About

Bio

I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. I hold Master’s Degrees in Sociology (UC Berkeley) and Public Policy (University of Chicago). My research examines how the structure of labor markets, employment relations, and the organization of work within firms shapes inequality and mobility. My work uses panel data methods, causal inference, and survey experiments.

My dissertation aims to understand how local labor markets structure workers’ opportunity for earnings attainment and mobility over their career. I argue that rising inequality between places within the US and declining lifetime earnings mobility are linked, in part by how local differences in the occupational structure create unequal economic opportunity. I show that the polarization of local labor markets’ occupational structure into “good” and “bad” jobs constrains opportunity for low-earners and expands opportunity for high-earners, amplifying inequalities in workers’ career paths by increasing inequality in early-career earnings and disproportionately benefitting earnings growth over the career for high-earners. In a second paper that examines racial inequalities in economic mobility after job displacement, I demonstrate that while Black workers experience disproportionate downward earnings and occupational mobility following job loss, such downward mobility is strongly moderated by both their local labor market’s occupational structure and its proportion of managers who are Black. In another paper, I develop a novel quantitative approach to model the full distribution of earnings ranks that workers may attain using quantile regressions.

A second strand of my research studies the organizational dynamics of work schedule inequality among low-wage workers. In a first-authored paper published in the ILR Review, I show how precarious work schedules increase turnover through their effect on job satisfaction and work-family conflict, and in turn contribute to downward earnings mobility. In another paper I use survey experiments to show how female managers amplify work scheduling inequalities for their employees who are mothers.

Contact

Email: jbchoper{at}berkeley{dot}edu