On February 24th, 2025, the Shift Project community gathered for the inaugural monthly meeting of the spring 2025 semester to learn about David Arbeláez’s research on fair workweek laws.
Guest Speaker: David Arbeláez is a fourth-year PhD student in the Sociology and Social Policy PhD program at Harvard University. He is generally interested in income and wealth inequality as well as intergenerational mobility in the context of higher education and the labor market in the US.
Presentation: “A Fair Work Week: The Impact of Work Hour Regulations on Work Schedules and Worker Wellbeing”. In this paper, we use stacked difference-in-differences models to estimate the effects of Fair Work Week regulations on work schedules, job quality, and worker well-being. We find that these regulations increased the share of workers receiving at least two weeks’ advance notice of their work schedules, had some positive effects on other aspects of scheduling stability, and had little or no negative impact on other aspects of job quality.
