For more than a quarter of a century, one of the central questions in empirical academic and policy research on the U.S. labor market concerns the long-term decline in male employment rates. Existing research has documented patterns and trends in employment rates but almost entirely using cross-sectional data. A critical open question is what the decline in employment measured on an annual basis reflects in terms of an individual’s employment trajectory. This project tackles this question by incorporating longitudinal analysis (through the Panel Study of Income Dynamics) and pseudo-panel techniques (via cohort analysis using the Current Population Survey). By looking at the wages of the sometimes-nonemployed, this project will yield a better answer to the question of how much of the reduction in prime-age employment over recent decades can be explained by declining wages. This is critical to understanding the extent to which changes in labor demand (which have reduced wages for sets of workers) versus changes in labor supply elasticities (which have potentially lowered labor supply for a given wage) explain reductions in prime-age employment.

The decline in bargaining power for large groups of workers is at the core of rising inequality. This research aims to provide some of the first causal evidence that contractual language is not merely cheap talk but rather meaningfully shapes the decisions of contracting parties in the labor market. The grant will support an effort to digitize union contracts stored at the Kheel Center at Cornell University. In addition to digitization, the researchers will use language processing tools to extract norms, commitments, and entitlements from the text. The result will be a tool that can be used to understand the role of unions in the 20th century. The dataset will be uniquely detailed, including features of union contracts based on industry sector, union, firm, and year of the contract. The research questions that might be answered with the data range from the fundamental—How are labor contractual terms determined, and how do contractual terms affect workers and firms?—to the more subtle—How and why do contractual terms begin to reflect legal changes and judicial decisions?

This research will test a widely held perception that making ethnic information less prominent—rather than completely eliminating it—will reduce discrimination. The researcher will use a recent Airbnb policy change to empirically test this relationship empirically. Utilizing data from Airbnb, the research effectively builds on the literature using ethnic names on resumes to test for discrimination. This research will be able to focus attention on the continuing problem of racial discrimination for wages, particularly in the “gig,” or “platform,” economy

This project will take advantage of the unusually large changes in the statutory minimum wages in eight states and nine cities to analyze wage and employment impacts. There is intense debate over the efficacy of increased minimum wages to address growing income inequality, and this research will provide useful evidence, directly contributing to discussions of how to improve the design of current and future minimum wage policies.

The rate of unionization remains low in the United States, and as new forms of worker representation emerge, we need to better understand what workers want from labor organizations and how employee preferences differ across industries and occupations. This project will field a relatively large-scale survey, with embedded survey experiments, to examine what aspects of labor organization are preferred by workers and management.

There is growing evidence that wage differences between industries and firms are a primary source of contemporary wage inequality. Similarly, evidence suggests that gender segregation at the industry, occupation, and firm levels has persisted even as gender differences in human capital have declined. This project will draw a connection between the contribution of between-industry wage differences to overall wage inequality on the one hand, and occupational/industrial gender segregation and the wage penalty for care work on the other. The researchers will compare employment and wages, by gender, in the care versus financial sectors, thereby capturing the dynamics of gender by occupation in sectors that are the bookends in the structure of wages and wage inequality, tracking the extent to which the gender gap has grown or subsided in these two extreme groups.