This research aims to empirically analyze potential explanations for gender wage gaps, glass ceilings, and differential labor market returns for women by looking at how gender gaps may be perpetuated within a firm. Using a dataset from a multinational firm employing 300,000 people that includes applications for promotions, as well as observed promotions, the project seeks to understand internal firm promotion processes that affect the gender wage gap over the career cycle.

This project consists of an empirical analysis using a county-pair design to examine the relationship between minimum wages and the quality of services provided by low-wage workers by examining safety inspections and patient health outcomes in nursing homes following minimum wage reforms.

This research seeks to understand how institutional interventions affect the realization of labor standards within the rapidly growing in-home care industry. Specifically, how do labor unions, government-civil society collaborations, and industry standards boards affect employer compliance, workers’ ability to claim their rights, and resulting wages and job quality? Using targeted Facebook, Inc. advertising to conduct surveys in multiple languages, the project will include a comparative analysis of New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle—cities with more robust protections for in-home care workers.

Russell will explore whether the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, reform affected the likelihood that ex-offenders moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This work sits at the intersection of two important policy areas—criminal justice reform and neighborhood access/mobility—and brings a racial lens to the question. It also seeks to understand whether the reform promotes statistical racial discrimination in housing, as some research has suggested “Ban the Box” laws unintentionally have.

As the population ages and the cost of nursing-home care soars, more attention in the paid leave debate is turning to the importance of eldercare. This project examines how family caregiving of older adults impacts productivity at work and whether historically marginalized subgroups of working caregivers face an increased and inequitable risk of work productivity loss. The author will use the National Study of Caregiving and the National Health and Aging Trends Study, and, using a work productivity instrument validated for employed family caregivers, will provide estimates of the prevalence and cost of absenteeism, presenteeism, and work productivity loss in working family caregivers, including sociodemographic breakdowns.

This project seeks to extend the evidence on welfare policies by examining the long-run effects of a high-impact set of randomized experiments conducted by the nonprofit organization MDRC in the late 1980s and 1990s involving more than 100,000 welfare recipients. This is the first study of its kind to look at the very long-term effects of welfare reform experiments on adult outcomes. In each study, welfare recipients were randomly assigned to either a control, Aid to Families with Dependent Children-like program, or to interventions involving different combinations of job training, job search assistance, financial incentives to work, childcare subsidies, time limits, and/or sanctions. Merging data from these experiments with administrative tax data and other data held at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hoynes will study the long-run impacts of welfare policies on many important outcomes, including earnings and employment, fertility, marriage, mortality, and program participation for adult welfare recipients and, importantly, their children.