Regulatory agencies overseeing the labor market often rely on worker complaints to direct their enforcement. However, if workers face differential barriers to complain, this system could result in ineffective targeting and create disparities in working conditions. To investigate these...

Item response theory (IRT) models are a class of statistical models used by researchers to describe the response behaviors of individuals to a set of categorically scored items. The most common IRT models can be classified as generalized linear fixed- and/or mixed-effect models. Although IRT...

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years. We use new machine learning...

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers' provision of safety - something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment, but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We...

We assess whether and why trade competition partly explains the sharp decline in U.S. workers' attempts to organize labor unions in recent decades. We find that between 1990-2007, import competition due to the "China Shock" lowered union certification elections by 4.5% among workers in...

Regulatory agencies overseeing the labor market often rely on worker complaints to direct their enforcement. However, if workers face differential barriers to complain, this system could result in ineffective targeting and create disparities in working conditions. To investigate these...

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers' provision of safety - something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment, but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We...

We analyze how the legal enforceability of Noncompete Agreements (NCAs) affects labor markets. Using newly-constructed panel data, we find that higher NCA enforceability diminishes workers' earnings and job mobility, with larger effects among workers most likely to sign NCAs. These effects are...