This project will use IRS tax records to study the effects of California’s 2004 paid family leave insurance on labor market and family formation outcomes for both men and women. Byker and Bailey’s research has two significant advantages over the existing literature on paid parental leave in the United States. First, because they are using administrative data, they have an extremely large sample size, which will allow for potentially stronger conclusions than previous studies to date. The large sample size also allows for the study of heterogeneous effects, which has previously been difficult due to data limitations. Second, the long-term longitudinal nature of their panel allows for the first-ever study of long-term policy effects on employment, earnings, fertility, family formation, and other important impacts. This research comes at a time when many states are actively debating public paid family leave policies, and a national-level conversation is ongoing.

Recent research by Raj Chetty and other economists using tax return data has allowed for a deeper understanding of the levels and trends of economic mobility in the United States, but there hasn’t been equivalent data for the analysis of social mobility. This study will develop a new longitudinally linked U.S. Census American Community Survey dataset that will allow for parallel analyses of occupational mobility. This will be an important complement to the recent work on economic mobility that will allow for a richer understanding of what mobility actually looks and feels like for Americans. An analysis of occupational mobility in addition to economic mobility will allow for an analysis of whether individuals trade higher earnings for other occupational traits such as prestige, creating a more nuanced understanding of what opportunity looks like. In addition, the project will advance the literature by decomposing intergenerational occupational mobility by race, migration status, family structure, and type of occupation. This work is part of a larger database creation effort at the U.S. Census Bureau, the American Opportunity Study, which will create a panel that will represent the full U.S. population over the past 70 years, increasing the ability of researchers to use linked census data to study many demographic and economic questions in the later half of the 20th century.

This research will investigate whether out-migration is a successful response to local economic shocks. In the wake of the Great Recession and its uneven impact on communities in different parts of the United States, out-migration was considered to be a key way for Americans to escape the incidence of local economic shocks. Recent work, however, finds that actual out-migration provided little insurance against recent local shocks, and U.S. migration rates have fallen by about 15 percent since 1980. Yagan will study whether out-migration is, in fact, a channel via which people respond to and solve for local economic shocks by examining whether people move from low opportunity areas to areas with good job prospects, rather than to areas with similarly poor job prospects. A key condition for out-migration to be an actual solution to concentrated and intergenerational economic distress is whether there are better economic conditions in the new location.

Measuring inequality is critical to understanding the nature of the challenge and its effects. This project aims to improve measurement of wealth inequality by understanding the extent to which tax evasion by the wealthy affects inequality measurements that rely on tax records. The authors combine administrative data on tax compliance, including audit results and the results of voluntary disclosure programs, and data leaked from financial and legal entities in recent years to explore the prevalence and scope of tax evasion by the wealthy. The researchers will use the improved estimates of tax evasion by the wealthy to construct revised estimates of income and wealth inequality in the United States.

This project will continue an important empirical line of research that uses innovative field-based experimental methods to understand the dynamics of discrimination. The researchers will combine an audit study with a survey of employers. The audit data has significant advantages over past audit studies: It examines a broader range of job openings by using BurningGlass data; examines a larger number of employers and responses to applications; examines a broader range of cities; and examines race by gender and by parental status simultaneously. The researchers will survey employers, focusing on three main areas: personnel policies such as affirmative action, parental leave, and flex time; hiring practices such as the use of technology, referrals, and standardized interview protocols; and the demographics, size, number of locations, and age of the company. This research will directly test several outstanding questions in the literature, particularly the connection between formalization procedures and discrimination, the effectiveness of diversity initiatives, and the role of technology. This project’s findings will provide a more precise assessment of how organizations perpetuate gendered, racial, and parental-status discrimination.

This project entails the collection of empirical metrics of merger outcomes in order to analyze effects beyond prices, taking into consideration other factors such as employment, innovation, and efficiencies. Scott Morton will collect empirical metrics of antitrust enforcement outcomes from publicly available data in company reports, earnings calls, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and from other sources such as industry analysts and consulting services in order to create a novel dataset. Information will be collected before and after a merger. Data will then be compared to the outcomes predicted by the merging firms. A second component of the research will examine the purposes and outcomes of acquisitions in the high-tech sector to determine whether acquisitions are motivated by increased efficiencies or by the elimination of competitors, a question that is largely unexplored. This line of inquiry seeks to test whether recent acquisitions have stifled innovation. This project is poised to make a considerable contribution to our understanding of the effects of mergers and acquisitions. Little evidence currently exists, resulting in a high burden on the agencies to justify challenges to proposed mergers and acquisitions.