About

Katherine Moos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she has been a faculty member since 2017. Her research interests include the political economy of policy and the welfare state, social reproduction, unpaid household labor, care work, and time-use and working-hours legislation. She has contributed to feminist economics and Marxian economics, with a focus on the societal costs of social reproduction and the impact of social policies on economic growth and inequality. Moos holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from The New School for Social Research and a B.A. in Political Economy from Sarah Lawrence College. Her professional experience includes positions as an Assistant and Associate Professor at UMass Amherst, as well as a visiting faculty role at Sarah Lawrence College. She has been recognized with awards such as the Edith Henry Johnson Memorial Award in Economics, the Eberstadt Prize Fellowship, and the Schwartz Research Fellowship. Her work has been published in various academic journals, and she has been invited to present her research at numerous conferences and institutions worldwide. Moos's scholarship emphasizes the intersection of feminist theory and political economy, particularly in analyzing social reproduction and state regulation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Law
• Social Science
• Political economy
• Mechanical engineering
• Engineering
• Development economics
• Economic growth
• Medicine
• Economic system
• Market economy
• Psychology
• Neoclassical economics

Selected publications

• Social Reproduction Research on Finance

  Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) · 2025-01-01

  otherSenior author
  Publisher

• US teachers, overwork and perceptions of work-time reductions: Evidence from Massachusetts

  The Economic and Labour Relations Review · 2025-05-14

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract This study is based on four focus group interviews with public school teachers in Massachusetts about reducing work hours as a means of improving their working conditions. Our analysis documents a common experience of overwork, expressed in the focus groups and measured by time-use diaries. Teachers reported long work hours and a significant ‘mental load’—both of which affect teachers’ quality of life, physical and mental health, relationships with their families and desire to keep teaching. While participants were union members and therefore experienced with collective bargaining, most approached the issue of overwork as an individual problem that must be solved by setting and maintaining personal boundaries. Focus group participants differed in their assessment of a hypothetical policy proposal for a work-time reduction without a loss of pay for teachers or instructional time for students. While generally supportive of the goal, participants questioned whether contractual reductions would correspond to actual reductions in hours worked. Teachers expressed both eagerness to include work-time reductions in future contracts, as well as scepticism that their districts had the fiscal space or political will to achieve this goal. Discussions revealed that teachers’ professional identities as hard-working and caring ‘perfectionists’ who are responsible for their students’ learning, inhibited their policy imaginations with regard to using collective bargaining to win them additional leisure time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The distribution of the cost of Cuban social reproduction in 2016: the relative contributions of domestic and diasporic households, the private sector and the state

  New Political Economy · 2024-06-14 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, we propose an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people. We apply this quantitative framework to available data and produce estimates for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households – both domestic and diasporic – were the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island.

  PublisherDOI

• A Comparison of the Socioeconomic and Gendered Organization of Social Reproduction in the United States and the United Kingdom, 1973–2013

  Social Politics International Studies in Gender State & Society · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Drawing on both gender regime theory and social reproduction theory, this article compares the socioeconomic and gendered organization of social reproduction in the United States and the United Kingdom from 1973 to 2013. Integrating data from the Luxembourg Income Study, the Multinational Time-Use Study, and additional sources, we examine how men and women of different socioeconomic groups contribute to social reproduction through household production, paid work, and government social benefits. Our results demonstrate that household social reproduction has not been universally refamilialized, marketized, or desocialized in either country. While there is some evidence of degendering, questions remain about its feminist implications.

  PublisherDOI

• Cueing Dancers to “Externally Rotate From the Hips” Improves Potentially Injurious Ankle Joint Angles and Contact Forces During a Demipointe Ballet Position

  Journal of Dance Medicine & Science · 2024-04-14 · 1 citations

  article

  Introduction: The demipointe dance position puts the ankle at high risk of overuse injury and posteromedial ankle pain due to increased ankle valgus forces. Previous work has shown that creating lower limb external rotation intrinsic to demipointe with hip external rotation reduces foot pronation that causes ankle valgus stress. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to examine long axis rotation kinematics of the hip, knee, and ankle as well as the ankle joint contact forces in demipointe to better understand the biomechanical impact(s) of the specific cue to increase hip external rotation in this position. Methods: Three-dimensional motion capture and force plate data were collected from 23 contemporary or ballet pre-professional dancers (age: 19.94 ± 1.34 years) who each performed 3 dancer-selected (DS) demipointe positions and 3 demipointes with the cue to “externally rotate from the hips.” Results: The cue to increase hip external rotation resulted in significantly increased hip external rotation angle [DS: 37.5; 9.42° (median; interquartile range), Cued: 39.9; 10.8°, P < .0001)] and significantly reduced ankle eversion angle (DS: 8.13; 11.4°, Cued: 7.77; 10.3°, P = .023). However, total turnout angle was also significantly decreased (DS: 75.8; 7.91°, Cued: 75.4; 7.73°, P < .0001), which is undesirable for proper esthetic performance of demipointe. Total ankle joint force remained unchanged, but ankle eversion force was significantly reduced (DS: 15.3; 4.18 %bodyweight (BW), Cued: 14.7; 4.99 %BW, P < .0001) with use of the cue. Discussion/Conclusion: Utilization of a cue to increase hip external rotation was successful in increasing hip contribution to turnout angle and reducing injurious ankle eversion force. Further coaching using this cue may allow dancers to produce these advantageous mechanics while maintaining turnout angle.

