Alumni Association

Eleonora Patacchini Face-to-Face Meetings, Referrals, and Hiring We study the impact of face-to-face interactions with preexisting social connections in the workplace —commonly known as referrals—on worker mobility. Using detailed cellphone geolocation data and sociodemographic information for 3.3 million workers in a large urban labor market over two years, we find that in-person meetings can double the positive effects of referrals on job movement. These interactions yield higher returns than other communication methods, such as phone calls and messaging apps. The benefits are particularly pronounced for women, migrants, full-time employees, high-income earners, private sector workers, and individuals transitioning from the IT, finance, and manufacturing industries. Our analysis reveals that a higher frequency of meetings drives the premium observed among women, high-income job switchers, and private sector employees, while the composition of these meetings is crucial to explaining the premium for migrants, full-time workers, and employees in specific industries. Diversity in the composition of in-person meetings does not enhance worker mobility.

Join us for our Wednesday Lunch Series, featuring guest speakers from Cornell's faculty and staff as well as the surrounding community. Enjoy an informal discussion where you can learn more about the speaker’s work or research, how they ended up doing what they are doing, current issues in higher education and local community. A free lunch will be served. Tejasvi Nagaraja is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s ILR School. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, the New School and the New York Historical Society. His writing has been published in the journal American Historical Review. Nagaraja’s research and teaching explores the intersections of U.S. labor and African American and foreign relations history. Investigating both ‘top-down’ public policy and ‘bottom-up’ social movements, his work considers how class, gender and race evolve within a changing global division of labor and geopolitics. As a scholar of empire, he interprets the United States both in and of the world, across both connection and comparison, especially through a focus on war and the military. As a historian of labor and racial capitalism, he finds the study of social movements particularly illuminating. In addition to labor and working-class history, Nagaraja’s teaching has highlighted the Black freedom movement and U.S. wars, including interdisciplinary courses on global capitalism, on race and war — as well as, gender and geopolitics; the military- and prison- industrial complex; freedom struggles in geopolitics; intersectional and international social movements. Nagaraja is writing a book about America’s World War II experience and generation. It reconstructs a far-flung war within the war, among Americans themselves. This transnational story braids military-industrial labor battles, Black soldiers’ protest against policing and incarceration, and veterans’ debates about America’s role in the world. Diverse war workers led a ‘greatest generation’ of labor, Black freedom and other social movements, which linked racial and economic and global contentions. These struggles took place from Pennsylvania to Panama, Georgia to Germany, Michigan to Manila. From WWII into the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy’s statecraft was entangled and embattled in relation with domestic social movements, which were themselves embedded within the new global war machine. This process took shape amidst a singular peak momentum in the organization and intersection of the U.S. labor and Black movements, as they intersected with a singular peak momentum in the organization of U.S. global military power. As Americans today grapple with the overlapping trajectories from New Deal to neo-liberalism, from Jim Crow to a prison-industrial complex, from American primacy to a military-industrial complex—this book finds the WWII generation’s war-within-war to be critically foundational and revealing.

Join us for a talk by Professor Dana Frank, based on her new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times. She explores a range of activism during the era, from mutual aid and labor strikes to resistance against racial and political oppression. The talk highlights 1937 sit-down strike by seven African American wet nurses in Chicago, examining their sources of power in the workplace, their communities, and the broader labor movement. Refreshments will be served. This event is geared toward an in-person audience, so we strongly prefer you join us on our Ithaca campus. If this is not possible, please register to join us via Zoom, and information will be included in the registration confirmation email. Dana Frank is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of seven books on US and Honduran labor and working-class history, including Buy American, The Long Honduran Night, and, with Robin D.G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Hammer & Hope, New Left Review, Foreign Affairs, The Jacobin, The Baffler, Literary Hub, The Progressive, and many other publications. She is a regular guest on Democracy Now.

Thibaut Lamadon Why Do Larger Firms Have Lower Labor Shares? We use population panel data on firms and workers in Norway to estimate how a firm's output, use of input factors, and payment to labor change in response to exogenous changes in revenues due to shifts in its product demand or productivity. These estimates allow us to draw causal inferences about how firms change the way they produce as they grow and why larger firms have lower labor shares. We develop and estimate a model to quantify the relative importance of three sources for variation in labor shares across firms: i) the shape of the labor supply curve facing the firm, ii) differences in the returns to scale between labor and other inputs, and iii) heterogeneity across firms in the output elasticities of input factors. We employ instrument variable strategies to isolate plausibly exogenous sources of variation in the revenues of firms. We compare these instrumental variable estimates to OLS estimates and document the biases that arise when using cross-sectional data to draw conclusions about how firms grow and why larger firms have lower labor shares.

Nuria Rodriguez-Planas

Join us as the 2023 Kheel Center Travel Grant winners present their research findings. The Richard Strassberg Travel Grant supports scholars conducting archival research at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives in Catherwood Library. Catherwood, located in the ILR School, is part of Cornell University Library. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from the recipients and explore their work! Program information will be sent upon registration. Speakers: Hillary Dann, producer/researcher for historical documentaries: "The Investigation of NYC Public School Teachers in the 1940s and 50s." and Hella Winston, sociologist and investigative reporterBryant EtheridgeDaniel GoldsteinHunter Moskowitz, Phd Candidate at Northeastern University: “Practical Men: “White Patriarchal Skill in the Global Textile Industry.”