This project will examine how Unemployment Insurance policies interact with job search behavior in dual-earner households in the United States. More specifically, the researcher will explore the impacts of an expansion of Unemployment Insurance to include workers who leave their jobs due to their spouse getting a job that requires relocation. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 and 1997, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 2008, this study will seek to explain how and if access to Unemployment Insurance influences whether households will migrate long distances and attempts to measure if access to Unemployment Insurance is associated with higher wages after the household moves. The findings have the potential to inform our understanding of the gender wealth gap and women’s labor force participation, as well as geographic mobility, which has been declining in recent decades.

This project will use surveys to assess the role customers play as a source of power for U.S. workers who strike or protest working conditions, as well as the effects of different aspects of job quality on the likelihood of workers to leave a current job. The coronavirus pandemic is providing a laboratory for examining how the salience of these issues affect workers’ views of their jobs and their willingness to work under conditions of varying risk.

The first survey will use experiments embedded in a Facebook-based convenience sample to target food workers broadly, with a focus on W-2 employees at meat processing facilities, grocery stores, restaurants, and platform-based food delivery workers, including but not limited to Instacart. The second will survey a nationally representative sample of the full U.S. population in order to assess changing food consumption habits, as well as perceptions of food workers and collective action during the pandemic. This timely research promises to bring worker views into the public discussion of quality jobs, including welfare and safety, and will shed light on how workers and customers are intertwined in workplace issues of the day.

This study will provide a much-needed window into the sorts of labor processes that are coming to dominate an increasingly important industry: package delivery. It will examine how workers experience new technological and outsourcing practices. It will focus on new technologies in three categories—communication and monitoring, algorithmic planning and management, and the surveillance of delivery by customers—that are used to manage workers and how workers respond to these technologies in the context of outsourcing. This large qualitative project involves 2 years of ethnography and 100 interviews. It will provide ethnographic insights into Amazon.com, Inc. delivery workers, in particular women, workers of color, and immigrants—all of whom will be a particular focus of the interviews. This research will be a valuable contribution, given the lack of attention by researchers on this burgeoning and quickly changing segment of the industry.

This study focuses on place-based policies and how geographic concentration of innovation affects regional economic growth in the United States. The researchers will explore how local fiscal stimulus in the form of defense spending impacts both innovation and economic growth. Using contract-level data on defense spending and county-level measures of innovation, the researchers will attempt to identify through which channels defense spending affects aggregate innovation. They use Gross Domestic Product, personal income, and total employment to evaluate how defense spending affects economic growth.

This project explores whether, as an empirical matter, people have constrained choice sets in energy consumption due to where they live, and if that, in turn, may mean that traditional models of the efficiency of carbon taxation are incorrect. The researcher will decompose the spatial heterogeneity in carbon emissions into a component driven by individual preferences and a component driven by place. Using U.S. Census data, the American Community Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, among other data sources, the author explores how factors such as climate, income inequality, segregation, and public disinvestment impact place-based heterogeneity. Since so much emission heterogeneity is tied to income, there are clear implications for how this could impact and be impacted by inequality. Findings have the potential to inform our understanding of how carbon taxes may need to be accompanied by rezoning or other policies.

Policy changes at the state and local levels have created recreational cannabis markets in many municipalities across the United States. It is well-known that the War on Drugs disproportionately incarcerated members of the Black and Latinx communities. This research project will explore how the legalization of recreational cannabis in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco integrated criminal justice and racial economic equity initiatives. The researcher will conduct interviews and complete a comparative case study of policy debates and implementation. Using this mixed-methods approach, the researcher intends to illuminate how market power granted by states can shape equity.