Funded Projects
WorkRise invests in research projects that generate evidence on both challenges and solutions to accelerating economic mobility for workers.

How Does Federal and State Wage and Employment Policy Shape Racial Disparities in Earnings and Economic Mobility?
Researchers will build public-use datasets that generate evidence on how minimum wage policies and the federal-state Unemployment Insurance program have both mitigated and exacerbated racial inequality.

Creating Paths for STARs: Increasing Mobility Opportunities for Workers without BA Degrees
This project will generate insights on occupational pathways that can drive upward mobility for the estimated 71 million people in the US labor market who lack college degrees but are “skilled through alternative routes.”

Schedule Control at IKEA: How Does Worker Schedule Control Impact Employee Economic Security and Mobility?
The research team will conduct a pilot experiment with retailer IKEA that develops, tests, and evaluates new ways of giving hourly workers greater control over their schedules and assesses both employee and employer outcomes.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Pursuit Fellowship
Researchers will conduct a multiyear RCT to determine economic mobility outcomes of participants in the Pursuit Fellowship, a postsecondary IT skill and professional development program that prepares low-income adults without college degrees for careers in the tech industry.

The Impact of a Worker's First Job
Through the creation of a new linked dataset, this project seeks to understand how features and skill requirements of a worker’s first job shape wage and career trajectories and how these outcomes vary by race, gender, educational attainment, geography, and other worker characteristics.

The Workforce Almanac: Mapping the US Workforce Development Sector
The workforce development sector plays an important role in creating pathways for economic opportunity and mobility for workers without four-year college degrees, yet little is known about the sector in aggregate. This project aims to address this significant knowledge gap by combining information from state, federal, and private data sources to build a new and comprehensive public-use dataset on the workforce development sector.

Underemployment in the US: Its Distribution and Effects on Workers
This project aims to address knowledge gaps on underemployment by painting a more detailed picture of who these workers are across a variety of dimensions, including demographic characteristics, scheduling conditions, industry, occupation, wage and household income levels.

Addressing Racial Inequalities in Apprenticeships
This project aims to discern the drivers of racial inequalities in registered apprenticeships to design more equitable and inclusive programs, empower workers’ decisionmaking about apprenticeships, and improve enforcement of antidiscrimination policies.

Evidence-Based Subsidized Employment Programs
Unemployment rates in California remain higher than the national rate, and expanded subsidized employment (ESE) programs in California appear to be underused by people who could most benefit from them
This project will undertake a comprehensive mixed-method evaluation of California’s ESE programs.

Employee Experiences of Fair Workweek Ordinances
Fair workweek ordinances aim to improve the predictability, stability, and control over work hours and pay for millions of hourly wage employees. Yet little is known about how workers experience these laws. This project will address these knowledge gaps by building evidence on employee experiences of fair workweek ordinances.

A Workplace Divided: Survey Research and Stakeholder Engagement to Advance Equitable Workplaces
Whether employer-led DEI policies and practices have yielded measurable changes in the lives of workers of color remains an open question, which this project seeks to answer through quantitative and qualitative research.

Accessing Pathways to Economic Security for Low-Wage Immigrant Manicurists
This project from the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative and the UCLA Labor Center explores how partnerships and sectoral boards can build a sustainable and equitable nail salon industry, focusing on two approaches from other sectors.

A Completed Sentence, but Ongoing Punishment: How Past Criminal Convictions Bar Floridians from Occupational Licensing Opportunities
This project will explore how Florida state regulations have stifled workforce development, the relationship between occupational licensing and recidivism, and policy proposals other states can employ to reduce barriers to workforce development for people with criminal records.