Graduate Research Awards

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. Carmen’s other research projects include a study the effects of firm-level sorting on the gender wage gap. The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust provide support for her research.

Becky Cardinali is a PhD candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. She conducts applied microeconomics research at the intersection of development, labor, behavioral, and health economics. Her project aims to understand the long-term impacts of online sexual education and teenage pregnancy on education and labor market outcomes in Colombia.

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Jenae Carpenter is in the third year of her PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley. This research deploys a neo-Bourdieusian framework and combines interview, ethnographic and historical methods to provide a relational portrait of the film industry. It complements  the view “from above”—the social structures that enable social differentiation, closure and reproduction—with the view “from below”—spotlighting the symbolic structures drawing individuals to the industry, filling them with the belief they can “make it.” In this study therefore, I hope to understand the ways films and filmmakers are valued, differentiated from one another (‘acts of classification’) and how they attempt to differentiate themselves from one another (‘classifiable acts’) such that some individuals are able to rise from the pack and become a winning commodity.

Chiman is a PhD candidate in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. His research centers around China’s rise as a global superpower and its economic and political implications for the rest of the World. His current project supported by IRLE assesses the impacts of increased exports to China on Taiwan’s local labor markets and asks whether these economic impacts contribute or mitigate the trend of rising Taiwanese nationalism observed in the past two decades.

Morgan Foy is a PhD candidate in the Business and Public Policy program at the Haas Business School. Morgan is interested in public and labor economics with a particular focus on issues facing local and state governments. For example, his research studies which teachers continue to join labor unions and the effects of declining unionization on local public schools. In a separate project, Morgan examines whether the civil service system shields government workers from the political process.

Cheng-Kai Hsu is currently a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He holds a BS in Urban Planning from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and an MSc in Transport from Imperial College London. His research interests include transportation planning and environmental/occupational health. Focusing on on-demand food-delivery drivers, his current project utilizes low-cost, wearable sensing to characterize their environmental/occupational exposure to air pollution, heat, traffic hazards, etc, and aims to explore the relationship between these exposures and driver behavior.

Livia Alfonsi is an applied micro-economist with research at the intersection of Development, Labor, and Behavioral economics. Her main strand of research focuses on labor market frictions in low-income countries. In separate work, she also studies how human capital investments and social networks affect individual preferences and behaviors.

Keith Brower Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley. Drawing on his past work in California’s clean energy sector and labor organizing roles, his dissertation researches how a boom in unionized solar and high-speed rail jobs in the San Joaquin Valley has shifted labor conditions and worker power. Along with IRLE, Keith’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Berkeley Latinxs & The Environment Initiative, and the journal Human Geography. His prior work has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Geographies, Antipode, Climate & Development, and Labor Notes.

Derek Brown is a Ph.D. student in Management of Organizations at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Derek explores the psychological barriers that curb efforts to reduce inequality within organizations and society. In particular, he studies the ways that diversity, prejudice, nonverbal behavior, and hierarchy shape how we interact with others and the increasingly diverse society around us.

Combining insights from behavioral economics to labor economics, my research agenda focuses on understanding the determinants of job search in low-income countries, where informal labor markets are widespread. In a current project, I explore the causes of persistent over-optimism in job finding probability among casual workers in India. I hope that my research can contribute to our understanding of how poverty and its interplay with (lack of) institutions can affect workers’ decision-making.

Justin Germain is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Justin’s research centers around the ways that physical space influences social and economic inequality, and is working with IRLE to understand how transportation barriers affect employment opportunities for low-income families living in rural areas.

Arlyn Moreno Luna is a doctoral student in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her scholarly interests include access and equity to early childhood education for migrant workers, barriers that migrant workers face as they access early childhood education, and access and equity in higher education for first-generation and traditionally underrepresented students. Arlyn was born and raised in Mexico, migrating to the U.S. as a teen. She received her Bachelor of Science in BioResource Research in 2013 (with Honors) and a Master of Public Policy, with a focus in Social Justice in 2015 from Oregon State University. In 2021, Arlyn received a Master of Arts in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.

Cristóbal is a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. He holds a BA and an MA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also obtained an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics. His fields of interest are labor and public economics, and more broadly public policy. His website can be found here.

Zabdi Salazar is a rising third-year student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) PhD program at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include refugee and asylum law, immigration law, sociology of law, and administrative law. Her current project explores the impact of a case quota policy on US immigration judges. The study will use a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach to examine how the fiscal year (FY) 2019 performance standards, particularly the requirement for judges to complete 700 cases each year, impacted judicial behavior and case outcomes.

Alex Stephenson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, where he researches the effects of past discrimination on modern political and economic inclusion, order, and violence. He is also interested in developing methods and tools for causal inference. His research supported by IRLE experimentally assesses whether learning about the historical roots of present-day segregation affects respondents’ support for addressing present-day racial inequity in the United States via redistribution.

Enrique Valencia López is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster at the Graduate School of Education. His research interests relate to three broad areas: the stratification of education by gender, immigration status and ethnicity; the measurement of teacher working conditions and well-being; and education in Latin America. He is currently researching (with Arlyn Moreno) the attitudes of farmworker immigrants towards early childhood care using mixed methods. The research aims to inform the main drivers and constraints Migrant Farm workers face when choosing options for early care for their children.

Liubing Xie’s research focuses on social-spatial inequality, living conditions, and lived experiences of migrant workers in Chinese and Indian cities at the intersection of migration, labor, and housing studies. He is especially interested in investigating the recent Chinese and Indian state initiatives to promote market-led but state-mediated rental housing for both skilled/educated and unskilled migrant labor forces in the large cities in China and India. He pursues these topics primarily through the methods of comparative urban studies and urban ethnography.

Alan Yan is a PhD student in the Political Science department. The primary question motivating much of his research is: Why isn’t there a rise in left voting as inequality has risen? His main focus is on class in American politics. Specifically, he is interested in how people conceptualize class, how people connect their class to politics, and how people understand their class interests. He is also interested in questions related to workplace democracy, ideology, and race.