I outline the sociological theory that would predict that external labor markets ' those in which more positions are filled with new hires rather from firm-internal promotions ' heighten gender based discrimination and contribute to earnings inequality. I test this theory by treating industries as miniature labor markets within the US with varying levels of gender inequality and different hiring practices. Using high quality administrative data from 1985 to 2013, including detailed work histories from this period, I compare the earnings of alike men and women across industries with different levels of reliance on external markets at different times. I find that men experience greater unexplained earnings relative to women ' unexplained in that it is not accounted for by work history or observable demographic characteristics ' when a greater share of earnings increase events occur outside the firm.
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Access to Financing and Racial Pay Gap Inside Firms
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-36
How does access to financing influence racial pay inequality inside firms? We answer this question using the employer-employee matched data administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and detailed resume data recording workers' career trajectories. Exploiting exogenous shocks to firms' debt capacity, we find that better access to debt financing significantly narrows the earnings gap between minority and white workers. Minority workers experience a persistent increase in earnings and also a rise in the pay rank relative to white workers in the same firm. The effect is more pronounced among mid- and high-skill minority workers, in areas where white workers are in shorter supply, and for firms with ex-ante less diverse boards and greater pre-existing racial inequality. With better access to financing, minority workers are also more likely to be promoted or be reassigned to technology-oriented occupations compared to white workers. Our evidence is consistent with access to financing making firms better utilize minority workers' human capital.
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Escaping poverty for low-wage workers The role of employer characteristics and changes
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
tp-2001-02
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The interactions of workers and firms in the low-wage labor market
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-12
This paper presents an analysis of workers who persistently have low earnings in
the labor market over a period of three or more years. Some of these workers manage to
escape from this low-earning status over subsequent years, while many do not. Using
data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) project at the U.S.
Census Bureau, we analyze the characteristics of persons and especially of their firms and
jobs that enable some to improve their earnings status over time.
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Is the Gender Pay Gap Largest at the Top?
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-61
No: it is at least as large at bottom percentiles of the earnings distribution. Conditional quantile regressions reveal that while the gap at top percentiles is largest among the most-educated, the gap at bottom percentiles is largest among the least-educated. Gender differences in labor supply create more pay inequality among the least-educated than they do among the most-educated. The pay gap has declined throughout the distribution since 2006, but it declined more for the most-educated women. Current economics-of-gender research focuses heavily on the top end; equal emphasis should be placed on mechanisms driving gender inequality for noncollege-educated workers.
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Entrepreneurial teams' acquisition of talent: a two-sided approach
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-45
While it is crucial for startups to hire high human capital employees, little is known about what drives the hiring decisions. Considering the stakes for both startups and their hires (i.e., joiners), we examine the phenomenon using a two-sided matching model that explicitly reveals the preferences of each side. We apply the model to a sample of startups from five technological manufacturing industries while examining a range of variables grounded in prior work on startup human capital. The analysis is based on the Longitudinal Employer Household dynamics from the U.S. Census Bureau. Our findings indicate that, in the context of entrepreneurship, both startups and joiners rely heavily on signals of quality. Further, quality considerations that are important for the match play a minimal role in determining earnings. Our approach refines our understanding of how entrepreneurial human capital evolves.
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The Effect of Firm Compensation Structures on Employee Mobility and Employee Entrepreneurship of Extreme Performers
March 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-06
Previous studies of employee entrepreneurship have not considered the rewards available to potential entrepreneurs inside of their current organizations. This study hopes to fill this gap by investigating how the firm's compensation structure, an important strategic decision closely scrutinized by human resource management, affects the mobility and entrepreneurship decisions of its employees, particularly those employees at the extreme ends of the performance distribution. Using a comprehensive U.S. Census data set covering all employees in the legal services industry across ten states for fifteen years, we find that high performing employees are less likely to leave firms with highly dispersed compensation structures. However, if high performers do leave employers that offer highly disperse compensation structures, they are more likely to join new firms. Less talented employees, on the other hand, are more likely to leave firms with greater pay dispersion. Unlike high performers, we find that low performers are less likely to move to new ventures when departing firms with highly disperse compensation structures.
