Research
Works in Progress
Unpredictable by design? How wage policy shapes hourly work
Abstract
This study provides causal evidence of the impacts of state-level minimum wage hikes on schedule stability for hourly workers in service sectors. Using daily payroll data from thousands of small businesses in the food and retail industries across the US, I document that workers’ schedules become less predictable week-to-week and more subject to last-minute shift changes following a large increase in the minimum wage, removing 33-40\% of monetary gains from the wage increase per week. Effects are exacerbated in tight labor markets, when competition among workers is high. To illustrate why it may be cost-effective for firms to adjust along this margin, I use exogenous variation in bad weather days to demonstrate how firms shift risk of slow business days on to workers through schedule adjustments. I then demonstrate how this practice increases following a wage hike, when it is of higher cost to firms to provide stable schedules. Schedule volatility has been shown to negatively impact worker health and productivity. As such, this paper provides necessary insights into the drivers and dynamics of this understudied non-wage amenity, and illuminates how minimum wage hikes, when not paired with other worker protections, may result in welfare declines.Bureaucracy and Political Bias: Evidence from Floods
With Seung Min Kim
Abstract
We study whether bureaucrats preemptively reflect the executive politician's preferences in their decisions. Combining novel administrative data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with hydrological models, we find that a standard deviation decrease in a county's alignment with the president leads to a 28 percentage point drop in the probability of bureaucrats flagging a county as requiring federal aid following a flooding event, controlling for flood intensity. This bias disappears in the most severe floods. We find evidence suggesting that such biases are significantly reduced when a career civil servant is overseeing the bureaucratic process rather than a political appointee.The Economic Value of Weather Forecasts: A Quantitative Systematic Literature Review
With Manuel Linsenmeier, Marta Talevi, Paolo Avner, Bramka Arga Jafino, and Moussa Sidibe
When the Credit Dries Up: Examining the Effect of Water Utility Surcharges on Consumer Credit
With Steve Ramos