This project will examine how Unemployment Insurance policies interact with job search behavior in dual-earner households in the United States. More specifically, the researcher will explore the impacts of an expansion of Unemployment Insurance to include workers who leave their jobs due to their spouse getting a job that requires relocation. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 and 1997, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 2008, this study will seek to explain how and if access to Unemployment Insurance influences whether households will migrate long distances and attempts to measure if access to Unemployment Insurance is associated with higher wages after the household moves. The findings have the potential to inform our understanding of the gender wealth gap and women’s labor force participation, as well as geographic mobility, which has been declining in recent decades.
Archives: Grant
Understanding collective labor action in platform businesses
This project will use surveys to assess the role customers play as a source of power for U.S. workers who strike or protest working conditions, as well as the effects of different aspects of job quality on the likelihood of workers to leave a current job. The coronavirus pandemic is providing a laboratory for examining how the salience of these issues affect workers’ views of their jobs and their willingness to work under conditions of varying risk.
The first survey will use experiments embedded in a Facebook-based convenience sample to target food workers broadly, with a focus on W-2 employees at meat processing facilities, grocery stores, restaurants, and platform-based food delivery workers, including but not limited to Instacart. The second will survey a nationally representative sample of the full U.S. population in order to assess changing food consumption habits, as well as perceptions of food workers and collective action during the pandemic. This timely research promises to bring worker views into the public discussion of quality jobs, including welfare and safety, and will shed light on how workers and customers are intertwined in workplace issues of the day.
Technology and outsourcing in last-mile delivery
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.
The innovation dividend of fiscal policy: the impact of defense spending on local innovation in U.S
This study focuses on place-based policies and how geographic concentration of innovation affects regional economic growth in the United States. The researchers will explore how local fiscal stimulus in the form of defense spending impacts both innovation and economic growth. Using contract-level data on defense spending and county-level measures of innovation, the researchers will attempt to identify through which channels defense spending affects aggregate innovation. They use Gross Domestic Product, personal income, and total employment to evaluate how defense spending affects economic growth.
Cannabis-infused dreams: A market at the crossroads of criminal and conventional
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.
Place-based climate policy in the United States
This project explores whether, as an empirical matter, people have constrained choice sets in energy consumption due to where they live, and if that, in turn, may mean that traditional models of the efficiency of carbon taxation are incorrect. The researcher will decompose the spatial heterogeneity in carbon emissions into a component driven by individual preferences and a component driven by place. Using U.S. Census data, the American Community Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, among other data sources, the author explores how factors such as climate, income inequality, segregation, and public disinvestment impact place-based heterogeneity. Since so much emission heterogeneity is tied to income, there are clear implications for how this could impact and be impacted by inequality. Findings have the potential to inform our understanding of how carbon taxes may need to be accompanied by rezoning or other policies.
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.