Alison Doxey

Welcome! I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. I am an applied microeconomist who combines historical data and quasi-experimental methods to study topics in labor and public economics. My research focuses on understanding how public policy affects opportunity, inequality, and economic mobility in the U.S. I am also interested in the long-run effects of policy and technological change on women's labor supply.

I am on the 2026-27 job market.

Before graduate school, I received a BS in Economics from Brigham Young University and worked as a Research Professional at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. My email is adoxey@uchicago.edu.

Working Papers

High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity (with Ezra Karger and Peter Nencka)

NBER WP #35068 (Reject and Resubmit at The Quarterly Journal of Economics)

Between 1850 and 1910, the share of young Americans living in towns with high schools increased from 17% to 46%—the fastest expansion of school access in U.S. history. Using new data on every high school built in the United States before 1945, we show that this expansion transformed economic opportunities for many young adults but widened class and racial inequalities. We find sharp increases in school attendance rates for high school-aged children in towns that opened a high school relative to children in nearby towns without one. Linking children to adult outcomes, we show that high schools increased women’s labor force participation and job quality, while reducing the probability of early marriage and childbearing. Increased access to high school accounts for a third of the increase in women’s labor force participation between 1870 and 1930. High schools had the largest effects on children from already-wealthy families, and did not, on average, benefit Black children. While the high school movement substantially narrowed gender gaps in labor market outcomes, it also widened existing race- and class-based disparities.

The Long-Run Effects of Access to Social Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Workers' Compensation (with Michael McKelligott)

Workers’ compensation was the first widespread social insurance program in the United States, but its long-run effects on injured workers and their families are not well understood. We examine this by leveraging quasi-random variation in both work accidents and access to workers’ compensation for families in the early-20th-century United States. Prior to the program, few families carried life insurance and more than half of work accident widows remarried within three years. We build a new data set describing nearly 57,000 fatal work accidents and match it with linked Census data to follow the spouses and children of work accident victims over the following 10 to 30 years. Exploiting the quasi-random timing of fatal accidents relative to program implementation in a stacked difference-in-differences approach, we estimate that access to workers' compensation substantially decreased remarriage among women widowed by a work accident. Reductions in remarriage are larger in states where widows lost benefits upon remarriage, suggesting that policy incentives may have played a role, but still large (12 percentage points) in states with no such policy incentive. Taken together, the evidence suggests that remarriage was a highly-used form of informal insurance but that a significant share of women shifted toward social insurance once it became available.

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