Structural Leverage at Work: Occupational Network Position and Labor Outcomes

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 25: Returns to Network Position

Abstract

This paper develops an occupation-level measure of workers’ positional power in the U.S. economy and examines its consequences for wages, unionization, and labor militancy. Existing research typically emphasizes market power (skill scarcity and substitutability) and associational power (collective organization), but these approaches understate how workers’ structural location in production networks can generate leverage. Building on Perrone (1984) and Wallace, Griffin, and Rubin (1989), I shift analysis from industries to occupations by integrating Bureau of Economic Analysis input-output tables with occupation-by-industry employment matrices from BLS and CPS-based historical estimates. This integration produces an occupation-to-occupation dependency network that captures how disruptions in one occupation can propagate across production systems. I operationalize positional power along three dimensions: downstream influence, network centrality, and brokerage across structural holes. Using occupation-year panel models, I estimate how these network-derived indicators relate to occupational outcomes, including wage levels, unionization rates, and strike exposure.

Author

• Steven Bao, Ohio State University