This project will examine the impact of supply-side child care investments on access to and stability of child care, as well as whether investments in child care vary by neighborhood. Utilizing novel mobile phone data, the authors plan to construct “real-time” measures of customer and worker flow, enabling an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of the child care workforce and consumers at a fine geographic scale with high frequency. They will then use this new data, along with data from a Minnesota grant program from the American Rescue Plan, to answer how funds given directly to providers affect the number and demographics of families served. This project will provide new evidence on the effects of investing in the supply of child care as opposed to supporting the demand side through vouchers or other subsidies.

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.

This project explores the causes and implications of the resilience of public-sector unions after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which effectively made the entire public sector right-to-work. The research team will field a national survey of 4,000 full-time, nonmanagerial, union-eligible public-sector workers to shed light on two questions: Why didn’t the Supreme Court decision in Janus cause a large decrease in public-sector union membership? And what can spark increased unionization efforts among public-sector workers in the United States? This project is poised to inform what options there may be for boosting union membership in the public sector.

This project will process job ads accessed through the National Labor Exchange Data Trust in a transparent and replicable way. The authors will use natural language processing tools to turn the job opening text into machine-readable data and will make the code available to other scholars.

This project will answer how campaigns for unionization run outside of the National Labor Relations Board differ from NLRB campaigns in terms of firm, industry, and bargaining unit characteristics, as well as employer and union tactics. There is existing evidence that NLRB-certified elections are fraught with employer labor law violations and other barriers. Card check campaigns, on the other hand, offer a potentially compelling alternative way of organizing. This study will use an in-depth national survey of lead organizers in private-sector, non-Board organizing campaigns to examine the characteristics and effectiveness of the campaigns. The author will compile a database of non-Board organizing campaigns from 2016–2022 to show the extent of non-Board organizing, whether these campaigns have declined in number and size in accordance with NLRB campaigns, and which unions and industries have the most non-Board organizing activity. The author will then conduct a survey of 500 non-Board campaign organizers on employer and union tactics, unit demographics, and the election and first contract process.

This research explores how nonwork policies affect work opportunities. The inability for individuals with low incomes to access transportation is a significant barrier to employment. Existing research has focused on the lack of car ownership or transportation deserts. But for millions of U.S. workers, the suspension of their driver’s licenses is a significant concern, with a large portion of those suspensions due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations. As of 2021, more than 1 million people in North Carolina (the state the author is researching) have active license suspensions as a result of these policies. For many, these policies often create a vicious cycle of debt and collateral consequences that linger for years. The author will conduct semi-structured interviews with people in North Carolina whose driver’s license has been suspended due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations to better understand the mechanisms through which driver’s license suspension structures affect individuals’ employment opportunities.