My Research

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. The core of my work studies paid and unpaid (volunteer) labor in nonprofit and public sectors. I am particularly interested in analyzing how and why individuals opt into these sectors and I answer these questions through quantitative, macro-level analyses of publicly available data. Within my research, I focus on the implications of this behavior relative to market outcomes and its subsequent meaning for practitioners.

This primary interest is reflected in my three-paper dissertation titled “Paid and Unpaid Labor in the Nonprofit Sector.” In this project, I investigate the three separate but interrelated topics of wage differences, volunteer patterns, and gender variations that arise between nonprofit and public workers relative to their for-profit counterparts. The photo above displays work from Paper 2 in which I find a strong relationship between early-career volunteering and mid-career employment in the nonprofit sector. This echoes a consistent finding across many of my papers in which I conclude that individuals engaging with the nonprofit sector are idiosyncratic entities that necessitate nuanced methodology. My results call for tailored recruitment strategies that bolster nonprofit and government human capital.