Dissertation Fellowship

Carmen Brick is a sociologist whose research focuses upon low-wage work, stratification processes, and social policy. Her dissertation research uses mixed methods to examine the potential of state-level Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) to reduce poverty and inequality by studying the contexts of their adoption. Her other research projects study the effects of firm-level sorting on the gender wage gap and the disparities in policing related to mental health and substance use statuses. She was previously a Presidential Management Fellow and is currently a Scholars Strategy Network Graduate Fellow and a grant recipient of the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

Christina is a Doctoral Candidate in the Economics Department concentrating on Development and Labor Economics. Her research focuses on optimal contracting, hiring and monitoring of employees in low-resource settings. She has conducted research in Pakistan, India and Indonesia. Prior to Berkeley, she was a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has a B.A. in Political Science and Physics from UCLA and an MA from the Fletcher School at Tufts in Development Economics.

Andy Scott Chang is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a sociologist of gender, international migration, and work. His dissertation uses ethnographic methods to examine how the state, the market, and the family shape labor migrants’ aspirations, as well as how international migration stratifies their livelihoods along gender, ethnic, and class lines. His research has appeared in Pacific Affairs and has won the best graduate paper award and an honorable mention from the American Sociological Association’s Global and Transnational Sociology

Kwabena is a Ph.D. Job candidate in the Agricultural and Resources Economics Department. His research spans topics in Labor economics, Behavioral economics, and quantitative Industrial Organizations. In Labor economics, his research focuses on how the Affordable Care Act and state level Medicaid expansion programs affect seasonal agricultural workers’ healthcare access, use and funding. He also studies the determinants of immigrant skill transferability into the US labor market and the effect of worker experience on the trade-off between job satisfaction and worker productivity. In Behavioral and Industrial Organizations, his work is on how firms use pricing strategies such as menus and default options to influence consumer behavior, and the importance of social norms and decision costs for consumer choices. In addition, he evaluates the social welfare implications of menus and default options

Peter is a doctoral candidate in the Economics Department, with a specialization in macroeconomics. The core of his dissertation studies the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a tool for limiting the deleterious effects of economic downturns and the costs borne by workers in recessions. In one chapter of his dissertation, he documents how government spending shocks propagate between labor markets in the U.S. through the trade in intermediate goods. His research suggests that fiscal policy is an effective tool to combat economic downturns when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. Prior to Berkeley, Peter worked for two years as a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He received his B.A. from Covenant College with a double major in Economics and Philosophy.

Matt is a labor and development economist working primarily in Latin America and the United States. His work sees to study how public institutions and policies may help or impede the lives of workers and the economy using quasi- or fully experimental research methods. His job market paper explores the effects of experience and market access as a result of receiving public contracts in the Dominican Republic. Other research of his looks at the causal effects of the incarceration of a family member in the United States and the extent of consumer-side discrimination in online markets.

Benjamin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics Department whose research focuses on labor economics, the economics of the criminal legal system, and econometrics. His dissertation project investigates the role of personnel policies in improving outcomes for indigent criminal defendants by developing a novel methodology for quantifying variation in attorney quality and evaluating the effects of a unique reform. Other projects explore estimation of heterogeneous reveled-preference job ladders for skilled workers, measuring the incidence of the Earned Income Tax Credit on low-wage workers and firms in imperfectly competitive labor markets, and investigating the effects of policies aimed at mitigating racial disparities in police interactions. Before graduate school, Benjamin worked for two years as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at Harvard University. He graduated with an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 2014.

Adam is a sociologist working at the intersection of cultural sociology, the sociology of work, and stratification. His dissertation work uses computational methods to understand how low-wage workers evaluate their job quality in the context of changing company policy, as well as a shifting cultural and legal landscape. Other research of his focuses on cultural capital, organizational culture, and workplace discrimination.

Jose’s research lies at the intersection of labor economics and international trade. He has a particular interest in studying the effects of globalization on both workers and firms. Before starting his Ph.D. at Berkeley, Jose worked for two years as a researcher at the Central Bank of Costa Rica. He also holds an M.A. in Economics from CEMFI, Madrid and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Costa Rica.

Jose’s job market paper studies the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on the labor market, using administrative data from Costa Rica.  Policy makers from developed and developing countries alike and at all levels of government compete for the attraction of superstar firms (typically MNCs) through strong economic incentives. In return, they expect the creation of “good jobs” and an improvement in the overall labor market conditions of their jurisdiction. Jose’s dissertation provides evidence on who are the winners and losers of MNC entry and expansion and how to compare the costs and benefits of policies attracting such type of firms.