Archives: Grant

Workers in the board room: The causal effects of shared governance

Whether and how to involve workers in decision-making at the workplace is a fundamental question of the organization of firms and economies more broadly. This project proposes to use a novel research design to study a 1994 reform in Germany that sharply abolished employee board representation in newly incorporated firms with fewer than 500 workers in order to analyze the effects of shared governance on a variety of firm and worker-level outcomes, including wages, distribution of profits, and inequality of pay within a firm. The authors will use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the 1994 reform, supplemented with a difference-in-difference approach that compares changes among shareholder firms to changes among nonshareholder firms that were never subject to co-determination and thus were not affected by the reform. This will allow them to control for general economic trends that may have impacted firm and worker outcomes around the timing of the reform.

Getting labor markets right: Occupational mobility and outside options

How does the availability of job options outside workers’ own occupations affect their labor market outcomes? This project uses Burning Glass data to define labor markets by the probabilistic occupational transitions that workers make. The research looks at the likelihood that a worker switches occupations based on location and other job determinants. In addition, the researchers will study differences based on the industrial composition of a location, local labor market shocks, and race and gender analyses, thus deepening our understanding of workers’ outside options in regard to the impact of labor market concentration.

Federal financial aid and postsecondary success for low-income students

This research will investigate how low-income and first-generation students respond financially and academically to financial aid austerity by exploiting a 2011 change that the U.S. Congress made to Pell grant eligibility that affected nearly 286,000 students. As a result, an estimated 12,000 students were eliminated from eligibility for a Pell grant, and 274,000 students received fewer grant dollars. The project will estimate the impact of this sudden unexpected loss in financial aid on college attendance, financial aid, and labor supply outcomes for low-income college students using a combination of restricted-use data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The researcher will use the panel nature of the data to track changes in outcomes for students from one academic year to the next. A regression discontinuity design will be employed to estimate the causal effect of the loss on various educational and labor market outcomes.

Disentangling gender gaps: New evidence from personnel records

This research aims to empirically analyze potential explanations for gender wage gaps, glass ceilings, and differential labor market returns for women by looking at how gender gaps may be perpetuated within a firm. Using a dataset from a multinational firm employing 300,000 people that includes applications for promotions, as well as observed promotions, the project seeks to understand internal firm promotion processes that affect the gender wage gap over the career cycle.

Regulating the care boom: Labor standards and in-home care work in three U.S. cities

This research seeks to understand how institutional interventions affect the realization of labor standards within the rapidly growing in-home care industry. Specifically, how do labor unions, government-civil society collaborations, and industry standards boards affect employer compliance, workers’ ability to claim their rights, and resulting wages and job quality? Using targeted Facebook, Inc. advertising to conduct surveys in multiple languages, the project will include a comparative analysis of New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle—cities with more robust protections for in-home care workers.

Criminal record information and access to opportunity: Using the 2010 CORI reform as a natural experiment

Russell will explore whether the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, reform affected the likelihood that ex-offenders moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This work sits at the intersection of two important policy areas—criminal justice reform and neighborhood access/mobility—and brings a racial lens to the question. It also seeks to understand whether the reform promotes statistical racial discrimination in housing, as some research has suggested “Ban the Box” laws unintentionally have.

Examining the relationship between caregiving and work productivity loss among employed family caregivers of older adults

As the population ages and the cost of nursing-home care soars, more attention in the paid leave debate is turning to the importance of eldercare. This project examines how family caregiving of older adults impacts productivity at work and whether historically marginalized subgroups of working caregivers face an increased and inequitable risk of work productivity loss. The author will use the National Study of Caregiving and the National Health and Aging Trends Study, and, using a work productivity instrument validated for employed family caregivers, will provide estimates of the prevalence and cost of absenteeism, presenteeism, and work productivity loss in working family caregivers, including sociodemographic breakdowns.

The effects of employment incentives and cash transfers on parent and child outcomes: Evidence from the long-run effects of welfare reform experiments

This project seeks to extend the evidence on welfare policies by examining the long-run effects of a high-impact set of randomized experiments conducted by the nonprofit organization MDRC in the late 1980s and 1990s involving more than 100,000 welfare recipients. This is the first study of its kind to look at the very long-term effects of welfare reform experiments on adult outcomes. In each study, welfare recipients were randomly assigned to either a control, Aid to Families with Dependent Children-like program, or to interventions involving different combinations of job training, job search assistance, financial incentives to work, childcare subsidies, time limits, and/or sanctions. Merging data from these experiments with administrative tax data and other data held at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hoynes will study the long-run impacts of welfare policies on many important outcomes, including earnings and employment, fertility, marriage, mortality, and program participation for adult welfare recipients and, importantly, their children.

Evaluating the Philadelphia Fair Workweek Standard to identify the consequences of scheduling regulation on workers and families

This research will assess before and after data in Philadelphia across industries that are and are not subject to the recent scheduling regulation in order to investigate the effectiveness of the policy, including unintentional consequences such as a reduction in the total number of hours offered to an employee. Using a daily diary study conducted via cellphone text message in English and Spanish, the project will survey 1,000 Philadelphia workers in low-wage service occupations who have a young child (ages 2 to 7). It will compare voluntary and involuntary schedule changes by using daily diaries to assess changes in hours and schedules in order to discern not only the frequency and distribution of unpredictability, but also its effect on low-wage parents and children. The results of this study will provide unique, causal information on the potential effects of new scheduling laws on both parents and children.