Research

This paper shows that immigration fostered the emergence of organized labor in the United States. I digitize archival data to construct the first county-level dataset on historical U.S. union membership and use a shift-share instrument to isolate a plausibly exogenous shock to the labor supply induced by immigration, between 1900 and 1920. Counties with higher immigration experienced an increase in the probability of having labor unions, the number of union branches, the share of unionized workers, and the number of union members per branch.  This increase occurred more prominently among skilled workers, particularly in counties more exposed to labor competition from immigrants, and in areas with less favorable attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, these results are consistent with existing workers forming and joining labor unions for economic as well as social motivations. The findings highlight a novel driver of unionization in the early 20th-century United States: in the absence of immigration, the average share of unionized workers during this period would have been 22%. The results also identify an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of institutions aimed at protecting workers' status in the labor market, with effects that continue into the present.

This paper investigates the economic consequences of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigration from China. The Act reduced the number of Chinese workers of all skill levels living in the United States. It also reduced the labor supply and the quality of jobs held by white and U.S.-born workers, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, and reduced manufacturing output. The results suggest that the Chinese Exclusion Act slowed economic growth in western states until at least 1940.

This paper studies the role of political connections in the performance and career paths of civil servants. The focus is on U.S. federal judges, who are nominated by the president upon recommendation from senators of their home state. Leveraging individual-level data on judges and senators from 1789 to 2019, we use a difference-in-differences design to compare the performance of judges before and after their recommending senators leave office. Following their recommenders' exit from Congress, judges produce 12% fewer judicial opinions, with no improvement in the average quality of those opinions, as measured by length, backward citations, and inward citations. This reduction in effort is likely driven by an erosion of career incentives: after the exit of their recommenders, district court judges are 66% less likely to be promoted to upper-level courts. These findings highlight how political appointments can negatively impact civil servant performance, particularly when career advancements depend on the influence of their political patrons.

A broad strand of literature in economics has studied political cycles, especially focusing on how politicians manipulate budgets to increase their chances of re-election. Much less attention has been given to how the political cycle affects the incentives and behavior of organizations. In this paper, I study how elections affect public sector labor unions, a type of organization with well-acknowledged ties to politics, and the Democratic party in particular. I find that, in presidential election years, unionization rates increase for Black workers. The effect is larger in the occurrence of open seat elections; in Blue states; and, among constituencies where other institutions that mobilize Black voters, such as the NAACP or the Black church, are less present. This evidence is consistent with a mechanism in which labor unions increase their membership to more effectively lobby politicians ahead of a general election, by targeting and mobilizing workers who are otherwise less likely to turn out to vote, and more likely to lean Democratic.

How do public administrations cope with tight limits on external hiring? What is the effect of these limits on public sector performance? How does the size of public employment affect local labor markets and private sector growth? In this paper, we aim to address these questions by: (i) leveraging rich administrative data on the universe of both public and private sector employees in the Italian labor market; and, (ii) exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in hiring constraints across different Italian public administrations induced by a 2008 reform that limited public sector hiring. With the findings of this paper, we aim to contribute to a long-standing debate on the public employment effects on the labor market, by exploiting exogenous variation in the size of local public employment; and, to the literature on internal labor markets, by focusing on a unique setting that allows us to document how the internal labor market of public sector organizations responds to shocks in external hiring ability.