This research explores how nonwork policies affect work opportunities. The inability for individuals with low incomes to access transportation is a significant barrier to employment. Existing research has focused on the lack of car ownership or transportation deserts. But for millions of U.S. workers, the suspension of their driver’s licenses is a significant concern, with a large portion of those suspensions due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations. As of 2021, more than 1 million people in North Carolina (the state the author is researching) have active license suspensions as a result of these policies. For many, these policies often create a vicious cycle of debt and collateral consequences that linger for years. The author will conduct semi-structured interviews with people in North Carolina whose driver’s license has been suspended due to Failure to Comply and Failure to Appear violations to better understand the mechanisms through which driver’s license suspension structures affect individuals’ employment opportunities.
Archives: Grant
Do Labor Strikes Achieve Worker Demands? Understanding Strike Outcomes and Effectiveness
This project is a data collection effort that seeks to fill an important gap: the undercounting of strikes. The author will collect data on all strikes in the United States regardless of size, duration, or whether workers are unionized or not. There is a perceived rise in collective action, but current data sources are not collecting information on the full universe of strikes. This effort will define a strike as “a temporary stoppage of work by a group of workers in order to express a grievance or to enforce a demand. Such a grievance or demand may or may not be workplace related.” A rigorous search and verification protocol by the author will ensure that a strike occurred. Data will be collected on other variables related to the strike, and all data will be publicly accessible on an interactive map. This project will extend recent research that has found strikes decreased in both amount and scale, and that strike effectiveness declined. It seeks to provide information on the outcomes of strikes for workers and their organizations, and under what conditions strikes are most effective. A notable extension is an investigation of whether strikes can respond to identity-based inequality, such as racial discrimination or sexual harassment, by studying noneconomic demands.
The Impact of Natural Disasters on Firm and Labor Dynamics
This project will explore the impact of natural disasters on small businesses and whether effects differ depending on the demographics of the entrepreneurs running those businesses. Understanding how the composition of local economies changes after disasters because of the demise of some firms and the startup of others can explain a lot about what makes a particular place more or less resilient. Research shows that there is a lot of startup activity following a natural disaster, but this could be misleading if it is generated from rebuilding and doesn’t fully factor in displaced workers or shuttered businesses, which will have larger long-term effects. This project will look at the impact of natural disasters on firms’ entry/exit, survival, and financial performances. It will also look at whether these effects vary by entrepreneur demographics, their socioeconomic backgrounds, the types of firms and in which industries, market power, and competitive setting.
Startups’ Common Ownership and Competition in Technology Markets
This project will examine the effect of common ownership of technology startups by venture capitalists on those firms’ outcomes, such as shutdowns, exits via mergers or acquisitions, and Initial Public Offerings. The author seeks to contribute to the literature on how common ownership may impact competition and innovation by studying spillovers among technology startups in the portfolios of multiple venture capital firms. It will explore two questions: Do venture capitalists’ common ownership of technology startups have anticompetitive effects, and by affecting startups’ outcomes, can common ownership impact the market structure of technology industries? The focus on the technology sector allows the author to look at competition between like firms. Because venture capitalists have a lot of decision-making power, the author theorizes that the effects could be strong since venture capital firms focus on the innovation pipeline. Therefore, the project expects to speak to how competition can be stifled in the seed stages of venture funding. The project will proceed in three stages: Develop a stylized analytical model to highlight the main incentives at play; present reduced-form evidence on the effects of common ownership on startups’ outcomes; and develop a structural matching model of venture capital firms and startups.
Exploring disparate impact in online retailing
This project studies discrimination in online retail grocery stores. Do different consumers get charged a different price based on their perceived race? To answer this question, the author will implement a massive data collection exercise using web scraping. The data will combine firm-level data on products and prices with geography and aggregate socioeconomic indicators. This provides information on the underlying consumers in those areas. In the first phase of the project, the shopper’s race is based solely on geography. Future phases of the project will attempt to use browsing history to find racial differences in the shoppers. Web crawlers will be used to collect prices based on location to understand how online prices faced by consumers vary across socioeconomic and racial groups (imputed based on location). This research will identify whether online shopping allows retailers to price discriminate in ways that are harder to do in person.