  PublisherDOI

• The state's response to the crisis of neoliberalism: a comparison of the net social wage in China and the United States, 1992-2017

  International Review of Applied Economics · 2022-04-08 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We compare the welfare states and taxation regimes of the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, from 1992 to 2017. We begin with a comparison of each country’s net social wage – that is, the difference between total benefits received by and taxes paid by labor – using two established methods. While the net social wage in the two countries exhibited similar trends, the increasing net social wage has distinctly different implications in the two countries due to their specific historical trajectories in the neoliberal era. In the US, the increasing net social wage reflects an ambivalent and reluctant response to workers’ social reproduction. In China, it reflects institutional changes in the welfare state, which we interpret as the Chinese state’s attempt to resolve the social-reproduction crisis caused by neoliberal reforms of the 1990s.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coronavirus Fiscal Policy in the United States: Lessons from Feminist Political Economy

  Feminist Economics · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Political economy

  Using the U.S. fiscal response to Covid-19 in March and April 2020 as a case study, this paper explores the implications that the U.S. coronavirus legislation had on the societal distribution of responsibility for social reproduction among U.S. households, employers, and the U.S. federal government —and its effect on women and racialized minorities. It builds on feminist political economy research that argues that, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis and stagnating conditions for workers in the United States had increased the role of households and the U.S. government in social reproduction, relative to the contribution of employers. This paper argues that the U.S. federal government has responded to the Covid-19 crisis through an infusion of income support, but has failed to increase its long-term socially-reproductive commitments, nor addressed the intensified socially-reproductive burden placed on households or the declining role of employers in working-class social reproduction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Care work

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Engineering
  • Mechanical engineering

  Domestic and care work—both paid and unpaid—have been a central issue for feminist economics. Feminist economists have situated the analysis of care work within broader institutions and with due attention to intersections of gender with class, race, nationality, and other social differences. This chapter discusses care work as encompassing both direct and indirect care and unpaid and paid care work. Unpaid caregivers’ relative disadvantage puts them in a subordinate position both in terms of intra-household bargaining and in the labor market. Feminist economists have long argued that domestic labor has constrained women’s involvement in the labor market work, and women’s responsibility for domestic work is a major source of women’s oppression. The gender division of unpaid work leads to a “second shift” for women who also work for pay. Feminist macroeconomists argue that fiscal policy can be used to reduce the burden of unpaid household work on women.

  PublisherDOI

• Neoliberal Redistributive Policy: The U.S. Net Social Wage in the 21st Century

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2021-09-20 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, I examine the trends of fiscal transfers between the state and workers during 1959 - 2012 to understand the net impact of redistributive policy in the United States. This paper presents original net social wage data from and analysis based on the replication and extension of Shaikh and Tonak (2002). The paper investigates the appearance of a post-2001 variation in the net social wage data. The positive net social wage in the 21st century is the result of a combination of factors including the growth of income support, healthcare inflation, neoliberal tax reforms, and macroeconomic instability. Growing economic inequality does not appear to alter the results of the net social wage methodology.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Economy of State Regulation: The Case of the English Factory Acts

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2021-09-20

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper proposes a theory of why the state enacted social policy that regulated the length of the working day in 19th century industrial England. This paper will argue that, far from being capable of self-regulation, the capitalist labor market during Britain’s industrial revolution is best conceptualized as consisting of two major social coordination problems resulting from conflicting interests between and within capital and labor. Left unregulated, this dual social coordination problem caused the overexploitation of labor, with dire consequences for both the capitalist and working classes. The reason why this coordination problem could not self-correct was because the wage-labor bargain contained the externality of unwaged household labor. The existence of this externality became deleterious to firms’ profitability and workers’ survival, especially given the high levels of female labor force participation. This social coordination problem justified and required state regulation into industrial relations. By conceptualizing protective policy as the solution to a dual social coordination problem caused by conflicting interests among heterogeneous firms and workers, this paper extends the Polanyian framework with an explicit theory of exploitation based on the classical theory of competition and a feminist emphasis on social reproduction and unwaged labor.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kristen F. Nicholson

  Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist

  2 shared

• Tessa Hulburt

  2 shared

• Anamary Maqueira Linares

  University of Manitoba

  1 shared

• Laura Santos

  University of North Carolina School of the Arts

  1 shared

• Pilar Gonalons‐Pons

  University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

• Hao Qi

  Renmin University of China

  1 shared

• K. Vela Velupillai

  1 shared

• David Popoli

  Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Edith Henry Johnson Memorial Award in Economics, Civil Affai…
• Eberstadt Prize Fellowship (2014-2017)
• University Fellowship (2013-2014)
• Schwartz Research Fellowship (2013-2014)
• NSSR Tuition Scholarship (2012—2013)