Recent research finds that most, if not all, of the growth in earnings inequality in the United States may be explained by the growth in inequality across firms or establishments. This finding is consistent with research showing that workers in outsourced establishments—such as call centers, janitorial service companies, or security services—receive lower pay and benefits than those workers doing the same jobs but who are employed by lead or primary firms. But our knowledge of the extent and impact of outsourcing on a broader set of workers is limited, in large part because of data constraints. This study will provide evidence based on rigorous, quantitative analysis of the extent to which outsourcing has contributed to inequality in the United States. The study will rely on Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data linked with American Community Suvey data and will use the methodology established in a previous paper based on German data. A key shortcoming of the LEHD data is that it does not have information on occupation. By linking to ACS data, the authors will be able to observe occupation for a subset of those in the LEHD dataset and to assess the effects of outsourcing on outcomes besides earnings—most critically, health insurance.

Research shows how important college is to upward economic mobility. Yet there are many barriers to getting into and completing college, most notably cost. Community colleges are frequently touted as a cost-effective path, whereby students begin at a community college and then transfer to a 4-year university. This research focuses on transfer students and Wisconsin’s Promise Tuition grants, a place-based scholarship which offers debt-free tuition assistance. Over the past decade, more and more states and postsecondary institutions are offering such grants, yet there is virtually no research that focuses on their impact on transfer students, particularly transfer students’ degree completion. This project explores the intersection between transfer students, their perceptions related to college finances, and the design of Promise Tuition scholarships and grants by using a mixed methods study. The first part utilizes student-level administrative data from the University of Wisconsin to examine course-taking patterns, credits attempted and completed, Grade Point Average, persistence rates, financial aid eligibility and receipt, and degrees conferred. The second part is a survey of a random sample of transfer students in order to elicit information regarding college experiences and finances. This rich case study promises to inform not only policy debates around college affordability and completion, but also our understanding of how the institutional structures of postsecondary education in the United States are supporting or inhibiting intergenerational mobility.

Previous research indicates that wealth inequality in the United States has increased since the mid-20th century and is much higher than income inequality. Wealth inequality is particularly worrisome since wealth provides many advantages, including securing against shocks and transferability to the next generation. Yet despite the relevance of wealth for our understanding of inequality and mobility, available data on wealth inequality is limited. This project will make an important contribution by drawing on tax data linked to external data on housing equity to overcome the limitations of survey data and by linking these data across generations within families and by generating geographic aggregates at small-scale geographical levels. This will allow the author to answer pressing questions, such as how concentrated wealth is locally and the stickiness of the wealth distribution across generations.

This historical analysis focuses on whether racial discrimination by firms led to underprovision of content for minorities in the U.S. radio market in the post-war Jim Crow era and whether competition in the market reduced the racial divide. More specifically, the researcher looks at how the entry of television in local markets in the 1950s and 1960s affected programming for Black audiences. Using Federal Communications Commission annual financial reports, directories of radio stations, and the National Opinion Research Center’s 1944 and 1946 racial attitude surveys, the author will analyze how and if discrimination played a role in firms’ programming decisions.

A prominent feature of the post-Great Recession U.S. economy is the lack of adequate wage growth despite a tight labor market. One explanation is that a decline in workers’ bargaining power put downward pressure on wage growth. The declining labor share of income is popularly cited as one reason behind weakened worker bargaining power, and a burgeoning field of research ascribes much of this decline to the increase in monopsony power in the United States. This researcher seeks to estimate workers’ bargaining power over time in the United States. It will make some important extensions on the job search model, and then move onto a model of wage determination that looks at how labor market dynamics, such as vacancies and unemployment, impact wage determination via worker bargaining power.

Capital gains are one of the largest components of income at the top of the wealth distribution and play a key role in measuring wealth inequality. Yet capital gains are rarely included in estimates of the wealth distribution in economics, mainly because measurement requires detailed information on the distribution of wealth at the individual security level. This project will construct a new dataset to directly measure the holdings of public equities and fixed-income assets for all individuals in the United States using internal IRS data from the 1099-DIV and 1099-INT forms, which have not previously been used by researchers. This improved data will allow for more accurate estimates of wealth inequality, including new estimates of top-end wealth inequality. It will also shed light on savings rates across the income distribution and bring to bear new evidence of whether the rich save more.