Pervasive earnings losses are a well-documented feature of job displacement, yet the understanding of the sources of these earnings losses is limited. The decline could be due to a lower wage at a new job, a lower likelihood of finding a new job, working fewer hours, or the loss of firm-specific rents. This project proposes to take advantage of employer-employee matched administrative data from Washington state’s unemployment insurance program to better understand the sources of earnings losses and to analyze the role of employer characteristics in job losses. Obtaining a better diagnosis of the root causes behind the long-term earnings decline can lead to better-designed policy responses.

This project will quantify the level of and inequality in employer-provided paid parental leave by fielding a survey of small and medium-sized employers in three relatively low-wage industries (including retail) in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The work is likely to make a significant contribution to our understanding of a currently hazy empirical picture of the social insurance system in the United States. Poor federal data collection on leave policy means that studies such as this one are a valuable addition. The authors will assess the availability, quality, and employee take-up of leave offered. One main advantage of funding this survey is that it will provide pre-treatment data collection for New York before the recently passed paid family leave law goes into effect in January, 2018. The investigators’ previous Rhode Island study is widely cited and useful to policymakers working on these issues, and we expect this to be similarly impactful.

The authors will construct estimates of how much parenthood contributes to the gender wage gap. Although it is well-known that the gendered returns to parenthood contribute to the gender wage gap, there are few estimates of what proportion of the gap we can attribute to different returns to parenthood for men and women. If successful, this research could provide a more complete analysis of the phenomena contributing to the gender wage gap, including returns to education. The project will provide an empirical foundation for policies that support working parents as a key mechanism for promoting gender equity. The findings will bolster the economic argument for many policies relevant to equitable growth, including child care and parental leave.

The authors will examine whether unemployment insurance benefit extensions improve job match quality. A longstanding question regarding unemployment insurance is whether recipients make use of funds to finance longer job searches, therefore finding better jobs. Most studies to date have examined wages and have found no effect, but if this project is able to find effects on match quality then it will make an important contribution. It could also be important to understanding the role that unemployment insurance plays in improving worker outcomes and overall macroeconomic performance. Unemployment insurance is typically understood by policymakers as a social insurance program. The idea that it might improve productivity by facilitating better match quality is poorly understood, and key to better understanding policy levers for macro performance.

This project offers a novel twist on intra-firm mobility and job-to-job transitions by using preferences to look at labor market decisions and not simply tax preferences. Using a combination of online lab experiments and employee-employer matched LEHD data, the research will test for individual social preferences over payoff distributions.

This research project uses qualitative data to explore the mechanisms that link the decline of employment options to the rise in drug use, the decline in labor force participation, and other negative socio-economic and behavioral consequences for males. Unlike many studies of industry decline which look at urban communities, this work focuses on the loss of natural resource employment in rural areas. Specifically, the researcher focuses on the lack of employment options and life outcomes on two Native American tribal reservations, The Yurok and Hoopa Valley Reservations, located in California’s northwest. A member of the Yurok tribe herself, the researcher’s data provides a unique contribution. We also see the research as having useful insights on the consequences of declining male labor force participation, particularly in non-urban settings. From a policy engagement perspective, the rich stories that are likely to come from this qualitative work will help provide the narrative and texture that is necessary for capturing policy attention.