Her research focus is placed on three main themes, including the linkage between labour market institutions and wage inequality, issues related to the economic progress of gender equality, as well as contributions to decomposition methods.
[6] John DiNardo, Thomas Lemieux and Nicole Fortin employ the semiparametric regression approach to analyse the impacts of various institutional changes and labour market factors on wage distribution.
They employ the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys to determine whether the gender gap in math test scores correlates with computer (digital devices) gaming.
[8] Fortin, Philip Oreopoulos, and Shelley Phipps employ three decades of data from the "Monitoring the Future" cross-sectional surveys to show that the mode of girls' high school GPA distribution has shifted from "B" to "A" from the 1980s to the 2000s.
In a reweighted OB decomposition of achievement at each GPA level, they find that gender differences in tertiary education expectations, controlling for school ability, and as early as 8th grade are the most crucial factor to account for this trend.
[9] Nicole Fortin co-authored with Sergio Firpo and Thomas Lemieux to explain an extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method that can be applied to various distributional measures.
They demonstrate the practical aspects of the procedure by exploring how factors, such as de-unionization, education, occupations, and industry changes, impacted the polarization of U.S. male wages from the late 1980s to the mid 2010s.
[10] This chapter, authored by Thomas Lemieux, Sergio Firpo and Nicole Fortin, provides an overview of decomposition methods that have been developed after the seminal work of Oaxaca and Blinder in the early 1970s.
While the original work of Oaxaca and Blinder considered the case of the mean, their main focus is placed on other distributional statistics aside the mean (e.g. quantiles, the Gini coefficient or the variance).