Surveillance is increasing in almost all areas of U.S. society. In formerly incarcerated Black men’s lives, surveillance represents a pervasive threat that operates through both techniques and technologies. Research shows that fear of surveillance leads formerly incarcerated Black men to avoid vital economic institutions. Prior research also finds that a criminal record diminishes Black men’s employment prospects. This research will extend the literature by examining how a criminal record operates as a credential that enables work but limits upward mobility by pulling ex-offenders into community-based, low-quality crime prevention jobs and also constrains work through surveillance practices that reinforce the stigma of the criminal record. This qualitative work will utilize archival, interview, and ethnographic methods and focus on Black men in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. This research seeks to demonstrate the often-invisible ways that surveillance mechanisms reproduce racial inequalities, advancing our theoretical understanding of how surveillance mediates access to socioeconomic resources, and providing insight into substantive interventions.

A growing body of evidence suggests that monopsony power is an important feature of the low-wage labor market. One reason why employers have some degree of wage-setting power is that jobs are differentiated, meaning workers differently value certain “amenities.” Existing research shows the valuation of nonwage characteristics such as control over schedules. Yet more evidence is needed to understand how nonwage amenities contribute to workplace power. This research will use a Facebook survey of workers at Walmart Inc. to shed new light on the degree of monopsony power in the U.S. labor market and the role of amenities in monopsony. The survey presents Walmart workers with hypothetical job offers, with random wage draws, to estimate the quit elasticity. This can be translated into the firm-specific labor supply curve, a measure of the degree of monopsony. Dube will then ask how amenities other than wages at the job affect quits, specifically using a regression framework to scale those factors into a money-metric valuation of different amenities. He will then zoom into "dignity at work" as a specific type of amenity and will test whether minimum wages may affect amenity provision by firms.

The common ownership hypothesis suggests that when large investors own shares in more than one firm within the same industry, those firms may have reduced incentives to compete. Firms can soften competition by producing fewer units, raising prices, reducing investment, innovating less, or limiting entry into new markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have all acknowledged concerns about the anticompetitive effects of common ownership and have relied on the theory and evidence of common ownership in major merger cases. This is a series of four separate projects by the four researchers. The first project seeks to show a link between executive compensation and measures of common ownership, providing a "mechanism" for how common ownership might affect competition and consumption. The second focuses on innovation, building on recent work and seeking to incorporate effects of common ownership, which are predicted to vary according to technological and product-market relationships. The third project is largely theoretical and will study the size and magnitude of the relationship between common ownership and innovation and the extent to which that varies across the universe of publicly listed U.S. corporations. Finally, the fourth project is a data collection effort, expanding the universe of high-quality common ownership data outside of the United States.

This project seeks to determine the overall impact of Walmart supercenters on local employment and earnings, and more generally on the competitive structure of affected local labor markets. The research design exploits the fact that Walmart Inc. attempted to place a supercenter in 39 counties but was prevented from doing so as the result of local efforts. These counties are compared to those where a supercenter was opened. Data on employment and earnings is gathered from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and county-by-year labor force data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics, both from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary results show that the entry of Walmart supercenters caused significant reductions in aggregate local employment and earnings, with retail employment increasing immediately upon entry before largely reverting to pre-entry levels. This research will help us understand how large employers can exercise monopsony power locally in the market for less-skilled labor and what the consequences are for workers.

Fine, Galvin, Round, and Shepherd seek to understand the relationship between region, race, state enforcement capacities, and minimum wage violations in the United States, and what the mechanisms are by which weaker state enforcement capacities might produce a higher incidence of minimum wage violations. This exploratory, theory-building project involves three major empirical components. First, the four researchers will improve upon, merge, and expand separate datasets they previously compiled on subnational labor standards enforcement capacity to create a novel and flexible database of all the enforcement capacities of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data and coding rules will be made fully transparent to enable future researchers to use whichever combination of codes best suits their particular research questions. Second, the researchers will use CPS-MORG data to estimate the minimum wage violation rate in every state and region of the United States. Third, they will use exploratory, in-depth comparative case studies to identify and theorize a repertoire of mechanisms linking the legacy of slavery and the post-slavery racialized economy in the South to weak state enforcement capacity and minimum wage violations in order to understand the role of federalism in creating and maintaining Black-White racial disparities.

Prior research suggests that the pathways through which childhood poverty shapes poverty in adulthood include physical and mental well-being, educational attainment, employment, and family structure. Income support policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, are all known to reduce levels of child poverty and have the potential to reduce racial disparities in child poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1967–2018, the researchers plan to investigate how the introduction of and/or policy changes to the EITC, SNAP, and TANF programs are effective at reducing racial differences in the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The authors will disaggregate their findings by race and use individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to identify children in poverty who were exposed to these programs and will follow them through early adulthood, assessing their poverty status.