This project examines the source of racial and ethnic inequality among the highly educated workforce in the United States by focusing on how educational credentials translate into U.S. labor market outcomes. The racial and ethnic wage divide is the largest and has expanded the most among highly educated workers, despite the fact that people of color in the United States are registering higher educational attainment. This project seeks to shed light on that by exploring how educational credentials translate into positions in the U.S. labor market and whether there are mismatches. Specifically, the project will investigate vertical and horizontal dimensions of education-occupation mismatches. Vertical mismatch refers to a mismatch between a worker's educational credentials and the level of education required for the occupation, such as a college graduate working as a retail sales associate. Horizontal mismatch refers to a mismatch between a worker's field of study and the type of education required for the occupation, for example, an engineering major working as an accountant. Lu will incorporate a demand-based measure of mismatch using online job-posting data compiled by Burning Glass Technologies, in addition to pooling two decades of nationally representative longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. She will investigate which dimensions of mismatch and which processes in the employment relationship drive racial and ethnic labor market inequality by exploring initial occupational allocation, subsequent occupational trajectory, and wage consequences of mismatch. Lu also will investigate how educational stratification factors into ethnic/racial disparities by looking at degree levels, fields of study, and college quality.

An estimated 7.5 million children under 6 years old are cared for by home-based child care providers each year, which represents the majority of young children in regular nonparental care arrangements in the United States. Home-based child care programs are more affordable and accessible to a broad range of families, especially low-income, Black and Latinx, and rural families. The pandemic has drawn attention to longstanding racialized inequities in access to child care and the structural inequalities that are perpetuated due to insufficient investment in the home-based child care sector. This project will document trends over time (before, during, and after the pandemic) in access to child care subsidies for home-based care providers using administrative records data for the state of Illinois, paying particular attention to the racial composition of those receiving child care subsidies and those who serve racially diverse and economically disadvantaged families through the child care subsidy program. The analysis of the administrative records will be able to show how licensed and unlicensed providers' access to child care subsidies were affected by the pandemic, compared with one another and compared with center-based care. The two researchers will augment this analysis with in-depth interviews with home-based care providers. These qualitative interviews will explore how home-based care providers fared during the pandemic.

Progressive taxation is highly polarized in the United States because some states have millionaire taxes while others have no state income tax at all. The 2017 tax reform legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, amplified these differences by capping the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. This effectively reduced top tax rates in some states while increasing them in others, leading some, including governors, to worry that this new tax differential will set off a wave of millionaire tax flight and a new “race to the bottom” in state taxes on the rich. Using confidential data from IRS tax returns, the author will examine elite mobility and embeddedness in the wake of the 2017 tax reform. The author seeks to understand if the rich are more likely to move when their tax rates are high, whether the TCJA-induced tax differential led to greater migration, and, conditional on moving, how much this tax reform increased the likelihood that moves are to lower-tax destinations. These questions are of great importance as state and local taxes are essential for states’ capacity to provide services and alleviate inequality. And while previous work shows the existence of effects among particular job classes, this paper would provide policy-relevant estimates for the universe of high-earners in recent U.S. history.

Understanding the degree to which, and how, hurricanes have had disparate effects across disadvantaged and advantaged groups in the United States is key to policymakers’ ability to craft climate policy that ensures disadvantaged communities do not bear the brunt of our warming world. Most of the literature in this area has focused on average impacts, with relatively little attention paid to heterogeneity. But even in cases where no negative impacts of natural disasters are found, on average, some subgroups may experience substantial negative effects. This project leverages newly linked administrative tax data from the IRS and demographic information from the American Community Survey and decennial census with exogenous variation in individual-level exposure to all hurricanes in the United States between 1995 and 2019. The analysis seeks to uncover a deeper understanding of the consequences of and responses to hurricanes, and how these effects differ across socioeconomic and demographic groups.

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.

Fine, Galvin, Round, and Shepherd seek to understand the relationship between region, race, state enforcement capacities, and minimum wage violations in the United States, and what the mechanisms are by which weaker state enforcement capacities might produce a higher incidence of minimum wage violations. This exploratory, theory-building project involves three major empirical components. First, the four researchers will improve upon, merge, and expand separate datasets they previously compiled on subnational labor standards enforcement capacity to create a novel and flexible database of all the enforcement capacities of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data and coding rules will be made fully transparent to enable future researchers to use whichever combination of codes best suits their particular research questions. Second, the researchers will use CPS-MORG data to estimate the minimum wage violation rate in every state and region of the United States. Third, they will use exploratory, in-depth comparative case studies to identify and theorize a repertoire of mechanisms linking the legacy of slavery and the post-slavery racialized economy in the South to weak state enforcement capacity and minimum wage violations in order to understand the role of federalism in creating and maintaining Black-White racial disparities.