The declining relative earnings of workers constitutes an important macroeconomic trend. This project will study a new potential explanation: changes in corporate governance. To do so, the author will use the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, Longitudinal Business Databases, Census of Manufacturers, and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers to analyze changes generated by activist hedge fund investors, then changes in equity-based compensation of managers, and their impacts on worker outcomes.
Archives: Grant
Determinants of Irregular Worker Schedules
This project will utilize third-party scheduling data that is well-suited to investigate schedule volatility. Research in this area has been limited to surveys of workers, but with detailed time and attendance data from a payroll provider, this project seeks to document novel facts about worker schedules, evaluate the effect of predictive scheduling and minimum wage laws on schedule-related outcomes for firms and workers, and understand the welfare effects of schedule regulation on workers.
Empirical Evaluations of Child Care Subsidy Policies
This project proposes to estimate a structural equilibrium model of the U.S. child care sector to use for counterfactual subsidy design, with the goal of finding an optimal cost-neutral subsidy design. The project consists of two parts. First, the author will evaluate the effect of reimbursement rate policies on local maternal labor force participation, child care worker wages, child care prices, and quality of care. Second, the author will use the estimated model to simulate the effects of counterfactual subsidy policies on parent utility, worker wages, mark-ups, and the distribution of quality.
The Distribution of Federally-Insured Mortgages: 1935-1975 Evidence from Local Land Records
Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration policies are understood to have contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, wealth, and neighborhood opportunity in the United States, but systematic data on their mortgage activity is scarce. This project proposes to digitize and publicly release a dataset of FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed mortgages issued between 1935 and 1975 to assess the demographic and spatial distribution of these loans. Addresses will be geocoded, and names of borrowers matched to full-count Census data from 1930, 1940, and 1950 to identify borrowers’ demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. This project will assess who received these loans; how they were distributed across neighborhoods; and whether FHA and VA insurance accelerated White flight and exacerbated segregation.
Supply Chain Resilience and Economic Growth: Evidence from Global Shipping Disruptions
This project aims to provide new causal evidence on the economic implications of
supply chain disruptions. The identification strategy leverages the fact that global supply chains rely on maritime trade, which depends on a few critical choke points. The author will identify disruptive incidents, which are plausibly exogenous to the U.S. economy, and then isolate the market impact of the disruption using high-frequency financial data. The author will then use these shipping cost surprises as an instrument in a structural VAR model of the U.S. economy to identify a structural supply chain shock.
Unlocking Opportunity: The Long-Term Effects of EITC-Led Migration on Families and Intergenerational Mobility
Building on past research on the role of the Earned Income Tax Credit in supporting migration decisions, this research will evaluate the subsequent outcomes for both parents and children. Leveraging detailed linked administrative data—including the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and individual tax records—the author will conduct a longitudinal analysis of U.S. families’ migration patterns and economic outcomes. High-resolution geographic information provides information on the quality of neighborhoods families move to and from, with variables such as school quality, local poverty rates, incarceration rates, labor market opportunities, and measures of economic mobility. Linking individual tax records with survey data allows for an assessment of children’s educational attainment, employment, and earnings over time. Tax records provide information on family income, employment, and geographic mobility.
Market Power in Homebuilding and the U.S. Housing Shortage
This project brings together two important U.S. economic policy areas: the housing shortage and market power. The author will use cutting-edge tools from industrial organization to test firm conduct and answer the question of whether market power among homebuilders can explain the under-supply of new housing, particularly entry-level units, or whether their economies of scale reduce costs.
Labor Market Collusion through Common Leadership
This project studies how firms collude in labor markets, studying an overlooked potential mechanism: common leadership, in which the same person holds high-level leadership positions in two competing firms. Common leadership is prohibited by antitrust law, but until the past few years, enforcement was nearly nonexistent. This study focuses on collusion in labor markets in the form of no-poach agreements—specifically, how entry into such agreements affects worker mobility and career trajectories. Preliminary results find entry into collusive agreements in the years following connection through common leadership. No-poach agreements are extremely difficult to study since they are secret in nature. The author will use the largest known case of labor market collusion to overcome this data challenge. In the late 2000s, more than 50 tech companies entered into no-poach agreements. She will use three primary sources of data: court documents, data on worker histories, and biographical data on company executives.
The Distributional Effects of Firm Productivity Changes: Evidence from U.S. Linked Worker-Owner Data
This project will estimate exactly which individuals benefit when firms become more productive and whether these are the same individuals who bear the costs when firms do poorly. The author will use novel linked worker-owner administrative data from the United States. Specifically, he will use data covering the universe of pass-through firms in the United States to identify each firm’s workers and owners, and measure their total compensation from the firm. He will link these data to quasi-experimental, firm-specific productivity shocks to estimate the distributional effects of productivity changes. This will allow for an understanding of how productivity shocks affect workers and owners in various ways.
Big Daycare: The Impact of Private Equity-Owned Child Care Businesses on the Market for Early Care and Education
This project aims to fill the gap on the impact that private-equity-owned child care businesses have on the structure and functioning of the early child care market. The author seeks to answer the following questions: How does private equity affect the market for early career and education? In particular, how different are private-equity-backed child care centers from other child care centers? How do centers change when taken over by a private equity firm? How does the entrance of a private-equity-backed center impact other private and public providers? This research is poised to fill a large void in the child care literature: the role of for-profit providers and, in particular, the effects of new entrants and private-equity-owned operations into child care markets.