This project will examine whether regulations increase firms’ labor market power and how changes in labor market structure vis-à-vis regulation affect worker outcomes. Some laws limit how much existing firms must comply with new regulations, while new firms must comply. One example is the Environmental Protection Agency’s New Source Review permitting requirements. The research team seeks to understand how this regulation affects employers’ labor market power. They will use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to link individual earnings with demographic and geographic information. Further, they will use data on counties and industries from the EPA to conduct a difference-in-difference analysis and a two-stage instrumental strategy to estimate the effect of regulation on local labor concentration and worker outcomes. This research will broadly inform regulatory design with worker outcomes in mind.

This project will unpack the association between child care infrastructure, child care employment, and unemployment rates across counties, and examine whether it differs by geography, race, or poverty level. The research team will estimate the racial and ethnic differences in the local availability of child care and then test the relationship between early childhood education and both child care workers’ employment and wages, as well as overall labor force participation. The project will provide a longitudinal national measurement of child care supply at the county level and evaluate whether the stability of publicly funded child care through schooling bolstered local child care employment and earnings.

This project will explore whether reparations can close and have a lasting impact on the racial wealth gap. The research team will examine how parental income, wealth, and education affect offspring’s wealth as adults. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, they estimate an empirical model of the relationship between parents’ and children’s income, wealth, and education. They will then develop a general equilibrium model with endogenous accumulation of physical and human capital by heterogeneous households. Built into the model is an overlapping generations structure, whereby investments in children depend on parents’ income and wealth, and wealth can be inherited across generations. They will then use the model to examine the effect of different reparations policies and their effects on short- and long-run welfare, income, and human capital by race.

This project will unpack the effect of inflation on employment and wages during the current inflationary episode in the United States. They plan to establish stylized empirical facts related to heterogeneity in wage rigidity and the labor market effects of inflation. They will use Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data to study how wage rigidities vary with inflation. The team’s second goal is an extension of an existing theoretical model of the labor market by adding job-to-job mobility, wage renegotiation costs, and multiworker firms to better capture firms’ labor market power.

This project will process job ads accessed through the National Labor Exchange Data Trust in a transparent and replicable way. The authors will use natural language processing tools to turn the job opening text into machine-readable data and will make the code available to other scholars.

This project explores the causes and implications of the resilience of public-sector unions after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which effectively made the entire public sector right-to-work. The research team will field a national survey of 4,000 full-time, nonmanagerial, union-eligible public-sector workers to shed light on two questions: Why didn’t the Supreme Court decision in Janus cause a large decrease in public-sector union membership? And what can spark increased unionization efforts among public-sector workers in the United States? This project is poised to inform what options there may be for boosting union membership in the public sector.