OSU Graduate Students: Alec Rhodes, Sociology; & Guanting Yi, Economics
Alec Rhodes; "Labor Unions and Wealth Inequality in the United States, 1985-2016"
The deunionization of the American labor market played an important role in the rise in wage inequality in the late 20th and early 21st century. Less is known about the consequences of union decline for household wealth inequality. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort and fixed effects unconditional quantile regressions, I find that career union coverage is more strongly associated with wealth increases for low and middle than high wealth individuals. This heterogeneity in part reflects the strong influence of union coverage on savings and durables—assets that account for a larger share of total wealth for low and middle wealth individuals. Counterfactual analyses suggest that wealth inequality in the 2010s among those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s would have been 10-15 percent lower had they experienced the same union coverage as similarly aged workers in the 1980s.
Guanting Yi; "Discrimination in Restaurant Patronage at the Onset of the Covid Pandemic."
Pandemics are recurring throughout history, and discrimination toward certain social groups often coexists. I study the causal effect of early Covid pandemic events led by the national first case on Chinese cuisine visits to approximate the effect of consumer discrimination toward Chinese cuisine in the U.S. from December 2019 to April 2020. I find sizeable relative declines of about -9% in Chinese cuisine visits and a larger negative spillover effect of about -14% on Japanese and Korean cuisine visits. Additionally, I find a remarkable amount of heterogeneity in the causal effect along county political affiliation and diversity in race and ethnicity: a county being one-standard-deviation more republican supporting in 2016 was associated with an additional 10% relative drop in Chinese cuisine visits; a county being one-standard-deviation more diverse in race and ethnicity was associated with an additional 7% relative increase in Chinese cuisine visits.
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The City of Columbus and Franklin County are currently recommending masking indoors after the CDC upgraded the county to a “high” COVID-19 community level. IPR strongly encourages masks at all events.
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