Research Agenda

The Future of the Welfare State

At the center of my current research agenda is the study of transformation of cash assistance in the United States, and this involves studying the politics of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), welfare, and education and training programs at the state level in Wisconsin and California. I use historical methods (in the American Political Development tradition) to examine how Liberal Democrats within each state attempt to restructure the welfare system between the 1970s and 1990s and find that they pursue distinct projects with the aim of protective restructuring. These projects—which I call the income maintenance strategy (WI) and the jobs mobility strategy (CA)—shape welfare politics, but ultimately cannot be fully achieved within the context of conservative ascendancy and fiscal austerity. Liberal Democrats’ projects in both states suffer from blocked restructuring.

My research on welfare state restructuring also examines liberal ideas about women’s labor market incorporation between the 1970s and 1990s. California’s jobs mobility strategy proposed to offer less advantaged women supported opportunities for education and training, creating the possibility of more advantageous labor market incorporation.  Wisconsin’s income maintenance strategy, on the other hand, assumed participation in low-wage labor and provided wage subsidies to ensure well-being. These distinct visions of labor market incorporation had lasting effects upon the opportunities available to women, and thus liberal actors’ ideas—and their success at promoting these ideas—mattered.

This research has been funded by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and Josephine de Karman Foundation. Please feel free to contact me for chapters from my dissertation, The Two Faces of the New Welfare Capitalism.

Work and Inequality

In other work, I have explored labor market inequalities in relation to gender. Through the Shift Project, I have co-authored an article with Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “The Gender Wage Gap, Between-Firm Inequality, and Devaluation: Testing a New Hypothesis in the Service Sector,” which was published in Work and Occupations. Our research finds that women and men in the service sector cluster into different firms and that this firm-level gender segregation contributes to the sector’s understudied gender wage gap. This research contributes to a growing literature on the role of firms in producing the contemporary gender wage gap by investigating how contemporary firm-level segregation occurs, and in contrast to the existing literature that assumes hiring discrimination, our research finds evidence that gender composition directly affects wages, potentially through a devaluation pathway.