This project seeks to understand the scale, scope, and spread of employee activism, workplace protest, and its impact on corporate stock prices in the United States. The author builds on an existing longitudinal dataset—the Dynamics of Collective Action by Stanford University—to understand employee activism and understand its use as an alternative to employees leaving the firm. She then will attempt to understand how employee activism spreads by tracking the occurrence of employee protests across industry or social movement networks. Finally, she examines how employee activism affects the share price of a corporation.
Archives: Grant
Long Term Own and Dynamic Complementarity Effects of the WIC Program
This project will first attempt to find the causal effect of exposure to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children in-utero and in childhood on one’s long-term outcomes. She will utilize a difference-in-difference design to exploit the variation in roll-out of WIC programs by county and evaluate educational attainment and economic self-sufficiency in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design, she will also test whether WIC funding was actually distributed to counties in a nonrandom way. In addition, she plans to examine whether and how the effect of WIC exposure is strengthened if one is also exposed to other large-scale public programs such as Head Start or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, contributing to our understanding of the long-run effects of potentially complementary income support programs.
Tracking Hospital Mergers and Understanding Which Markets are Changing
This project will create a database of hospital mergers over the past 40 years. The database will detail the following: where health systems are merging or divesting to understand which areas/people (including demographic differences) are affected; whether that differs between for-profit and nonprofit hospitals; and whether higher-priced hospitals continue to provide higher-quality care. Beyond the dataset construction, the project will map areas with 2+, 3+, and 4+ hospitals and produce descriptive statistics at various geographic levels. The research team will track the growth in health systems that resulted from acquisitions by analyzing whether for-profit health systems were strategically acquiring hospitals in regions with more affluent, privately insured patients. This project will contribute to our understanding of the impacts of hospital mergers on equity, patient access, and quality of care.
Novel Measurement of Childcare Customer and Worker Flows Enables Novel Evidence on Recent Supply-Side Subsidies
This project will examine the impact of supply-side child care investments on access to and stability of child care, as well as whether investments in child care vary by neighborhood. Utilizing novel mobile phone data, the authors plan to construct “real-time” measures of customer and worker flow, enabling an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of the child care workforce and consumers at a fine geographic scale with high frequency. They will then use this new data, along with data from a Minnesota grant program from the American Rescue Plan, to answer how funds given directly to providers affect the number and demographics of families served. This project will provide new evidence on the effects of investing in the supply of child care as opposed to supporting the demand side through vouchers or other subsidies.
The Role of Regulations in the Development of Labor Market Power: Evidence from Clean Air Act’s New Source Review Permit Program
This project will examine whether regulations increase firms’ labor market power and how changes in labor market structure vis-à-vis regulation affect worker outcomes. Some laws limit how much existing firms must comply with new regulations, while new firms must comply. One example is the Environmental Protection Agency’s New Source Review permitting requirements. The research team seeks to understand how this regulation affects employers’ labor market power. They will use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to link individual earnings with demographic and geographic information. Further, they will use data on counties and industries from the EPA to conduct a difference-in-difference analysis and a two-stage instrumental strategy to estimate the effect of regulation on local labor concentration and worker outcomes. This research will broadly inform regulatory design with worker outcomes in mind.
Building an open-source knowledge base and machine learning tools to automate the transformation of job advertisement text into data
This project will process job ads accessed through the National Labor Exchange Data Trust in a transparent and replicable way. The authors will use natural language processing tools to turn the job opening text into machine-readable data and will make the code available to other scholars.
Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Implications of Wage Rigidity
This project will unpack the effect of inflation on employment and wages during the current inflationary episode in the United States. They plan to establish stylized empirical facts related to heterogeneity in wage rigidity and the labor market effects of inflation. They will use Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data to study how wage rigidities vary with inflation. The team’s second goal is an extension of an existing theoretical model of the labor market by adding job-to-job mobility, wage renegotiation costs, and multiworker firms to better capture firms’ labor market power.
The Child Care Workforce and COVID: Community Capacity and Investments as Buffers to the Pandemic
This project will unpack the association between child care infrastructure, child care employment, and unemployment rates across counties, and examine whether it differs by geography, race, or poverty level. The research team will estimate the racial and ethnic differences in the local availability of child care and then test the relationship between early childhood education and both child care workers’ employment and wages, as well as overall labor force participation. The project will provide a longitudinal national measurement of child care supply at the county level and evaluate whether the stability of publicly funded child care through schooling bolstered local child care employment and earnings.
The Physics of Reparations: A Quantum Leap in Equity
This project will explore whether reparations can close and have a lasting impact on the racial wealth gap. The research team will examine how parental income, wealth, and education affect offspring’s wealth as adults. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, they estimate an empirical model of the relationship between parents’ and children’s income, wealth, and education. They will then develop a general equilibrium model with endogenous accumulation of physical and human capital by heterogeneous households. Built into the model is an overlapping generations structure, whereby investments in children depend on parents’ income and wealth, and wealth can be inherited across generations. They will then use the model to examine the effect of different reparations policies and their effects on short- and long-run welfare, income, and human capital by race.
Janus and the Future of Public Sector Worker Power
This project explores the causes and implications of the resilience of public-sector unions after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which effectively made the entire public sector right-to-work. The research team will field a national survey of 4,000 full-time, nonmanagerial, union-eligible public-sector workers to shed light on two questions: Why didn’t the Supreme Court decision in Janus cause a large decrease in public-sector union membership? And what can spark increased unionization efforts among public-sector workers in the United States? This project is poised to inform what options there may be for boosting union membership in the public sector.