Agricultural supply chains in the United States include hundreds or thousands of farmers and large agribusinesses that process and distribute the produce. Following a series of mergers over the past five decades, the farmers that contribute to the production of meat and grain each have the option of selling to only four predominant buyers, with the buyers varying by product. Given the disparity between the sizes of individual farmers and the agribusinesses, it is natural to wonder whether transaction prices reflect the marginal value of farmers’ product, as they would in a competitive market, or whether agribusinesses are able to exercise oligopsony power to artificially depress prices. These concerns are particularly salient now, given indictments for price-fixing and anticompetitive practices in the meatpacking industry. Yet farm bankruptcies have increased each year for the past decade. This project will study oligopsony power in cattle markets by quantifying the market power of the packers, assessing the causes and consequences of the market power, and examining how it has changed over the past two decades. Outcomes of interest include the degree of local market concentration, plant-specific mark-ups and the mechanisms that support the mark-ups, and evaluation of specific mergers.

This project will build on the relatively thin body of work on informal, home-based child care providers in the United States. It aims to better understand how that community can be supported in meeting societal priorities around increasing affordable access to high-quality early childhood care. Home-based care providers deliver essential care services but occupy a structurally challenging position. These providers are poorly compensated and face challenges when it comes to meeting licensing requirements or achieving high-quality ratings. This study will identify impediments to these child care providers’ abilities to provide high-quality, affordable child care that is accessible to the families that need it. The authors will take advantage of a collaboration with the Virginia Department of Education to conduct interviews with licensed and unlicensed providers in Virginia through participatory action research, a research design that helps create unsilencing opportunities for those who have been silenced. This is especially important since the voices of home-based providers are often not included in the conversation about quality care.

The common ownership hypothesis suggests that when large investors own shares in more than one firm within the same industry, those firms may have reduced incentives to compete. Firms can soften competition by producing fewer units, raising prices, reducing investment, innovating less, or limiting entry into new markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have all acknowledged concerns about the anticompetitive effects of common ownership and have relied on the theory and evidence of common ownership in major merger cases. This is a series of four separate projects by the four researchers. The first project seeks to show a link between executive compensation and measures of common ownership, providing a "mechanism" for how common ownership might affect competition and consumption. The second focuses on innovation, building on recent work and seeking to incorporate effects of common ownership, which are predicted to vary according to technological and product-market relationships. The third project is largely theoretical and will study the size and magnitude of the relationship between common ownership and innovation and the extent to which that varies across the universe of publicly listed U.S. corporations. Finally, the fourth project is a data collection effort, expanding the universe of high-quality common ownership data outside of the United States.

Prior research suggests that the pathways through which childhood poverty shapes poverty in adulthood include physical and mental well-being, educational attainment, employment, and family structure. Income support policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, are all known to reduce levels of child poverty and have the potential to reduce racial disparities in child poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1967–2018, the researchers plan to investigate how the introduction of and/or policy changes to the EITC, SNAP, and TANF programs are effective at reducing racial differences in the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The authors will disaggregate their findings by race and use individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to identify children in poverty who were exposed to these programs and will follow them through early adulthood, assessing their poverty status.

This project seeks to determine the overall impact of Walmart supercenters on local employment and earnings, and more generally on the competitive structure of affected local labor markets. The research design exploits the fact that Walmart Inc. attempted to place a supercenter in 39 counties but was prevented from doing so as the result of local efforts. These counties are compared to those where a supercenter was opened. Data on employment and earnings is gathered from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and county-by-year labor force data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics, both from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary results show that the entry of Walmart supercenters caused significant reductions in aggregate local employment and earnings, with retail employment increasing immediately upon entry before largely reverting to pre-entry levels. This research will help us understand how large employers can exercise monopsony power locally in the market for less-skilled labor and what the consequences are for workers.

This project will convene economists, political scientists, energy scholars, and policy practitioners to synthesize collective expertise on the role of carbon pricing and innovation in climate policy. Participants will discuss how carbon pricing has been used around the world, its economic and political potential as a climate policy tool, and the importance of considering political economy in the design, implementation, and durability of climate policies.