November 6, 2025
The Upjohn Institute is pleased to announce its 2025 Dissertation Award winners. The Institute has sponsored awards each year since 1995 for the best Ph.D. dissertation on employment policies and issues.
First prize goes to Lukas Lehner for the dissertation “Beyond Unemployment: An Investigation of Social Policies to Empower Workers in a Changing World of Work" for the University of Oxford.
Honorable mentions go to Amy Burnett Cross of American University, with the dissertation “Military Manpower Policy and Women” and Omeed Maghzian of Harvard University, with the dissertation “Essays in Macroeconomics and Labor Markets.”
Dissertation Award first-place winners receive a prize of $2,500. Honorable mentions receive $1,000 prizes.
Lukas Lehner
Lukas Lehner is an assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh. His dissertation examined how social policies can better support unemployed workers in a changing world. His work combines field and survey experiments and comparative analysis to provide new insight on employment programs, job training, and labor market institutions.
In one field experiment, Lehner evaluates Austria’s Marienthal Job Guarantee, which offered guaranteed employment to long-term unemployed residents. His study shows that stable, meaningful work improves participants’ well-being, social inclusion, and community life—benefits that extend beyond income.
A second field experiment investigates why many unemployed workers do not take advantage of job training programs. Working with 50,000 job seekers, Lehner and his coauthor tested low-cost ways to reduce stigma and information barriers, finding that clear communication can boost participation, especially among women and low-income workers.
Another study analyzes the rise of temporary jobs across Europe and finds that temporary employment can slow wage growth for permanent workers, illustrating how labor market dualization affects entire economies.
In the final section of his dissertation, Lehner explores unemployed workers’ preferences for guaranteed income versus guaranteed employment through a survey experiment. Contrary to polarized public debate on this topic, he finds broad support for both ideas—with stronger preference for job guarantees—suggesting the two policies can complement one another.
Amy Burnett Cross
“Military Manpower Policy and Women’s Labor Market Outcomes”
Amy Burnett Cross is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She received her PhD in economics at American University and was a Dissertation Fellow at the Economic History Association and the NBER’s Study Group on Gender in the Economy.
Through two historical studies, Cross’s dissertation examines how U.S. military recruitment policy has shaped women’s participation in the civilian labor market.
The first study shows that the gender desegregation of the U.S. Army in 1972 significantly increased women’s entry into nontraditional civilian occupations, particularly in white-collar fields. The second study provides a contrasting example, revealing how dependency-based draft deferments during World War I reinforced traditional gender roles by reducing married women’s labor force participation.
Together, these findings highlight how military policies can either perpetuate or alleviate occupational segregation by gender—a persistent driver of the gender wage gap. This research offers valuable insights for policymakers seeking to address gender-based labor market inequalities through military policy reform.
Omeed Maghzian
“Essays in Macroeconomics and Labor Markets”
Omeed Maghzian is a postdoctoral associate at MIT Sloan and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He joined the MIT FutureTech group in July. His dissertation sheds light on how transmission mechanisms and frictions within labor markets alter the economic shocks that expose households to macroeconomic fluctuations. Each of his three chapters looks at a distinct friction affecting the interplay between such fluctuations and labor markets. His work has implications for designing policy to mitigate economic downturns and their adverse impacts on workers and communities.
Chapter 1, “The Labor Market Spillovers of Job Destruction,” examines how, when a firm lays off its workers, it becomes harder for others who are unemployed to find work, amplifying the earnings losses that the unemployed experience. Although employment contraction during recessions disproportionately occurs at low-productivity firms, Maghzian and his coauthor find that when many firms destroy jobs at once, workers’ earnings losses can outweigh any economic benefits that arise from reallocating labor to more productive firms, and economic policy that encourages job retention by firms may be optimal during recessions.
Chapter 2, “Credit Cycles, Firms, and the Labor Market,” shows that loose credit market conditions prompt more workers to accept jobs with firms on shaky financial footing, leading to large and persistent earnings losses for workers when credit tightens and these firms downsize or go out of business.
Chapter 3, “Household Liquidity and Macroeconomic Stabilization,” examines how the CARES Act mortgage forbearance program boosted local employment on the heels of the 2020 COVID-19 recession. It finds that the mortgage-payment deferrals provided by the federal forbearance program sped recovery following the lifting of economic lockdowns.