October 2020

What happens when official information aimed at changing people’s behaviors clashes with popular accounts and folk theories? In a time of conspiracy theories and conflicting narratives about everything from pandemic precautions to TikTok, this question is often top of mind.

In a recent article with Laura Doering, we examine this question in the context of a financial inclusion program in Colombia. Financial inclusion, or the incorporation of low-income consumers into the formal financial sector, has become a priority for governments, banks, and international organizations around the world, and Colombia is no exception. According to the World Bank, fewer than half of Colombians have a bank account, and the poor are especially unlikely to have one. 

When Donald Trump warned voters that Senator Corey Booker might someday obliterate the suburbs by overseeing a massive buildup of public housing there, we all knew exactly what he meant. His words, like those of countless politicians before him, were carefully chosen to drum up white resentment and backlash against racial minorities.

He intuited that an easy way to do so was to invoke the myth of a federal government that abused its power to gratify minorities at the expense of white families, especially by forcing racial desegregation. The irony, however, is that the federal government today plays a relatively small role in the provision of housing for low-income renters, hemmed in largely by the same forces of white resentment and backlash that Trump sought to stir up.

Luke Elliott-Negri, Kathleen Griesbach, Adam Reich and I began studying platform-based food delivery in 2018. Like many labor scholars, we were fascinated by the exploding gig economy and its impact on workers. In late 2018 and early 2019 we conducted Facebook surveys with 955 platform-based food delivery workers, followed by in-depth interviews with 55 of them. 

Our data were collected well before the COVID-19 pandemic sparked an explosion of demand for all sorts of home delivery, even as it widened pre-existing gender and class inequalities. Those developments only add to the significance of our findings. 

We did not start the project with a gender focus, but we quickly learned that working-class women dominate this sector of the gig economy. About three-fourths of our survey respondents (and a similar proportion of interviewees) were female, and mostly white. This should not have been a surprise, but for us it was, maybe because we live in New York City, which has a far longer tradition of food delivery – mostly performed by immigrant men – than the rest of the U.S.

Right to Work laws were a centerpiece of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that curbed many of the victories won by labor unions in the previous two decades. These laws allow for a state to prohibit union membership or the contribution of union dues as a precondition for employment at a firm.

Proponents of Right to Work argue that it removes an unjust restriction placed on worker freedom, while opponents argue that it further fragments and undermines an already weak system of labor protection for ordinary workers.

Today, 27 states with about half the US population have enacted Right to Work laws. Scholars have described Right to Work laws as some of the most consequential antilabor provisions passed in the 20^th century, and many local, regional, and national social movements have been motivated to act by the prospect of a state passing or repealing these laws, as one can see with the contentious political activity surrounding Wisconsin’s passage of Right to Work in 2015 and Missouri’s repeal in 2018.

Ex-post analyses of corporate scandals often postulate a what-if scenario: Would things have been different (better) had women held the reins of those firms? Variants of this question appear in the media, political speeches, and academic research. Our recent research addresses this question by examining whether the likelihood of irregularities in corporate financial statements is lower if the firm has a female Chief Financial Officer (CFO). 

Financial statement information is critical for efficient capital allocation and investment. Misreported financial statements have harmful consequences: companies go bankrupt erasing the jobs and savings of employees; management and directors are fired, tried, and sometimes incarcerated; and confidence in business is eroded. Although financial misreporting is a popular area of multidisciplinary research, empirical inquiry is based generally on firms that are ‘caught’ engaging in fraudulent behaviors. Researchers observe detected fraud, not all fraudulent activity, generally referred to as the ‘partial observability’ problem. 

“Get yourself a good government job!” This familiar refrain originates in the Black community, for whom public employment offers a rare respite from the inequities of the private sector labor market. Government jobs are in fact good for many groups. The pay, status, and rewards of African-American, female, and disabled public employees are closer to that of their white, male, and non-disabled colleagues, even when accounting for public-private differences in occupation and education.  Recent attacks on public sector unions, moreover, are in part the result of prejudice against these groups.

Yet the public sector did not always protect African Americans and others. When Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal visited the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, he could still describe the “tenuous presence of Blacks in public employment.” This precariousness was a legacy of the Woodrow Wilson presidency which introduced segregation and discrimination into civil service hiring practices.