This research project uses qualitative data to explore the mechanisms that link the decline of employment options to the rise in drug use, the decline in labor force participation, and other negative socio-economic and behavioral consequences for males. Unlike many studies of industry decline which look at urban communities, this work focuses on the loss of natural resource employment in rural areas. Specifically, the researcher focuses on the lack of employment options and life outcomes on two Native American tribal reservations, The Yurok and Hoopa Valley Reservations, located in California’s northwest. A member of the Yurok tribe herself, the researcher’s data provides a unique contribution. We also see the research as having useful insights on the consequences of declining male labor force participation, particularly in non-urban settings. From a policy engagement perspective, the rich stories that are likely to come from this qualitative work will help provide the narrative and texture that is necessary for capturing policy attention.

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.