This research asks whether vertical disintegration strategies, such as outsourcing and franchising, are merely efficiency-enhancing or if they are also strategies to manipulate the legal boundaries of the firm to gain greater revenues and shift risk onto less powerful suppliers, contractors and franchisees. The research focuses specifically on franchises and proposes to build a unique new dataset based on financial data from court cases. Particular areas of exploration include questions of bargaining power, risk, royalty rates, and contract terms.

A structural change in the United States economy—huge new flows of personal information stemming from technological innovation—has enabled companies to classify, sort and rank individuals in ways previously unimaginable. This research proposes to use big data from car insurance providers to predict market decisions by looking at how regulators, members of industry and other key actors together establish the market rules by which personal data determines economic opportunity. It asks on what grounds policy and market actors conclude that it is fair to treat people differently in the marketplace based on their personal data “traces,” and seeks to show how some, but not other, ideas get embedded in markets over time.

The rate of unionization remains low in the United States, and as new forms of worker representation emerge, we need to better understand what workers want from labor organizations and how employee preferences differ across industries and occupations. This project will field a relatively large-scale survey, with embedded survey experiments, to examine what aspects of labor organization are preferred by workers and management.

There is growing evidence that wage differences between industries and firms are a primary source of contemporary wage inequality. Similarly, evidence suggests that gender segregation at the industry, occupation, and firm levels has persisted even as gender differences in human capital have declined. This project will draw a connection between the contribution of between-industry wage differences to overall wage inequality on the one hand, and occupational/industrial gender segregation and the wage penalty for care work on the other. The researchers will compare employment and wages, by gender, in the care versus financial sectors, thereby capturing the dynamics of gender by occupation in sectors that are the bookends in the structure of wages and wage inequality, tracking the extent to which the gender gap has grown or subsided in these two extreme groups.

This research explores how maternity leave affects mothers and their children. Much of the work on paid maternity leave in the United States has focused on the labor supply effect for women, with a small literature on health effects for children. Using a set of linked administrative data from the state of Rhode Island, this project will examine a more extensive set of outcomes for both mothers and children. In addition, the research will look at maternal and child outcomes for individuals across the income distribution, providing needed nuance to assess various policy options.

Researchers and policymakers are increasingly discovering the important role of firms when it comes to earnings. Shocks to the productivity of firms or industry—for example, a firm closing, or an industry shrinking—appear to be an important contributor to workers’ earnings and employment volatility. This project will investigate how different shocks to firms and the market are passed onto employees of that firm and, importantly, the effectiveness of U.S. social insurance programs—for example, unemployment insurance, Social Security programs, etc.—in buffering households against shocks to their incomes. Whereas most of the work on these issues to date is limited to either looking at workers independently from firms or industries, or at shocks that result in substantial displacement, the researchers will utilize IRS data that allow them to link individuals to the firms that employ them, opening a rich field of research questions that it has not previously been possible to answer. Research findings will likely provide details to help us understand where problems may be greatest, or provide new evidence on places where institutions are more successful in mitigating negative shocks.