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Measuring the Effects of the Tipped Minimum Wage Using W-2 Data
June 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-03
While an extensive literature exists on the effects of federal and state minimum wages, the minimum wage received by tipped workers has received less attention. Researchers have found it difficult to capture the hourly wages of tipped workers and thus assess the economic effects of the tipped minimum wage. In this paper, I present a new measure of hourly wages for tipped servers (wait staff and bartenders) using linked W-2 and survey data. I estimate the effect of tipped minimum wages on the wages and hourly tips of servers, as well as server employment and hours worked. I find that higher mandatory tipped minimum wages increase that portion of wages paid by employers, but decrease tip income by a similar percentage. I also find evidence that employment increases over lower values of the tipped minimum wage and then decreases at higher values. These results are consistent with a monopsony model of server employment. The wide variance of tipped minimum wages compared to non-tipped minimums provide insight into monopsony effects that may not be discernible over a smaller range of minimum wage values.
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When Liability Becomes Potential: Intermediary Entrepreneurship in Dynamic Market Contexts
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-21
This paper analyzes how entrepreneurs fare in an intermediary market segment when the segment is closely attached to a single supplier market. While focusing on two structural constraints, organizational structure and competitive pressure, I build off of the fact that in the past thirty years in the U.S. beer industry, as the number of beer producers (i.e. brewers) proliferated, their intermediaries (i.e. wholesalers) declined. Using establishment-level restricted-access economic microdata from the Longitudinal Business Database, I examine what happens with intermediaries when (some) producers start competing on product variety instead of competing on scale. Piecewise exponential survival models show that Stinchcombe's 'liability of newness' principle can get suspended and certain newcomers have better survival chances than industry incumbents. I call this effect the potential of newness under which entrepreneurial establishments fare better if they are part of well-resourced multiunit firms. Furthermore, I show that these resource-rich entrepreneurs benefit from the potential of newness especially in areas with competition-laden history and where the industry experiences shakeouts. For market incumbents, the more competition-laden the history of the local market, the higher the hazards of current time establishment failure. For multiunit entrepreneurs, however, a more competition-laden history of the local market is associated with a decrease in the hazards of current time establishment failure. This paper highlights that market structure not only enables but sometimes traps already existing organizations and make them less adaptive to changing logics of competition. The results highlight how organizational factors and geography create inequalities among intermediary organizations.
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Work Organization and Cumulative Advantage
March 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-18
Over decades of wage stagnation, researchers have argued that reorganizing work can boost pay for disadvantaged workers. But upgrading jobs could inadvertently shift hiring away from those workers, exacerbating their disadvantage. We theorize how work organization affects cumulative advantage in the labor market, or the extent to which high-paying positions are increasingly allocated to already-advantaged workers. Specifically, raising technical skill demands exacerbates cumulative advantage by shifting hiring towards higher-skilled applicants. In contrast, when employers increase autonomy or skills learned on-the-job, they raise wages to buy worker consent or commitment, rather than pre-existing skill. To test this idea, we match administrative earnings to task descriptions from job posts. We compare earnings for workers hired into the same occupation and firm, but under different task allocations. When employers raise complexity and autonomy, new hires' starting earnings increase and grow faster. However, while the earnings boost from complex, technical tasks shifts employment toward workers with higher prior earnings, worker selection changes less for tasks learned on-the-job and very little for high autonomy tasks. These results demonstrate how reorganizing work can interrupt cumulative advantage.
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Socially Responsible Investment and Gender Equality in the United States Census
August 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-44
With administrative data, we test whether institutional ownership with a social preference is related to employee-level gender equality. We show that the gender pay gap, which is an unexplained part of the lower wages of female employees, does not have a significant relation with socially responsible investments. Next, we show that female directorship strengthens the relation between socially responsible investments and the gender pay gap. When there are female directors, socially responsible investments have a robust correlation with a lower gender pay gap. This is because female directorship alleviates information asymmetry in gender equality.
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