» Wage Shocks and the Technological Substitution of Low-Wage Jobs (PDF)

I study how downsizing establishments choose which workers to lay off and how the cost of job loss varies by the type of layoff rule using administrative employer-employee data for West Germany. I estimate establishment-level layoff rules for over 4,400 mass layoffs from 1980 to 2009 and explore how layoff rules have changed over time

Labor activists have called for greater international coordination among trade unions in response to the assault on organized labor by global capital, but such coordination faces many hurdles. Under what conditions can unions overcome those barriers and coordinate effectively to achieve campaign goals? I examine this question through a comparison of European-level international solidarity with

We study the impact of 160 increases in state-level minimum wages on the dynamics of prices in local grocery stores. We find that the impact of raising minimum wages on prices is small, significant, and occurs in the months following minimum wage legislation and preceding implementation. Our estimates of the minimum wage elasticity of grocery

Rising healthcare costs and methods to contain these costs are of great interest and relevance for private and public agents. We examine one such strategy by analyzing the introduction of a reference-pricing program by a large health insurer. Reference pricing set a maximum reimbursable amount for screening colonoscopies if they were performed at a higher-cost

Standard models of labor supply do not account account for the fact that leisure consumed simultaneously across millions of people may be different than its isolated consumption by individuals. We enrich the standard model to account for such "coordinated leisure" and demonstrate a role for the government in selecting from multiple potential coordinated equilibria. Optimal

What do markets see when they look at people? Information dragnets increasingly yield huge quantities of individual-level data, which is analyzed to sort and slot people into categories of taste, riskiness, or worth. Developed to better understand and improve customer experience, these tools also define new strategies of profit making. In this mainly theoretical talk,

Do non-tuition costs constrain college access? From 1995 to 2005, four new public universities in California began admitting first-year students. I exploit these new campus openings to test if relaxing distance cost constraints will increase four-year college enrollment among local high school graduates. I show that distance is still influential in the first-time enrollment of

Using unique longitudinal administrative tax panel data for the District of Columbia (DC), we assess the combined effect of the DC supplemental earned income tax credit (EITC) and the federal EITC on poverty and income within Washington, DC from 2001 to 2013. The EITC in DC merits investigation, as the DC supplement to the federal

Immigration policies drastically expanded in Japan and South Korea, but the reality migrant workers face in both countries are not as promising. The general resistance of unskilled immigration and the demands of labor shortages and shrinking populations have been accommodated with ad hoc governmental policies. Under the supervision of Professor Keiko Yamanaka, UC Berkeley undergraduate