Robert Allen Manduca

Shows how Social Security, unemployment insurance, and other social insurance programs fulfill some of the common uses for private wealth, and have values of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to their recipients.

Builds on the idea that researchers and economic developers distinguish between "traded" industries that produce for national or global markets and "local" industries that meet local demand to provide evidence for a third industry type: "regional" industries that serve metropolitan markets. Regional industries pay better than local industries but are more accessible than traded industries.

Explores classic approaches to the regulation of employment that solidified in the period following the world wars. Explores how unions and collective bargaining, labor and employment laws, and social partnerships are, and will continue to be, important institutions in many countries. Reimagines old and new ideas for the governance of work and employment in global, digital, post-industrial, and rapidly changing economies and societies. 

Argues that a key and underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the national trend of rising income inequality.

Examine the correspondence between Phoenix metro area restaurants identified by a social media source (yelp.com) and those from an administrative source (Maricopa Association of Governments [MAG]). Finds that they capture largely disjoint subsets of Phoenix restaurants, with only about one-third of restaurants in each data set present in the other.

Estimates rates of "absolute income mobility" - the fraction of children who earn more than their parents - by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records.