Governments around the world provided substantial support to individuals and firms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This project will study the effects of the stimulus payments provided to U.S. individuals through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES, Act. Comprising $2.2 trillion in spending, this bill included $300 billion in stimulus payments to individuals at the onset of the pandemic. Using data on the universe of U.S. federal tax returns for individuals and firms, the authors plan to estimate the effects of stimulus payments on labor market outcomes. The data allow the authors to link stimulus payments with labor market outcomes, including salaried employment, contract jobs, unemployment, and entrepreneurship. The authors plan to implement a regression kink design to identify the effects of stimulus payments on labor market outcomes. The project is poised to contribute to our understanding of the effects of fiscal stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market choices of individuals.

Unemployment Insurance was a critical component of the federal fiscal response to the COVID-19 recession. Yet one of the UI system’s most promising job retention programs used in many other countries—Short-Time Compensation—was underutilized in the United States, despite substantial federal subsidies to states. Through Short-Time Compensation, employers reduce hours for a group of workers who receive prorated UI benefits and maintain job benefits. Despite having bipartisan support, little is known about this program’s effectiveness due to a lack of data on it. This project harnesses unique administrative data and an ongoing partnership in California to evaluate the impact of Short-Time Compensation on different workers and employers during the pandemic. The outcomes the research seeks to address are: STC awareness and use, partial UI use and full UI use, worker outcomes, and firm outcomes. To evaluate heterogeneity in outcomes, the authors will analyze outcomes by worker characteristics, including age, gender, and prior earnings, and firm characteristics, including firm size, industry, geography, and wage bill size. To help improve take-up during the next recession and obtain the first causal impacts of Short-Time Compensation, the authors will use an encouragement design experiment to estimate the effect of randomized promotion on employer awareness of the program and its impact on worker and firm outcomes.

This project will examine whether there are heterogenous inflation rates across the United States. If so, the authors plan to identify which areas face higher rates of inflation and what mechanisms drive the observed differences. More specifically, the authors will use regional Nielsen Retail Scanner data from 2006–2016 to measure food inflation. This project will also analyze the effects of local market concentration on inflation, adding to the evidence base needed to effectively measure the heterogeneous effects of inflation.

This project will explore the effect of large-scale business openings subsidized with tax and related incentives to estimate the effect of these public investments on labor markets—not just on wages, but also on the skills demanded by employers post-opening. The author will use data on government subsidized projects from 2013–2019, including manufacturing, distribution centers, headquarters and data centers, as well as runner-up locations for these projects, to help identify the causal effect of the “million-dollar projects.” This research will provide new insights on the spillover effects of public investments when designing place-based policy.

This project will create a database of hospital mergers over the past 40 years. The database will detail the following: where health systems are merging or divesting to understand which areas/people (including demographic differences) are affected; whether that differs between for-profit and nonprofit hospitals; and whether higher-priced hospitals continue to provide higher-quality care. Beyond the dataset construction, the project will map areas with 2+, 3+, and 4+ hospitals and produce descriptive statistics at various geographic levels. The research team will track the growth in health systems that resulted from acquisitions by analyzing whether for-profit health systems were strategically acquiring hospitals in regions with more affluent, privately insured patients. This project will contribute to our understanding of the impacts of hospital mergers on equity, patient access, and quality of care.

This project seeks to understand the scale, scope, and spread of employee activism, workplace protest, and its impact on corporate stock prices in the United States. The author builds on an existing longitudinal dataset—the Dynamics of Collective Action by Stanford University—to understand employee activism and understand its use as an alternative to employees leaving the firm. She then will attempt to understand how employee activism spreads by tracking the occurrence of employee protests across industry or social movement networks. Finally, she examines how employee activism affects the share price of a corporation.