Alison Doxey

Welcome! I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. I combine historical data and quasi-experimental methods to study topics in labor and public economics. I am primarily interested in understanding how public policies may have affected inequality and intergenerational mobility in the U.S. I also have an interest in the effects of public policy and technological change on women's labor supply.

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. If you'd like to talk about research or are considering applying to PhD programs in economics or public policy, feel free to email me at adoxey@uchicago.edu.

Selected work in progress

Democratizing Opportunity? The Effects of the U.S. High School Movement (with Ezra Karger and Peter Nencka)

Between 1850 and 1910, the share of young Americans living in towns with a high school increased from 17% to 46%—the fastest expansion of school access in U.S. history. Using a new panel of every high school in the United States, we show that this expansion transformed economic opportunities for many young adults but widened class and racial inequalities. Comparing children in towns that opened a high school to those in nearby towns without one, we find sharp increases in school attendance among high school-aged students. 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 high school access explains 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. Therefore, 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 (Fishback & Kantor, 2000), 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 mining accidents and access to workers’ compensation for families in the early-20th-century United States. Matching detailed individual-level data on coal mining accidents with linked Census data, we study how access to workers’ compensation payments may have narrowed income and education gaps between children whose father died in a mining accident and similar children whose father survived. To illuminate possible mechanisms, we also examine effects of access to workers’ compensation on deceased miners’ surviving spouses.

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