This project seeks to empirically investigate the incidence and consequences of participation in multiple income support programs. The author proposes harnessing rich internal administrative records from the state of Virginia on program application and participation—covering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, child care assistance, energy assistance, and other programs—to accomplish three objectives: Producing descriptive statistics on the frequency of multiple-program participation and the characteristics of enrollees; estimating the causal effects of multiple-program participation on various dimensions of family well-being, including earnings, the duration of program participation, and interactions with the criminal justice system for adults and children; and evaluating the efficacy of multiple-program participation and the combinations of programs that have the largest effects on improving the economic well-being of those served. Although many individuals participate in multiple income support programs, there is little research examining outcomes. The unique administrative data here will allow the author to examine these realities with a higher degree of accuracy over time than has been the case with survey data.

This research explores how worker-led lawsuits under California’s Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA, impact firm size, survival, relocation decision, employment, and wages. The author will rely on two main data sources. First, she will leverage publicly available administrative data on PAGA claims and settlements from California’s Department of Industrial Relations. While PAGA claims data are publicly available online through PAGA Case Search tool, they have yet to be compiled and published in a way that facilitates research. Compilation, cleaning, and creation of this dataset to be made publicly available is an important contribution of this project. It is also critical to understand whether the Private Attorneys General Act is an effective tool for supporting worker rights.   

This project will use administrative tax data to better understand the distributional consequences of the tax subsidy for private equity. The study includes three analyses: First, the co-authors will quantify the preferential tax treatment of private equity profits in several stages and then calculate the change in tax liability if carried interest was taxed as ordinary income. Second, they will compare tax on private equity income and loss flows to the counterfactual tax liability to understand how private equity firms make strategic decisions to distribute profits to nontaxable investors. Third, they will examine the consequences of private equity acquisitions for workers across the income distribution by tracking the long-run labor market outcomes of workers employed at firms acquired by private equity.  

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, forgivable loans or grants to firms became a large-scale countercyclical income support strategy. This project studies the effect of such programs on short- and medium-run outcomes for U.S. firms and workers using $125 million in grants to 12,129 small businesses administered by the state of Minnesota via random lottery. The dataset will link the full set of program applicants and awardees to business and individual tax records and to credit histories. The authors will use the random assignment of grants to investigate the causal impact of loans on firm employment and payroll, borrowing and delinquency, and worker attachment to recipient firms. The Minnesota program closely mirrors the design of the federal Paycheck Protection Program but provides for a much cleaner research design due to the random lottery for recipients. Supporting small businesses during economic downturns is critical, but more evidence is needed to inform effective policy design of direct support to firms. This research promises to provide such evidence.

The COVID-19 recession was unique in that it was marked by a labor shortage in many U.S. sectors, leading policymakers to experiment with new tools to mitigate these losses. This project will study the impact of the child care spending provisions of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 on women's labor supply and child care utilization. The American Rescue Plan included $24 billion in child care stabilization grants, which were direct block grants to states to support child care services. The law also included the largest-ever expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which increased by 400 percent the child-care-related transfers paid to some U.S. households in 2022, relative to past years. Unlike other child-related transfers, only children ages 13 and under are eligible for the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit . Utilizing unique tax record data from the universe of all U.S. tax filers—which includes care providers, as well as CDCTC claims—the authors will use a regression discontinuity design in children's age to estimate the causal impact of this credit on household choices and how the impact varies with socioeconomic factors.

Governments around the world provided substantial support to individuals and firms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This project will study the effects of the stimulus payments provided to U.S. individuals through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES, Act. Comprising $2.2 trillion in spending, this bill included $300 billion in stimulus payments to individuals at the onset of the pandemic. Using data on the universe of U.S. federal tax returns for individuals and firms, the authors plan to estimate the effects of stimulus payments on labor market outcomes. The data allow the authors to link stimulus payments with labor market outcomes, including salaried employment, contract jobs, unemployment, and entrepreneurship. The authors plan to implement a regression kink design to identify the effects of stimulus payments on labor market outcomes. The project is poised to contribute to our understanding of the effects of fiscal stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market choices of individuals.