This study will provide a much-needed window into the sorts of labor processes that are coming to dominate an increasingly important industry: package delivery. It will examine how workers experience new technological and outsourcing practices. It will focus on new technologies in three categories—communication and monitoring, algorithmic planning and management, and the surveillance of delivery by customers—that are used to manage workers and how workers respond to these technologies in the context of outsourcing. This large qualitative project involves 2 years of ethnography and 100 interviews. It will provide ethnographic insights into Amazon.com, Inc. delivery workers, in particular women, workers of color, and immigrants—all of whom will be a particular focus of the interviews. This research will be a valuable contribution, given the lack of attention by researchers on this burgeoning and quickly changing segment of the industry.

Despite the existence of a vast literature on U.S. labor market discrimination, there is still a lack of empirical evidence on the degree to which the private enforcement of anti-discrimination legislation through the federal courts has influenced racial divides in earnings and other socioeconomic outcomes. Using the Federal Court Cases: Integrated Data Base on Civil Terminations, the authors will create a set of comprehensive measures of civil rights enforcement at the court level, providing the opportunity to track changes in enforcement across 90 U.S. District Courts between 1970 and 2019. These measures of enforcement will be linked to socioeconomic outcomes using data at the individual and household levels in order to shed light on how enforcement of civil rights legislation via the courts influence labor market outcomes and intergenerational mobility of minority groups. In addition, the authors will create a comprehensive dataset on the political party composition of judges across courts and over time to examine how presidential appointees have influenced the evolution of civil rights enforcement and their implications for racial inequities in U.S. labor market outcomes and intergenerational income mobility.

Rising income inequality and declining labor market prospects are among the most salient features of the U.S. labor market today, particularly for non-college-educated men who are more likely to work in jobs which involve exposure to the elements, including in construction, agriculture, or warehousing. Growing evidence indicates that temperature stress may have important impacts on cognitive performance, labor capacity, and workplace safety, suggesting that added extreme heat due to climate change may significantly reduce earnings and job quality for many low-skilled workers. This project asks whether climate change could exacerbate recent trends in economic inequality and, if so, the possible scope for workplace adaptation and policy reforms. This project will examine the impact of a 2006 California policy to mandate a heat-illness-prevention standard on worker injuries, employment, wages, and profitability. It will provide additional evidence on the impact of temperature on workplace safety and contribute descriptive analysis on how various demographic groups are differentially exposed to occupational extreme temperature risk. The research uses administrative data on 11 million workplace injuries in California, injury and fatality data from the federal Office of Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and quasi-experimental variation in daily temperature at the U.S. ZIP code level from the National Climatic Data Center. This analysis will allow for an occupation by community zone level breakdown of workplace climate exposure by race, formal education, and immigrant status. The novel coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, has placed a spotlight on the health and economic inequalities among workers in the United States and so, too, will climate change. By exploring the overall and disparate impacts on workers, this research will provide concrete evidence on policies to mitigate such impacts.

The U.S. labor market literature relies, for the most part, on government survey data, which is invaluable for identifying economywide trends and differentials but lacks the detail needed about tasks and occupations to detect changes in how work is organized. This project will use two datasets assembled by Burning Glass Technologies containing millions of job postings and millions of resumes. The data offer the scope and scale to make fine distinctions and explore the array of skills embodied in workers and the tasks called out by employers. This project has three aims. First, it will examine variation within occupational categories and connections across categories. Given the growth of within-occupational inequality, understanding within-occupation heterogeneity in skills and other attributes is extremely important. Second, it will use resume data to examine worker mobility. This is a novel approach and is likely to offer important insights about labor market mobility. Third, it will investigate job quality, including nonwage benefits and employment relations, and the incidence of nonstandard work (temporary, on call, and contract based). Nonstandard work is not regularly measured in government surveys, so exploring whether job posting data can offer insight into the prevalence of nonstandard work arrangements and whether such arrangements are associated with job mobility and access to nonwage benefits, as well as differences in wage levels between similar occupations with different employment relations, could lay the groundwork for future research.

This project will explore the problem of implementing federal tax policy aimed at encouraging work when U.S. labor markets are imperfectly competitive. More specifically, this researcher will study the effect and optimal design of wage subsidies through the Earned Income Tax Credit in monopsonistic labor markets. In estimating the incidence of the EITC on both workers and firms, this research seeks to understand whether the purported inequality-combatting benefits of this federal tax credit are undermined by the capture of a large portion of the subsidy by employers. Because labor market power is known to vary considerably across place, and because exposure to concentrated markets varies by race and gender, this research will help to benchmark the effects of labor market power on places and demographic groups.

This project examines the level of alignment between employer and employee beliefs about the accessibility of paid leave. It takes advantage of a unique data source, The Shift Project, which samples low-wage, service-sector workers from within a set of large retail and food service employers across the United States and allows the team to match employee responses with individual employers. The research will pair quantitative analyses of Shift Project data and in-depth interview data from interviews with twenty human resources staff members at firms in the sample to provide important information about how employer practices may mediate awareness and take-up of paid leave benefits.