When humans undertake physically intensive tasks, the body must release heat to maintain a safe internal temperature. Worker safety organizations have strict guidelines for climate conditions under which it is safe for workers to perform strenuous manual labor. Rising temperatures from climate change will increase the risk of heat stress, making outdoor work more difficult. This study seeks to quantify these implications for capital accumulation, growth, and consumption by building a discrete time growth model of a closed economy. Unlike standard climate-economy models, Casey, Fried, and Gibson will account for differences in the way that climate affects the production of investment goods and services, compared to consumption goods and services. The model is designed to capture how vulnerability to climate change differs between consumption and investment sectors and how this difference evolves over time. It builds on past work by considering climate change as a determinant of productivity and considering a more disaggregated representation of the economy.

U.S. unemployment due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic was widespread, as was U.S. economic insecurity. In terms of consumption, aggregate retail sales fell by 16 percent in April 2020, the largest fall on record. While retail spending recovered by mid-July, spending on services remained significantly depressed. In contrast to aggregate spending and U.S. labor market data, there is little real-time data on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on consumer spending inequality. This project will use a new transaction-level, real-time dataset from Earnest Research to measure consumer spending inequality in the United States and assess the impact of the pandemic on consumption inequality. The dataset contains information on a panel of 6 million households and is updated with a delay of just 1 week. Abdelwahed and Robbins will be able to study the outflows of spending, as well as the inflows of payments from wages and salaries, stimulus payments, and other government transfers into the households’ accounts, allowing them to construct a series on various ratios of spending between the top and bottom percentiles in order to study changes in consumer spending inequality along the distribution. They will also measure the effects of the pandemic on consumption of those who lost their jobs or experienced lower incomes and will compare them to individuals who retained their jobs. Abdelwahed and Robbins will estimate the impact of government stimulus payments and Unemployment Insurance on consumer spending inequality and consumption patterns. The data will be released publicly at the aggregate level at both the state and county levels, and the two researchers plan to release quarterly reports, providing other researchers and policymakers with a valuable new data source.

Prior research suggests that the pathways through which childhood poverty shapes poverty in adulthood include physical and mental well-being, educational attainment, employment, and family structure. Income support policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, are all known to reduce levels of child poverty and have the potential to reduce racial disparities in child poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1967–2018, the researchers plan to investigate how the introduction of and/or policy changes to the EITC, SNAP, and TANF programs are effective at reducing racial differences in the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The authors will disaggregate their findings by race and use individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to identify children in poverty who were exposed to these programs and will follow them through early adulthood, assessing their poverty status.

The common ownership hypothesis suggests that when large investors own shares in more than one firm within the same industry, those firms may have reduced incentives to compete. Firms can soften competition by producing fewer units, raising prices, reducing investment, innovating less, or limiting entry into new markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have all acknowledged concerns about the anticompetitive effects of common ownership and have relied on the theory and evidence of common ownership in major merger cases. This is a series of four separate projects by the four researchers. The first project seeks to show a link between executive compensation and measures of common ownership, providing a "mechanism" for how common ownership might affect competition and consumption. The second focuses on innovation, building on recent work and seeking to incorporate effects of common ownership, which are predicted to vary according to technological and product-market relationships. The third project is largely theoretical and will study the size and magnitude of the relationship between common ownership and innovation and the extent to which that varies across the universe of publicly listed U.S. corporations. Finally, the fourth project is a data collection effort, expanding the universe of high-quality common ownership data outside of the United States.

This project seeks to determine the overall impact of Walmart supercenters on local employment and earnings, and more generally on the competitive structure of affected local labor markets. The research design exploits the fact that Walmart Inc. attempted to place a supercenter in 39 counties but was prevented from doing so as the result of local efforts. These counties are compared to those where a supercenter was opened. Data on employment and earnings is gathered from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and county-by-year labor force data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics, both from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary results show that the entry of Walmart supercenters caused significant reductions in aggregate local employment and earnings, with retail employment increasing immediately upon entry before largely reverting to pre-entry levels. This research will help us understand how large employers can exercise monopsony power locally in the market for less-skilled labor and what the consequences are for workers.

Confronting climate change will require the United States to dramatically reshape large portions of its economy. Carbon-intensive sectors in manufacturing and mining, which have long been bastions for middle-class jobs in communities across the country, are expected to shrink. Fears among workers and the communities that rely on these jobs are not unjustified, given recent economic research on the effect of trade shocks and environmental regulations. Yet reductions in carbon-intensive industries are only one side of the coin in addressing climate change. While many industries may shrink, a dramatic investment in green and renewable industries may create new opportunities for workers throughout the country. There is almost no economic research, however, exploring whether and how green jobs will benefit workers and their communities. Leveraging job-posting data from Burning Glass Technologies, along with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, Curtis and Marinescu will estimate the long-run benefits that workers accrue when green technology investments in solar and wind are made in their communities, as well as which types of workers benefit and which do not. The three researchers also are planning to estimate the effect of having more green jobs on local economic outcomes, such as the employment rate, poverty rate, and average incomes.