Essays on Labor Market Inequality: Dissertation Summary

This thesis consists of three chapters on aspects of labor market inequality. Chapter 1 examines the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. Chapter 2 studies the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which proposes that job suburbanization isolates blacks from work opportunities and depresses black employment. Chapter 3, coauthored with Isaiah Andrews, analyzes the effect of heterogeneity on the widely used analyses of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006) for optimal social insurance