Joshua Choper

Joshua Choper

Postdoctoral research fellow at Bocconi University studying inequality and mobility

Research

The Opportunity Structure for Career Mobility and Inequality

My dissertation investigates how income and job mobility over the career contribute to economic inequality, with a particular focus on how the structure of jobs in local labor markets shapes inequality in workers’ career paths.

The first chapter of my dissertation examines how occupational polarization has occurred unevenly across the US, reshaping local structures of economic opportunity and amplifying inequalities in attainment and mobility. I demonstrate that polarization is associated with higher earnings inequality at the beginning of workers’ careers and a stronger persistence in earnings inequality as workers age. This effect is particularly strong in more recent cohorts where earnings grow rapidly for high-earners in highly polarized local labor markets. Advantages from polarization disproportionately accrue to college-educated workers.

The second chapter investigates Black-White inequalities in the economic consequences of job displacement. This chapter is the first systematic study of Black-White inequalities after job displacement since Fairlie and Kletzer (1996). I show that Black-White inequalities in lost earnings from job displacement continued to narrow from the 1990s through the mid-2000s before massively increasing after the Great Recession. I demonstrate that rising Black-White inequality in lost earnings can be explained by Black workers’ disadvantage in labor market matching after job displacement. Black workers tend to sort into lower-paying jobs characterized by manual labor than otherwise similar White workers. This disadvantage is exacerbated by recent trends in occupational polarization, where employment in middle-paying routine jobs (e.g. manufacturing or clerical work) shrank and employment in lower-paying manual (e.g. delivery driving or retail service) and higher-paying abstract work (e.g. software engineers or managers) grew. Rising occupational polarization is thus an important driver of racial stratficiation in the labor market.

The final chapter develops a novel quantitative approach to model how individuals’ point of labor market entry shapes the full distribution of earnings ranks that workers may attain later in their career using quantile regressions. I argue that studies of intragenerational mobility should look beyond average outcomes to investigate how individuals’ origins shape the entire range of economic opportunity they face. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through an analysis of cohort trends in intragenerational mobility and show how the floors, ceilings, and average rank mobility outcomes have changed over time.

Working papers

Causes and Consequences of Work Schedule Instability

My other research focuses on the organizational dynamics of work schedule inequality among low-wage service sector workers. I use survey data and vignette experiments from the Shift Project to examine how female managers contribute to work scheduling inequalities for their employees who are mothers through the lens of social identity theory. I find that motherhood advantages in work scheduling present under male managers shrink considerably under female managers. Moreover, I find that queen bee behavior is limited to female managers without children, and it is only observed when female employees make scheduling requests specifically related to childcare. In co-authored work with Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett published in the ILR Review, we find that schedule instability substantially increases turnover, largely through its negative effects on job satisfaction and work-family conflict. We show that this turnover results in earnings losses due to relatively long bouts of unemployment and only produces earnings gains upon reemployment for some workers.

Working papers