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The CHIPS and Science Act is a Chance for Businesses and Local Leaders to Collaborate on a Stronger Child Care System
No full textWith Federal Child Care Legislation Abandoned, It’s Up to States to Help Working Families
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Essays on the Allocation, Coordination, and Selection of Workers
Get PDFThis thesis studies the determinants and consequences of workers’ allocation, coordination, and selection within organizations in countries at different levels of economic development.
The first chapter provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records on 200,000 employees over ten years of a multinational firm. Leveraging exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams, I find that successful managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. The results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.
The second chapter continues the study of leadership in a very different context: Myanmar’s labor movement. We conduct multiple field experiments by collaborating with a confederation of labor unions as it mobilizes garment workers in the run-up to a national minimum wage negotiation. First, we document that union leaders differ from the other workers along several traits that psychologists and sociologists have associated with the ability to influence collective outcomes. Second, by randomly embedding leaders in group discussions, we find that they help coordinate workers’ views to build consensus around the unions’ preferred minimum wage levels. Third, by conducting a mobilization experiment that features collective action problems, we show that leaders play a coordinating role also for workers’ actions.
The third chapter starts with the fact that women’s labor force participation varies widely across countries at every level of development. We ask how this affects gender diversity among employees, gender gaps, and firm productivity using five years of personnel records on over 100,000 employees of a multinational firm combined with the female to male labor force participation rate in the 101 countries where the firm operates. Structural estimates show that in a counterfactual world with no gender-specific barriers to labor force participation, firm productivity would be 32% higher for the same level of employment and the same wage bill. The findings suggest that selection is a powerful lens to understand the link between diversity and productivity
School-Based Mental Health Services Can Increase Access to Care and Decrease Suicide Attempts
Get PDFPredictive Analytics Supporting Labor Market Success: A Career Explorer for Job Seekers and Workforce Professionals in Michigan
Get PDFCareer Explorer provides customized career exploration tools for workforce development staff and job seekers in Michigan. There are separate Career Explorer modules for mediated staff services and self-service by job seekers. The system was developed by the Michigan Center for Data and Analytics in collaboration with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Michigan Works! Southwest. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workforce Investment and the Schmidt Futures foundation’s Data for the American Dream (D4AD) project. In this paper, we describe specifications of the models behind the frontline-staff-mediated version of Career Explorer, which are based on program administrative data, applying data-science methods for predictive analytics. We also describe the self-service Career Explorer, which provides customized labor market information based on published Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Career Explorer became an active feature of Michigan’s online reemployment-services system in June 2021
