Labor

This proposed research project will study the most efficient form of unemployment support using a large data set on the employment history of over 400,000 workers. This employment data will be combined with expenditure and unemployment compensation data for the study. The researchers will categorize different types of unemployment compensation (unemployment insurance, lump sum payments, and no insurance) and use sophisticated methods to analyze how the type of unemployment compensation unemployed workers receive affects affect their consumption over time.

The decline in bargaining power for large groups of workers is at the core of rising inequality. This research aims to provide some of the first causal evidence that contractual language is not merely cheap talk but rather meaningfully shapes the decisions of contracting parties in the labor market. The grant will support an effort to digitize union contracts stored at the Kheel Center at Cornell University. In addition to digitization, the researchers will use language processing tools to extract norms, commitments, and entitlements from the text.