On March 27, 2024, the Shift Project community gathered for practice talks by Leah Abrams, Siri Neerchal, and Kiara Hernandez in preparation for their upcoming presentations at the PAA and MPSA conferences.
Guest Speakers
Leah Abrams is a population health and aging researcher in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University. Dr. Abrams’ research focuses on trends in mortality and life expectancy, health equity in the aging population, and obstacles to working in late life.
Leah will present the paper “Older workers in the service sector: Exposure to and implications of automation and surveillance.” This analysis provides a uniquely detailed portrait of prevailing labor market conditions for aging workers in the service sector and demonstrates how certain kinds of technology matter for workers’ job satisfaction, retirement decisions, and ultimately their economic well-being.
Siri Neerchal is a PhD student in sociology and social policy at Harvard University. They previously worked as a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford Law School, and they received their B.S. in mathematics and B.A. in history at the University of Maryland in 2021.
Siri will present the paper “Work Schedule Instability and the Production of Parental Stress and Parenting Time.” This work examines the impact of unstable schedules on parenting-specific stress and time. Deploying measures of exposure to four dimensions of schedule instability in a large sample of hourly service-sector workers employed at many large firms across the U.S., the authors find that exposure to routine work schedule instability profoundly impacts parents in terms of higher levels of parenting stress and limited parenting time with children, and they demonstrate a dose-response relationship with intensity of exposure as well as panel data analysis, supporting stronger causal inferences.
Kiara Hernandez is a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard and a Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration at HKS. She studies the effects of economic and political precarity on intergroup cooperation and conflict, primarily in workplace and residential contexts.
Kiara will present the paper “Partisan Sorting at Work.” This paper investigates the effect that worker-firm ideological misalignment has on workers’ decisions to exit ideologically incompatible jobs. The authors find that workers are more likely to leave their job when there is a mismatch between their own ideology and that of corporate managers/executive board members, but that there is no difference in exit due to within-firm mismatch between workers. Their results suggest that workplaces may represent a unique and understudied driver of political segregation in the U.S.
