Research

Overview

My work examines how various dimensions of income inequality are structured by organizational processes. Projects span levels of analysis (covering interactions between coworkers, relations between and within workplaces, and the changing demography of employing organizations) and social groups compared (across race, class, and gender categories). They are united by using linked employer-employee data to infer social processes, and then linking results back to a popular national statistic (e.g. the gender pay gap) to contextualize their importance.

Here, I group by the focal social category.

Gender

Using IRS tax return data linked to Census responses, we show that between-workplace gender segregation is high in the US, comparable in consequence to between-occupation segregation. Within the same workplace, women doing comparable work to their male coworkers earn an average of 8% less.

_{King, Joseph, Matthew Mendoza, Andrew Penner, Anthony Rainey, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. “Estimating Firm-, Occupation-, and Job-Level Gender Pay Gaps with U.S. Linked Employer-Employee Population Data, 2005 to 2015.” Socius 9:1-9.}
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From tax authority earnings information linked to Swedish population registers, we find that women becoming more educated than male coworkers and obtaining a rising share of management jobs benefits the average earnings of women workers– even those who do not become more educated or managers themselves. We find evidence, however, that women advancing up the workplace job hierarchy relative to men may produce a backlash effect on average earnings.

^{Revise and resubmit at generalist sociology journal.}

Class

As a postdoc for Professor Tali Kristal’s “Distributional Workplace Accounts” project, I am developing methods to estimate the distribution of US manufacturing sector income between groups, including among “production classes” of production workers, managers, and owners, from restricted-access Census microdata. In the future, we will disaggregate further by gender, race, and education.

Race and ethnicity

In work in progress from my dissertation, I provide longitudinal evidence that between-workplace ethnoracial segregation may be falling in recent decades in the US.
In a related paper, I estimate that around a quarter of the earnings disadvantage that nonwhite workers face relative to white workers in the same county is due to between-workplace segregation. I unpack how this varies over time and by ethnoracial group, and uncover the key role of differential industry growth in amplifying this gap.

Workers generally

Rather than examine inequality between groups, two additional dissertation chapters consider corporate demographic factors influencing worker wage levels. These papers link the size and the diversity of the population of employer organizations to workers’ average wage, elaborating the roles of outside options and social comparison processes in pay determination.