This project seeks to determine the feasibility of a paid family and medical leave insurance (PFMLI) program with an opt-out mechanism. While state PFMLI programs in the United States vary somewhat in program parameters, all essentially require eligible workers to participate and are funded through payroll contributions. Some allow employers to self-insure and opt out of the public program. Generally, employees do not have that option. But proposed legislation in New Hampshire would create a program that contains an employee opt-out mechanism. There is a large gap in understanding of this design choice. Which individuals would opt out? And which would opt out initially and then opt in later? And how would that interact with the employer self-insurance opt-out? The answers have lasting implications for the cost of the program, the level of benefits that can be offered, the possibility of implicit or explicit bias against low-wage women workers of reproductive age, and the ultimate success of the program. The researcher will create, distribute, and analyze a survey of New Hampshire workers in an effort to predict their behavior if such a program were to be implemented.

This project seeks to identify the impact of workforce characteristics on the employer costs of implementing paid leave policies. The researchers will perform an empirical examination of the way New York City’s paid sick days law has affected covered businesses. They will undertake an employer survey of 350 firms, analyze the impact of workforce characteristics on costs, firm profitability, the share of the workforce that has access to paid sick days, and on the number of paid sick days available to specific categories of workers before and after the law.

This research will analyze how state-level paid family and medical leave and Medicaid expansions influence drug-related outcomes. The research team will draw from a variety of administrative data sources, including restricted individual-level mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control; data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s National Inpatient Sample and Nationwide Emergency Department Sample; and the Treatment Episode Data Set-Admissions. Drawing from these rich data sources in combination with information on population demographic characteristics and state policies, the team will employ a variety of causal inference techniques to examine whether access to paid family and medical leave can help reduce the abuse of opioids. While a large literature has examined the impacts of paid family and medical leave on parental leave-taking, labor market outcomes, and child health, there is no research to date on whether it can influence drug abuse and treatment. Similarly, there is little research on the effect of Medicaid coverage on drug-related deaths or measures of drug-related morbidity.

This research will investigate how low-income and first-generation students respond financially and academically to financial aid austerity by exploiting a 2011 change that the U.S. Congress made to Pell grant eligibility that affected nearly 286,000 students. As a result, an estimated 12,000 students were eliminated from eligibility for a Pell grant, and 274,000 students received fewer grant dollars. The project will estimate the impact of this sudden unexpected loss in financial aid on college attendance, financial aid, and labor supply outcomes for low-income college students using a combination of restricted-use data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The researcher will use the panel nature of the data to track changes in outcomes for students from one academic year to the next. A regression discontinuity design will be employed to estimate the causal effect of the loss on various educational and labor market outcomes.

Russell will explore whether the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, reform affected the likelihood that ex-offenders moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This work sits at the intersection of two important policy areas—criminal justice reform and neighborhood access/mobility—and brings a racial lens to the question. It also seeks to understand whether the reform promotes statistical racial discrimination in housing, as some research has suggested “Ban the Box” laws unintentionally have.

This project seeks to extend the evidence on welfare policies by examining the long-run effects of a high-impact set of randomized experiments conducted by the nonprofit organization MDRC in the late 1980s and 1990s involving more than 100,000 welfare recipients. This is the first study of its kind to look at the very long-term effects of welfare reform experiments on adult outcomes. In each study, welfare recipients were randomly assigned to either a control, Aid to Families with Dependent Children-like program, or to interventions involving different combinations of job training, job search assistance, financial incentives to work, childcare subsidies, time limits, and/or sanctions. Merging data from these experiments with administrative tax data and other data held at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hoynes will study the long-run impacts of welfare policies on many important outcomes, including earnings and employment, fertility, marriage, mortality, and program participation for adult welfare recipients and, importantly, their children.