Alaa Abdelfattah is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests meet at the intersection of monopsony power, public policy, and skill-driven income inequality. More specifically, she studies the effect of public policy and aggregate market shocks on skill demand and wage distribution in local labor markets. The main chapter of her dissertation examines the spillover effects of government-subsidized million-dollar projects on incumbent firms’ skill demand and posted wages. Other ongoing work examines the effect of COVID-19-induced labor shortages and the federal contractor minimum wage on employers’ skill demand and wage distribution. Abdelfattah received her B.A. in economics from Middlebury College and her M.A. in economics from the University of California, Davis.