This research asks how gender inequality influences the number of chances that individuals receive to succeed in the workplace and whether this affects skill development and/ or contributes to wage and promotion gaps. Specifically, the research seeks to add to our understanding of how gender differences may affect whether an employee’s successes and failures are attributed to luck or ability, and if that has implications for career trajectory. The project uses a unique data set of primary care physicians’ referrals to surgeons.

Pervasive earnings losses are a well-documented feature of job displacement, yet the understanding of the sources of these earnings losses is limited. The decline could be due to a lower wage at a new job, a lower likelihood of finding a new job, working fewer hours, or the loss of firm-specific rents. This project proposes to take advantage of employer-employee matched administrative data from Washington state’s unemployment insurance program to better understand the sources of earnings losses and to analyze the role of employer characteristics in job losses. Obtaining a better diagnosis of the root causes behind the long-term earnings decline can lead to better-designed policy responses.

Through an intervention with a major U.S. retailer (The Gap), the project tests whether shifting hourly workers to more stable schedules results in cost savings and increased productivity for businesses. In the second year of work, Williams and her team continued to make progress, including broadening the intervention in three important ways: an increase in hours, which research shows can improve sales by adding staffing at peak hours; agreeing to consider sources of instability stemming from the supply chain; and adding a worker survey and focus groups to gather information on scheduling impacts, pre and post intervention, on workers’ and their families’ well-being.

Innovation studies often use patents as an outcome of interest or a proxy for innovation. This project, however, focuses on the consequences of patents. By creating a new, restricted-access dataset that links patent applications to business tax records, the authors will use two quasi-experimental designs to estimate the relative effects of patent-generated monopoly rents on firm returns and worker wages. Much recent research has focused on inter-firm profitability and its relationship with inequality, and this project engages with that research to provide insights into the effects of patent rents on firm outcomes and earnings inequality. This work has the potential to help fill in our understanding of how innovation in an age of inequality may not be translating into broadly shared growth. Moreover, it provides a window into how governance and institutions (in this case, the patent and tax systems) impact innovation.

This team of young, promising applied economists seeks to quantify how public assistance affects households’ financial well-being through increasing access to credit. We know little about the interactions between social safety net programs and the financial well-being of families. This paper uses a credible and proven research design to provide new evidence to better our understanding of the role of credit markets in the lives of the poor. By matching individual credit data to administrative data, the authors will estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income on credit access, secured borrowing, and payday loan borrowing for the youth and their families. There is great interest in this broad subject, and precious few ways to tease out causal impacts. Yet with cutting-edge methods and use of administrative data, the authors will attempt to do so.

This project will quantify the level of and inequality in employer-provided paid parental leave by fielding a survey of small and medium-sized employers in three relatively low-wage industries (including retail) in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The work is likely to make a significant contribution to our understanding of a currently hazy empirical picture of the social insurance system in the United States. Poor federal data collection on leave policy means that studies such as this one are a valuable addition. The authors will assess the availability, quality, and employee take-up of leave offered. One main advantage of funding this survey is that it will provide pre-treatment data collection for New York before the recently passed paid family leave law goes into effect in January, 2018. The investigators’ previous Rhode Island study is widely cited and useful to policymakers working on these issues, and we expect this to be similarly impactful.