The Upjohn Institute is pleased to announce its 2024 Dissertation Award winners. The institute has sponsored awards each year since 1995 for the best Ph.D. dissertation on employment policies and issues.
First prize goes to Angela Wyse with the dissertation “Essays on Homelessness" for the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Honorable mentions go to Agostina Brinatti, with the dissertation “Essays on Immigration and International Trade” for the University of Michigan, and Sara Spaziana, with the dissertation “Essays in Public and Labor Economics” for Brown University.
Dissertation Award first-place winners receive a prize of $2,500. Honorable mentions receive $1,000 prizes.
Angela Wyse is an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Wyse’s dissertation considers fundamental questions around the U.S. homeless population, using data that is detailed, accurate, longitudinal and designed to be nationally representative.
In the first of three chapters, Wyse estimates the size of the homeless population by linking Census and shelter data, finding that there are about 400,000 people in U.S. shelters in a given night and 200,000 unsheltered. The second chapter provides the first national estimates of the homeless population’s employment, income and receipt of social safety net programs. Wyse finds that homelessness tends to arise in the context of persistent poverty, rather than major income shocks. In the final chapter, Wyse finds that someone who has experienced homelessness has 3.5 times the mortality risk of a housed person and that a homeless 40-year-old faces a mortality risk similar to that of a housed person who is nearly 60.
Sara Spaziani is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Warwick. To inform policy and reduce inequalities, her dissertation studies, in three chapters, how public policies and economic shocks affect workers, employers and the labor market.
Chapter 1 examines unemployment insurance financing policies, comparing experience rating, used in the United States, with coinsurance, used in other countries. Chapter 2 investigates the effectiveness of gender quotas in Italian municipal elections, finding they increase female representation in government but don’t significantly affect the election of female mayors. Chapter 3, written with Livia Alfonsi and Mary Namubiru, finds that the COVID-19 lockdowns imposed in Uganda disproportionately reduced female employment, resulting in a new and persistent employment gender gap.
Agostina Brinatti is a Yale University postdoctoral associate. She will then join the University of Chicago, in 2025 as a fellow in the Becker Friedman Institute and, starting in 2026, as an assistant professor in the Booth School of Business. Brinatti’s dissertation studies the welfare and production effects of immigration and international trade and how the two effects interact in the globalized economy. She presents her dissertation in three chapters:
- “Third-Country Effects of U.S. Immigration Policy,” with Xing Guo, on how U.S. restrictions on skilled immigration affect the Canadian economy and the welfare of American workers.
- “Firm Heterogeneity and the Impact of Immigration: Evidence from German Establishments,” with Nicolas Morales, documents that large firms allocate a higher proportion of their wage bill to immigrants compared to small firms.
- “The International Price of Remote Work,” with Alberto Cavallo, Javier Cravino and Andres Drenik, studies how the price of remote work is determined in a globalized labor market using data from a large web-based job platform.
The Upjohn Institute, as an employment research and services organization, is committed to supporting emerging scholars who advance our collective knowledge on employment issues and inform better policymaking. We maintain a list of past winners and honorable mentions going back to 1995 on our website.