This project takes a macroeconomic approach to market power. The authors will use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata on monthly prices to study how market power affects prices for the whole U.S. economy, not just one sector. Past work has looked at mark-ups and concentration as a proxy for price, but in principle, this could help address the fundamental question of whether market power or efficiency is driving increased mark-ups. This project would provide new evidence on the linkage between market concentration and margins across industries and within industries. It would also provide evidence on how import cost shocks lead to the pass-through of those shocks to the prices paid by final consumers. The authors plan to infer market power from the degree of pass-through. A main innovation in this study is the use of novel data, which record price for different sectors.

This project seeks to extend research on “deaths of despair” to look specifically at the causes of such deaths for Native Americans, and Native American women and girls in particular. Deaths of despair among Native Americans are proportionately higher than among any other group in the United States and have increased at almost twice the rate of non-Hispanic White Americans. Are the predictors of a death of despair for White constituents, especially men (joblessness, high rates of unemployment), different than those for Native American women and girls? The project will study this in the context of fracking. Preliminary analysis provides compelling, suggestive evidence that higher rates of employment and earnings among non-Hispanic White men due to extraction booms, measured by the fracking industry and building on existing literature, in proximity to Native lands and to Native American girls and women likely induces more human trafficking activity that disproportionately affects Native women and girls. In turn, this may also induce behaviors to “cope” with such contexts, such as increased alcohol and substance use and suicides among Native women and girls. The authors convincingly argue that what might reduce deaths of despair (jobs and higher wages) for one group (non-Hispanic White men) might result in higher rates of deaths of despair for another marginalized group, Native women and girls.

This project will leverage variations in implementation timing of the requirement in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Stimulus, or CARES, Act that employers notify recently separated workers of their eligibility for Unemployment Insurance. It seeks to causally identify whether notification improves the take-up of Unemployment Insurance with an emphasis on Black and Latino workers. The author will compile a database of states’ implementation of required separation notices by employers to employees by state and year. This project is expected to yield credible evidence regarding the efficacy of these employer separation notice requirements on the receipt of Unemployment Insurance. The project will further investigate whether such requirements close the racial divide in receiving Unemployment Insurance. Given known racialized disparities in receiving these benefits, the emphasis on this is critical. The distribution of information on UI eligibility as a mechanism in attenuating (or not) racial disparities would add to policymakers’ understanding of what is driving these disparities. In the case that separation notice requirements increase the take-up of Unemployment Insurance, the project has the potential to identify a relatively low-cost intervention with large payoffs. In the case that separation notice requirements do not improve UI take-up or close racial divides, policymakers may want to reconsider the universal requirements implemented as part of the CARES Act.

This project considers the interplay between paid and unpaid care work and the relationship between care work penalties and gender, race, and class inequalities. The author makes the novel argument that prior research does not sufficiently understand the combined effects of both paid and unpaid care work penalties and how they interact. To fill this gap, this project will develop a “care-work-systems” framework to determine how pay penalties for care work impact economic inequality. The project identifies that paid and unpaid care work penalties are often viewed as separate even though they impact each other. In addition to bringing these two skeins of research literature in conversation with one another, it will also bridge the research literatures in child care and eldercare, and integrate class, in addition to race and gender, into the analysis. In addition to the theoretical contribution, it proposes an empirical study to test this framework using panel data from three countries with different care infrastructures—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany—to help shed light on how policies and social structures play a role in generating paid and unpaid care work penalties.

There is a large literature exploring the tension between increasing minimum wages in order to raise the hourly wages of workers and having these increases offset by reductions in overall employment or hours worked by low-wage employees. Understanding the distributional impacts of minimum wage increases is therefore essential. This project seeks to provide some of the first empirical evidence on how minimum wage reforms change firms’ occupational composition, distribution of hours, and scheduling practices. To do this, the authors will leverage shift-level microdata for the near-universe of employees and contract workers at U.S. nursing homes from the Payroll Based Journal program. The nursing home industry is an attractive setting for this research as it is a major employer of low-wage workers, especially certified nursing assistants, who provide the majority of patient care at nursing homes, are typically paid at or just above the minimum wage, and the majority of whom are immigrants and women of color. Moreover, many low-wage staff intend to work in the industry throughout their careers, in stark contrast to more heavily studied low-wage industries such as restaurants and retail, where many workers expect to leave the industry quickly. Accordingly, wage policies in the nursing home sector have the potential to not only affect the economic well-being of low-income workers but also shape gender and racial pay divides. In addition, the nursing home industry is of particular interest to regulators and policymakers since Medicaid and Medicare finance the vast majority of long-term care, and policies that affect the wages of employees in this sector will correspondingly affect state and federal budgets. Employment or composition changes may also have important consequences for quality of care.

There is increasing evidence of monopsony power in labor markets, with implications of lower wages and higher inequality. One popular policy recommendation is to constrain such monopsony power through more organized unions of workers, such as in local bargaining councils—collections of trade unions and employers representing specific industry-regions that consultatively bargain over and set minimum wages and working conditions for those industry-regions. This project will study the effect of such “sectoral bargaining” using South African data. Using matched employer-employee tax data from the South African Revenue Service, Bassier will match these agreements to firms as demarcated by industry and location. There are currently 39 legally recognized bargaining councils in South Africa, each covering a specific industry-region. Bargaining councils are estimated to cover 40 percent of workers in the formal sector in South Africa, concentrated mainly in the manufacturing, construction, trade, and transport industries in addition to covering the public sector. This research could give insight into how sectoral bargaining could improve worker power and mitigate the effects of monopsonistic labor markets.