Policy changes at the state and local levels have created recreational cannabis markets in many municipalities across the United States. It is well-known that the War on Drugs disproportionately incarcerated members of the Black and Latinx communities. This research project will explore how the legalization of recreational cannabis in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco integrated criminal justice and racial economic equity initiatives. The researcher will conduct interviews and complete a comparative case study of policy debates and implementation. Using this mixed-methods approach, the researcher intends to illuminate how market power granted by states can shape equity.
Archives: Grant
A large-scale evaluation of merger simulations
This project asks whether standard merger simulation techniques in industrial organization effectively predict price changes in observed mergers, and if not, if predictions depart from reality systematically and in a way consistent with efficiencies or coordinated effects. Using scanner data, the authors will run a standard merger simulation on a large set of completed mergers and compare predictions to outcomes, creating a comprehensive retrospective of the effects of mergers on prices, which will inform us of whether typical approved mergers in the United States tend to increase prices. They will also study the sources of the prediction error.
Regulation of merger policy is a primary tool of competition policy in the United States. Merger simulations are used to decide whether mergers are anti-competitive or whether they should be permitted. This ambitious project could provide a wealth of information about consummated mergers and the predictive power of merger simulation techniques, contributing to the infrastructure used to regulate competition.
Monetary policy and firm heterogeneity in the United States
With the Federal Reserve’s focus on promoting maximum employment, it is important for researchers to understand how U.S. monetary policy affects firms’ employment differently. This research project will analyze how the age and size of a firm impacts the firm’s responsiveness to monetary policy. Using the Business Dynamics Statistics and Quarterly Workforce Indicators datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, the researcher will attempt to provide new evidence on the distributional effect of monetary policy on the employment of heterogenous firms in the United States from 1977 to 2007.
The evolution of civil rights enforcement and economic prosperity of minorities
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.
Mark-ups, labor market inequality, and the distributional implications of monetary policy
This project is part of a broader agenda to develop quantitative macroeconomic models that can be used to study the distributional implications of macroeconomic shocks and policies. Existing macroeconomic models are limited in their ability to create realistic dynamics in the distribution of labor income in response to macroeconomic shocks. Since labor income is one of the most important dimensions of economic inequality and the most important determinant of economic welfare for the majority of U.S. households, this is a significant limitation.
This paper will begin by developing a theory to demonstrate the new heterogeneity that is going to be a key force in the model. It will be followed by an empirical section to show the fact that the model is seeking to address and to highlight the important empirical facts that other models are missing, such as that not all labor income is similarly cyclical and that expansionary and productive occupations have systematically different experiences. The final section addresses the general equilibrium consequences of this heterogeneity, a step that is critically important for doing policy counterfactuals.
Labor market frictions and adaptation to climate change: Implications for earnings and job quality of low-skilled workers
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 individual-level effects of diversity programs
This study will seek to explore the consequences of diversity programs on recipients’ individual-level labor market outcomes. Using an audit study, the researcher will examine how Black university diversity scholarship recipients fare when seeking entry-level jobs after graduation in comparison to other Black job applicants. The author then will link these results to a survey of hiring professionals to understand the social and psychological phenomena that may explain the differential treatment of diversity scholarship recipients. The author also will use administrative data from a California postdoctoral program to compare post-Ph.D. outcomes of diversity scholarship recipients to applicants who were closely considered but did not receive the scholarship. The study could add to our understanding of the unintended consequences of diversity initiatives, which may inadvertently stigmatize recipients, and the broader implications of efforts to create more access and more means of support for scholarship recipients of color.
Using job posting and resume data to better understand the U.S. labor market
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.
Monetary policy, credit, and labor income redistribution
There is an enormous amount of interest recently in the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy, with an eye on questions such as whether monetary policy contributes to inequality. This research will examine two significant research questions within this literature: the effect of monetary policy on inequality and differential effects of the credit transmission channel.
This project will use Portuguese administrative data that matches employer-employee data with credit registry data. The project is likely to lead to fine-grained estimates of the effects of monetary policy on the distribution of labor income, as well as on the effects of the distribution of firm credit outcomes.
Optimal tax policy in imperfectly competitive U.S. labor markets
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.