Alex Bell is a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the California Policy Lab at UCLA. Prior to joining CPL, Dr. Bell earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Dr. Bell's research documents unequal experiences of workers in the labor market and the implications of these inequalities for society as a whole. Much of his research has leveraged large-scale administrative datasets to inform research on these topics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has written a series of rapid-response analyses of the crisis' disparate economic impacts on workers through the lens of California's unemployment insurance claims microdata and deployed quasi-experimental research designs t
In a methodological line of research, Dr. Bell has put forward a new framework for economists to study the role of job choice in income inequality, which yields significantly different price estimates for workplace amenities even when applied to the classic datasets used by labor economists. The framework for studying job choice updates the widely used canonical one to allow for a single dimension of unobserved worker skill heterogeneity.