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Our speaker will be Pamela Clouser McCann (USC Price)

The title of Pam’s talk and abstract appear below:

The Political Economy of Essential Work

Policy decisions distribute risk across subgroups in a population. Gubernatorial decisions made during states of emergency are no different. Statewide COVID-19 mandates shut down the private and public sectors but deemed some industries' workers "essential." We argue that such gubernatorial choices are associated with the health and economic risks of their electoral constituents and the states' political and economic landscape. We leverage variation in timing and content of COVID executive orders to analyze states’ COVID responses. We find that governors were responsive to voters' economic fragility and occupational exposure when making COVID policy. As particular combinations of health and economic vulnerabilities increase, governors' responsiveness to those groups increases in the governors' electoral risk. The state's institutions matter, too. Powerful industries facing governments with strong institutional capacity to resist industry pressure received fewer exemptions than their counterparts in states with weaker checks and balances. When state capacity to resist pressure is weak, strong industries receive the highest level of essential worker exemptions, but as state capacity strengthens, we observe a statistically significant decrease in such favorable treatment. (Co-written with Abby Wood)

After the talk, we will have a formal discussant: John Matsusaka (USC Marshall)

Lunch will be provided.