Monetary Policy and the Dynamics of Wealth Inequality
This project looks to determine the effect of monetary policy on wealth inequality in the United States. The author seeks to add to the literature demonstrating how portfolio heterogeneity is an important driver of wealth inequality. One contribution of the research is the use of the Distributional Financial Accounts. This dataset, collected by the Federal Reserve, reconciles the definitions of wealth between the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances and the quarterly flow of data from its Z.1 Financial Accounts of the United States, and then combines the datasets to create a series that tracks wealth for four quantile bins of households by wealth at a quarterly frequency. A key strength of the Distributional Financial Accounts is the ability to decompose quarterly wealth data into component asset and liability classes, allowing for the study of the channels by which monetary policy affects wealth for different groups of U.S. households.
Race and Outside Options: Evidence from U.S. Employer-Employee Data
This project asks how the racial composition of workers’ professional networks affect their wage growth and access to outside opportunities. Existing research has estimated that the inclusion of underrepresented workers in the U.S. economy since 1960 significantly contributed to U.S. GDP growth. Yet racial divides in earnings and opportunities persist. Understanding the sources of these gaps is critical for understanding growing income inequality and fostering broad-based growth. While many explanations have been proposed, relatively little is known about the extent of U.S. labor market segregation and its consequences today. This project will use restricted firm-level data to explore the role of workers’ professional networks in the persistence of race disparities in the U.S. labor market. Building on recent work showing that workers are able to renegotiate their wages when labor demand increases in their networks, and that referred workers are often similar to referrers in terms of age, gender, and race, the author proposes to estimate the impact of changes in the composition of the professional networks of workers to investigate whether the impact of an increase in local labor demand is sensitive to the size of the professional networks for underrepresented groups. This analysis will then be used to calibrate a search model that estimates the contribution of labor market segregation to the wage gap.
Inequality and Targeting of Disaggregated Policy
This project explores the question of how policy shocks propagate through the economy. The researchers will build a large dataset using Danish Bank and Danish government administrative data to build matrices of income, consumption, and production in different regions and sectors, as well as how income, consumption, and production in different regions and sectors are interconnected. This “disaggregated economic account” will be used to trace out how a shock that hits one part of the economy propagates to other parts and determine the aggregate impact of the shock. The resulting model will help define optimal policy responses to different kinds of shocks, to measure how certain shocks affect income inequality and growth, and to identify the most important channels that propagate shocks. Tracing how a shock in one sector filters through the economy is only possible with this type of administrative data linked in this way.
Labor Unions and Workplace Safety Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This project extends ongoing work by this research team on nursing home unionization and COVID-19 preparedness. The interdisciplinary team takes a mixed-methods approach to estimate the causal link between collective bargaining and workplace safety prior to and during the pandemic. The researchers have built a proprietary dataset of union status of all 15,000 nursing homes in the United States and merged it with publicly available Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services workplace-level data on COVID-19 outcomes in nursing homes. They will use this dataset to examine the impact of unionization on health and injury outcomes (and racial differences) before and during COVID-19 in the 2016–2021 period. Using an event-study difference-in-difference framework will allow them to capture the validity of parallel trends assumptions, and the proposed regression discontinuity design will help to establish the causal effect of unionization on worker COVID-19 infection outcomes. This is an important question that has significant resonance right now, as we are seeing a resurgence of union activity among major employers.
HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes
This proposal will utilize a large and comprehensive dataset to evaluate whether historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, can narrow or close racial gaps on numerous measures of economic well-being, not just typical measures such as income. The dataset links College Board SAT data with credit bureau data and National Student Clearinghouse data. It includes students who took the SATs between 2004 and 2010, tracking them from high school through college, and will allow the authors to look at financial outcomes at age 30. Using these data, the authors will compare the longer-term outcomes for Black students who attend these schools versus similar students who applied to but did not attend one. The authors will explore several outcomes, including those where racial disparities exist, such as college-related debt, other forms of debt, and whether the individual has a mortgage (a proxy for homeownership). The credit data also give a more complete picture of income than earnings since it covers all types of income. Existing research shows how important social supports and social capital are to economic mobility. This project will shed light on the distinctive social and psychological value-added features of historically Black colleges and universities.