The Upjohn Institute today announces 10 winners of its 2024 Early Career Research Awards. Each award provides up to $7,500 to early career faculty — those who have earned a doctorate degree in the last six years — to carry out policy-relevant research on labor market issues.
Proposals submitted by this year's awardees cover a range of topics, including criminal justice and later-life benefits from the social safety net, as shown in the table at bottom. The Upjohn Institute encourages research proposals on all issues related to labor markets and public workforce policy.
The Early Career Research Awards program at the Upjohn Institute began in 2007 and has supported more than 200 scholars in that time. The program furthers the institute’s mission of informing employment policy and practice with timely research.
The deadline to apply for each year's awards comes in January, with winners announced in April.
Early Career Research Award recipients are expected to write a research paper based on the funded work and submit the paper for the Institute’s working paper series, which also are submitted to SSRN and listed with RePEc. Paper summaries also are considered for publication in the Institute’s policy brief series and newsletter, Employment Research. The Institute encourages authors to submit their ECRA-supported papers to peer-reviewed journals.
View a list of past ECRA winners and summaries of their projects here.
Researcher |
Institution |
Proposal Title |
| Panka Bencsik | Vanderbilt University | Corrections' Worker Safety and Free Communications in Prisons |
| Valentin Bolotnyy | Hoover Institution, Stanford University | The Impact of Prisoner Education on Recidivism, Labor Market Outcomes, and Public Assistance Utilization |
| Zara Contractor | Middlebury College | How Pay Information Impacts Job Search |
| Hanna Hoover | University of Michigan | Employment Following a Criminal Record |
| Benjamin Hyman | FRB New York | Big Pushes, Little Hollywoods? Local Economic Development Effects of Film Tax Credit Lotteries |
| Michael Ricks | University of Nebraska | What are the Pecuniary Returns to Foreign Language Acquisition? |
| Benjamin Shestakofsky | University of Pennsylvania | Analog Trades in a Digital World: The Platformization of In-Person Service Work |
| Aparna Soni | American University | Does Expanding Medicaid Eligibility for Children Reduce Racial Disparities in Later-Life Labor Market Outcomes? |
| Anna Stansbury | MIT Sloan | Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries |
| Ashley Wong | Tilburg University | Pension Caregiver Credits and the Gender Gap in Old-Age Income |