Underlying all of my work is an interest in how places create opportunity for people. Most of my current research centers on inequalities in labor and housing markets. A key theme in my work is understanding how the drivers of economic disparities across city-regions also produce unequal outcomes for different segments of the population (e.g. across race, gender, or class).
Much of my current research centers on understanding the relationships between urbanization and inequality. While we know big city-regions provide huge opportunities for workers to climb up the income ladder through a greater number and diversity of jobs, in a recent PNAS paper we show this benefit largely accrues to White workers. This greater "big city experience effect" is largely explained by the far greater returns White workers get (as opposed to Black and Latinx workers) from working in occupations that have tasks which require high degrees of abstract reasoning and cognitive skills, occupations which are concentrated in big cities. Furthermore, we find that it is not only in big cities, but also expensive cities, where the returns to work experience are highly uneven across race/ethnicity. This suggests that high cost-of-living and large overall population may come together to create particularly strong barriers to Black and Latinx workers accessing good jobs with high levels of upward mobility as compared to White workers. Other research in this area (see my paper in the Journal of Urban Affairs) shows that as city-regions get denser, Black-White, Latinx-White, and female-male wage income inequality tend to increase. I provide suggestive evidence that this is due to ways in which non-White workers and women disproportionately experience the congestion costs of urbanization. A second research area centers on inequality between urban-regions. I recently published a synthesis of research on this topic in the Journal of Economic Geography. Much of my work in this area has looked at the impact of firms' economic linkages across space in driving patterns of economic growth and decline (see for instance, my recent papers in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society and European Planning Studies). |