region.

The research team will develop the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Data, which will link demographic information to employment records, and public program administrative data. It will construct households from these state-level data, including the creation of detailed documentation and testing that will allow other scholars to replicate these methodological innovations for analysis of a host of policy interventions on household income and program participation.

This project will jointly estimate production mark-ups and labor mark-downs with manufacturing data, and estimate rent-sharing with labor when there are productivity increases in the context of firms' labor market power using Longitudinal Employer-Household data. This dataset allows for heterogeneity analysis that helps understand the types of workers facing the most anticompetitive forces. Further, the research investigates how labor market power varies across geography, industries, and time, and how policymakers can target remedies taking these factors into consideration.

This proposal investigates the effects of mergers in the airline industry upon price, flight frequency, and consumer welfare. Specifically, it will investigate the competitive effects of the merger between US Airways and American Airlines in 2013 and ask whether (or to what extent) the structural remedies required by the U.S. Department of Justice mitigated the expected loss in consumer welfare. In doing so, the investigator seeks to provide a framework for antitrust authorities to approach welfare implications of future airline-related mergers and joint ventures when airport slots are involved.