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.

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.

Confronting climate change will require the United States to dramatically reshape large portions of its economy. Carbon-intensive sectors in manufacturing and mining, which have long been bastions for middle-class jobs in communities across the country, are expected to shrink. Fears among workers and the communities that rely on these jobs are not unjustified, given recent economic research on the effect of trade shocks and environmental regulations. Yet reductions in carbon-intensive industries are only one side of the coin in addressing climate change. While many industries may shrink, a dramatic investment in green and renewable industries may create new opportunities for workers throughout the country. There is almost no economic research, however, exploring whether and how green jobs will benefit workers and their communities. Leveraging job-posting data from Burning Glass Technologies, along with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, Curtis and Marinescu will estimate the long-run benefits that workers accrue when green technology investments in solar and wind are made in their communities, as well as which types of workers benefit and which do not. The three researchers also are planning to estimate the effect of having more green jobs on local economic outcomes, such as the employment rate, poverty rate, and average incomes.

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.

This project will convene economists, political scientists, energy scholars, and policy practitioners to synthesize collective expertise on the role of carbon pricing and innovation in climate policy. Participants will discuss how carbon pricing has been used around the world, its economic and political potential as a climate policy tool, and the importance of considering political economy in the design, implementation, and durability of climate policies.

Using monthly Current Population Survey data, this study will examine leave-taking behavior during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Specifically, the authors will investigate whether and how leave-taking was influenced by the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. The researchers will analyze the impact of FFCRA on several employment and leave-taking outcomes such as employment status, usual hours worked, and reasons for work absence (including child-care problems or one’s own illness). They will use these variables to measure leave-taking behavior, including total leave-taking and reasons for leave taking. These data allow them to explore how workers trade off the alternatives to leave-taking, including working while sick or separation from the labor force. Using a difference-in-difference empirical estimation strategy, the authors will compare leave taking in states that do or do not have state-based paid family and medical leave programs.