I engage with research in sociology, demography, political science, and economics to study the institutional foundations of economic inequality and insecurity in the United States. I use time-series and demographic methods to examine long-run changes over historically meaningful periods of time. One set of projects examines state governments’ influence on economic inequality.  A second examines workers’ experiences of employment loss. In both I find that access to the labor market, relative to inequality among workers, has become increasingly important to stratification in the United States.

State-level politics have become more consequential for economic inequality in the U.S. over the past several decades. I study the internal dynamics of states’ distributive politics as well as their external constraints. I find that states impact economic inequality primarily by influencing women’s ability to enter the labor force, while inequality in financial support from the federal government undermines poorer states’ ability to provide public goods.

The prevalence of employment loss has been difficult to track over time due to data challenges. I make novel use of the panel structure of the Current Population Survey to overcome these challenges and examine how employment insecurity has developed since the late 1970s. Against theoretical expectations, I find it has become less common largely due to the changing composition of the labor force. I am using the CPS to examine the health consequences of employment loss in ongoing research.