On April 30th, 2025, the Shift Project community gathered for the last monthly meeting of the spring semester to learn about David Pedulla and Danny Schneider’s research on between-firm gaps in job quality and workers’ knowledge of these differences.
Guest Speaker
David Pedulla is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His research agenda examines the consequences of nonstandard, contingent, and precarious employment for workers’ social and economic outcomes as well as the processes leading to race and gender labor market stratification. David’s research has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and other academic journals. His work has been supported by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He was previously a member of the faculty of Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University.
Danny Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology at FAS. Danny completed his B.A. in Public Policy at Brown University in 2003 and earned his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012. Prior to joining Harvard, he was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at Berkeley/UCSF. Danny’s research interests are focused on social demography, inequality, and the family. He has written on class inequality in parenting, the role of economic resources in marriage, divorce, and fertility, the effects of the Great Recession, and the scope of household financial fragility. As Co-Director of The Shift Project, his current research focuses on how precarious and unpredictable work schedules affects household economic security and worker and family health and wellbeing.
Presentation
In this talk, David and Danny presented their project, “Is There a High Road and Where Can I Find It?”, co-authored by Kristen Harknett at UCSF and Nicole Kreisberg at PSU. They will explore how job quality varies between similar firms and whether workers know which firms offer better job opportunities. Neither within-sector, between-firm gaps nor information asymmetries are predicted by canonical models of the labor market. Yet, recent work focused on wages in the European context suggests the presence of both meaningful firm effects and limited worker information about them. Similar research has yet to be conducted in the United States or extended beyond knowledge about wages. To fill that gap and shed new light on these processes, we draw on unique employer-employee linked data from workers at large U.S. service sector firms to show significant between-firm gaps in job quality along multiple dimensions, including wages, schedules, and benefits, which are not explained by compensating differentials. Taking this data as “ground truth” for job quality by firm, we use separate surveys of broad samples of service sector workers to show that these potential job seekers have very little information about the wages, schedules, or benefits at these firms. Finally, drawing on data from a pre-registered information-based experiment, we find that exposure to firm-specific information about job quality increases the likelihood of intending to apply for a new job, especially for low-information workers.
