DISSERTATION RESEARCH

Chapter 1:

The Employment Relationship & Gender Inequality

For years scholars have documented the growth of nonstandard contingent employment and its role in exacerbating already rising wage inequality (e.g., Bidwell et al., 2013; Cobb, 2016). Women are overrepresented in low-paying contingent work, resulting in a widening gender wage between standard and nonstandard workers. While much of the research in this area has focused on inequality between these groups, the variation in gender wage disparities across different nonstandard employment relationships remains largely unexplored.

 

Nonstandard work is often treated as a monolith in terms of gendered wage outcomes, despite evidence that contingent work arrangements vary significantly in their configurations (Cappelli & Keller, 2013; Benassi & Kornelakis, 2021; Osterman, 2023). In response, I develop a typology of employment relationships to better understand how changes in the configuration of employment relationships either amplify or ameliorate the gender wage gap. Through this work I contribute to the growing body of literature on inequality, the gender wage gap, and contingent work by shifting the focus toward demand-side explanations within nonstandard employment.

 

Using data from the 2017 Contingent Work Supplement of the Current Population Survey, I empirically test this typology, offering new evidence of how employment relationship configurations shape demand-side gender wage inequality within contingent work.

Chapter 2:

Firm Preferences & Gendered Mobility Inequality

Moving is never easy. For individuals, there are financial costs, family considerations, and potentially very challenging government regulations to navigate depending on the home and destination countries. For firms that want to attract talent outside of their local labor markets, these barriers for their recruits are also their barriers to human capital. Choudhury (2022) refers to these impediments as geographic mobility frictions. As large actors, firms can often alleviate these frictions to attract (e.g., premium immigration processing; Rissing & Carver, 2024) or tighten them to retain talent (e.g., non-compete clauses; Belenzon & Schankerman, 2013). There are many benefits associated with mobility including wage gains (Clemens, 2013) and skill growth (Kerr et al., 2016). However, it is unclear who firms choose to reduce mobility frictions for.

 

Firms use inequality to attract and retain high-quality talent (Bishop, 1987; Lawler & Jenkins, 1992). However, information about the productivity of an employee (especially a new hire) is imperfect (Spence, 1973). As a result, employers use a mixture of signals (e.g., credentialling) and heuristics (e.g., stereotyping) when determining reward distribution (e.g., friction reducers) which can lead to unequal outcomes across ascriptive groups (Phelps, 1972). There may also be market inefficiencies such as taste-based discrimination, highlighting ascriptive preferences independent of productivity differences (Becker, 1957). As one of the most well-studied forms of inequality, I focus on gender drawing on theories of signaling and discrimination.

 

In early 2021 firms began submitting the H-1B visa applicants multiple times to game the immigration lottery system. I use data from a Bloomberg FOIA request on the H-1B program to study whether firms favor male or female candidates for multiple submissions addressing a number of potential moderating factors.

 

Chapter 3:

Employment Relationship Configurations & Temporary Worker Career Outcomes

Decades of research have found that temporary/contingent jobs may act as steppingstones for workers into full-time permanent roles or as traps leading to continuous employment precarity. Unfortunately, the steppingstone/trap debate has largely treated contingent work as a monolith, rarely examining variation within temporary work. As a result, it remains unclear under what contexts contingent jobs will lead to permanent positions.

 

Building on previous classifications of temporary jobs and a cost/control model of contingent work I develop a cost-based integration theory of temporary work. Using data on H-1B visa workers from the Department of Labor, I examine permanency outcomes across multiple employment relationship configurations (ERCs) for temporary workers.

 

I find that temporary jobs in firms under majority co-employment and externally mediated ERCs are associated with significantly lower permanent visa sponsorship ratios compared to those under direct ERCs. Externally mediated ERCs are also found to have significantly lower ratios of permanent visa sponsorship than co-employment ERCs.