This project consists of an empirical analysis using a county-pair design to examine the relationship between minimum wages and the quality of services provided by low-wage workers by examining safety inspections and patient health outcomes in nursing homes following minimum wage reforms.

This research seeks to understand how institutional interventions affect the realization of labor standards within the rapidly growing in-home care industry. Specifically, how do labor unions, government-civil society collaborations, and industry standards boards affect employer compliance, workers’ ability to claim their rights, and resulting wages and job quality? Using targeted Facebook, Inc. advertising to conduct surveys in multiple languages, the project will include a comparative analysis of New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle—cities with more robust protections for in-home care workers.

As the population ages and the cost of nursing-home care soars, more attention in the paid leave debate is turning to the importance of eldercare. This project examines how family caregiving of older adults impacts productivity at work and whether historically marginalized subgroups of working caregivers face an increased and inequitable risk of work productivity loss. The author will use the National Study of Caregiving and the National Health and Aging Trends Study, and, using a work productivity instrument validated for employed family caregivers, will provide estimates of the prevalence and cost of absenteeism, presenteeism, and work productivity loss in working family caregivers, including sociodemographic breakdowns.

This project will use administrative data to explore the role of Temporary Disability Insurance policies in shaping long-term labor market outcomes, as well as the receipt of long-term Social Security Disability Insurance. Specifically, the researchers will look at the impact of Temporary Disability Insurance on long-run earnings, labor force participation, and employment stability for those with an employment-limiting disability, as well as whether this program impacts Social Security Disability Insurance claims. The project will assess whether there are groups of workers (by education, earnings, gender, and race) for whom Temporary Disability Insurance is particularly useful in improving labor market outcomes or reducing SSDI claims. Currently, five states provide state-run TDI programs—social insurance-style wage replacement for short-term disability. The project will exploit this state variation, using the SIPP Beta Gold longitudinal data. Research on the impacts of these programs is extremely thin, and this project represents an important step in filling this gap.

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.

This project will research how effective basic and universal labor standards are at reducing group inequality by looking at a major amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1966, which extended federal minimum wage coverage to several new industries. The expansion occurred at a time when the federal minimum wage was 40 percent higher in real terms than it is today. The newly covered industries were concentrated in services, retail, and agriculture, sectors with disproportionately high shares of women and black workers. The project proposes to take advantage of the scale of the reform and the racial and gender composition of treated industries to test the effects of high minimum wages and their ability to close the gender and racial wage gaps. This research promises to increase our understanding of the effects of introducing a high wage floor and whether universal federal labor standards can effectively reduce the racial and gender wage gaps.