We use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting and self-employment work in California. We identify this work by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return and/or the receipt of a Form 1099 information...

Vaccinating the world's population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procurement. We find that if the goal is to...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement--the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history--and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on...

We estimate the effects of government spending along the supply chain using disaggregated U.S. government procurement data. We first identify sectoral public spending shocks and combine them with input-output tables to measure upstream and downstream exposure through the production network. We...

We study how ownership structure, in particular public listing status, affects workplace safety and productivity tradeoffs. Theory offers competing hypotheses on how listing related frictions affect these tradeoffs. We exploit detailed asset-level data in the U.S. coal industry and find that...

Are laboratory safety practices a tax on scientific productivity? We examine this question by exploiting the substantial increase in safety regulations at the University of California following the shocking death of a research assistant in 2008. Difference-in-differences analyses show that...

Emeryville, CA's Fair Workweek Ordinance (FWO) aimed to reduce service workers' schedule unpredictability by requiring large retail and food service employers to provide advanced notice of schedules and to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. From a 1-in-6 sample of Emeryville...

Wage inequality does not fully capture differences in job quality. Jobs also differ along other key dimensions, including the prevalence of labor rights violations. We construct novel measures of labor violation rates using data from federal agencies. Within local industries over time, a 10%...