This project will explore the distributional implications of fracking and mass transit expansions, two important recent developments in U.S. cities and regions. Using newly available, restricted access, longitudinal U.S. Census Bureau microdata, the researcher seeks to answer: If fracking or urban rail expansions have heterogenous effects? How much do local housing costs rise? And do fracking or rail expansions lead to displacement of original residents? Policymakers are searching for policies to encourage growth in American cities, and we see this project as providing insightful and generalizable findings in that area.

The polarization of the labor market into high- and low-skill jobs is one of the most popular explanations for the increase in income inequality. This project will explore how much skill polarization actually happened by creating a novel new dataset of job openings by skill level spanning multiple decades. The researchers will create these data by mining the text of job advertisements in newspapers and online job sites. The new data will help researchers better understand the change in skill requirements for jobs over the long run, as well as changes during recoveries and economic expansions. This research will improve our understanding of how inequalities in human capital contribute to broader economic inequality.

This project will bring together macroeconomic theory and large-scale microeconomic datasets to advance modern economics and inform monetary and public policy. Using employment records merged to credit reports, the authors will estimate the impact of credit access on the job-finding rates and re-employment earnings of displaced workers. Past research has examined the borrowing and credit use of the unemployed, and this study builds on that line of work to examine the direct impact of credit on future outcomes. In preliminary results, the authors find that credit access increases the time before re-employment, but also increases average salary once a new job is found. This work will develop a search model capable of explaining these new findings.

This project will study the rise of mass incarceration in relation to military downsizing. The author will determine whether the military-penal crossover, occurring in the 1990s and continuing through the present, has reinforced racial inequality in the labor market, with blacks experiencing more incarceration while decreasingly enlisting in the military.

How does the dramatic increase of student loan debt affect how college graduates search for jobs in the labor market? Do the effects of student debt on job search differ across the distribution of family income? This project addresses these important questions, with immediate implications for contemporary policy conversations about student debt reform, as well as the broader fate of Millennials in the labor market.

This project will quantify the gains that low-wage workers make via union membership, not only in terms of wages but also benefits, health and safety protections, grievance procedures, training, and work flexibility and regularity. Utilizing a database of first contracts gained under collective bargaining agreements, the researcher seeks to provide a broader view of unionization’s benefits which fully captures the human capital implications. In addition, this project focuses on women, workers of color, and low-wage workers, which the vast majority of the contemporary research on unions and labor market outcomes does not capture. Low-wage workers are disproportionately at the bottom of the income scale, and account for a significant share of the growth in income inequality. Understanding the diverse consequences of organizing and collective bargaining may provide insights into how and why inequality has grown.