This project will examine the housing consequences of Interstate 10 in New Orleans. Specifically, the author will examine whether the construction of Interstate 10 resulted in differential housing outcomes in Black neighborhoods, compared to White neighborhoods. The author has created historical interstate data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and additional census tract characteristics, including racial demographics, total housing units, owner-occupied housing units, and median home value. This study has the potential to shape the multidisciplinary literature examining the impact of highways, public railways, and other types of transportation infrastructure on neighborhoods.
Archives: Grant
COVID-19 Relief Funding and the Child Care Workforce
Policymakers are grappling with how to support the child care sector after the COVID-19 public health crisis. Problems with the child care sector were apparent well before the onset of the pandemic: Parents paid high care costs, care workers were underpaid and left the field in high numbers, child care programs experienced unsustainable operating costs and closed their doors, and child care quality suffered. Without access to safe and affordable care, parents work less and have less income, and businesses struggle to retain qualified workers. This project will study a new initiative to increase public funding for U.S. child care workers via a wage supplement program with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. In 2022, the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin substantially expanded the statewide REWARD program, which provides financial support to early childhood educators, and the City of Milwaukee Early Childhood Workforce Stipend Program. The expanded programs dramatically increased stipends available to eligible caregivers. The authors will examine the extent to which increased wage supplements keep qualified workers in the field and reduce turnover in the childcare workforce. Evidence from similar programs in other states finds a significant reduction in teacher turnover, indicating that wage subsidies could be effective. Given the dearth of research on the effectiveness of stipends, this research could provide more evidence to shape policy solutions.
Skill and spatial mismatch in the energy transition
This project seeks to answer the question of which labor market frictions prevent workers and communities from smoothly adjusting to local employment shocks and the extent to which investments in human capital address existing frictions. The author looks at this in the context of the transition to clean energy, focusing on the coal industry. She will merge worker-level administrative data with institution-level data on enrollment and completions from 2- and 4-year colleges to explore whether spatial proximity to postsecondary institutions serves to mollify longer-term earnings and employment outcomes.
Labor Market Collusion through Common Leadership
This project studies how firms collude in labor markets, studying an overlooked potential mechanism: common leadership, in which the same person holds high-level leadership positions in two competing firms. Common leadership is prohibited by antitrust law, but until the past few years, enforcement was nearly nonexistent. This study focuses on collusion in labor markets in the form of no-poach agreements—specifically, how entry into such agreements affects worker mobility and career trajectories. Preliminary results find entry into collusive agreements in the years following connection through common leadership. No-poach agreements are extremely difficult to study since they are secret in nature. The author will use the largest known case of labor market collusion to overcome this data challenge. In the late 2000s, more than 50 tech companies entered into no-poach agreements. She will use three primary sources of data: court documents, data on worker histories, and biographical data on company executives.
The Distributional Effects of Firm Productivity Changes: Evidence from U.S. Linked Worker-Owner Data
This project will estimate exactly which individuals benefit when firms become more productive and whether these are the same individuals who bear the costs when firms do poorly. The author will use novel linked worker-owner administrative data from the United States. Specifically, he will use data covering the universe of pass-through firms in the United States to identify each firm’s workers and owners, and measure their total compensation from the firm. He will link these data to quasi-experimental, firm-specific productivity shocks to estimate the distributional effects of productivity changes. This will allow for an understanding of how productivity shocks affect workers and owners in various ways.
Big Daycare: The Impact of Private Equity-Owned Child Care Businesses on the Market for Early Care and Education
This project aims to fill the gap on the impact that private-equity-owned child care businesses have on the structure and functioning of the early child care market. The author seeks to answer the following questions: How does private equity affect the market for early career and education? In particular, how different are private-equity-backed child care centers from other child care centers? How do centers change when taken over by a private equity firm? How does the entrance of a private-equity-backed center impact other private and public providers? This research is poised to fill a large void in the child care literature: the role of for-profit providers and, in particular, the effects of new entrants and private-equity-owned operations into child care markets.
Causes and Consequences of Incomplete Unemployment Insurance Take-Up
This research proposal seeks to answer three related questions regarding the barriers to accessing Unemployment Insurance benefits. First, what are the underlying causes of incomplete UI take-up for individual workers? Second, do the barriers to take-up disproportionately impact low-income, marginalized workers in a way that creates inequities in the UI program? Third, in what ways can outreach from workforce agencies boost UI take-up to better support workers and reduce inequities? To answer these questions, the author will utilize administrative data from the Washington State Employment Security Department. He will then field a survey of unemployed workers and combine findings with an analysis of administrative records. Together, this will inform the implementation of a field experiment, administered in partnership with the Employment Security Department, to explore how UI receipt can be increased, particularly for vulnerable populations.
Worker Led Lawsuits: The Effects of California’s Private Attorney Generals Act
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.
The Effect of Wealth on Descendants of the Enslaved
Due to federal American Indian policy, thousands of formerly enslaved people, or “freedmen,” and their descendants became landowners in present-day Oklahoma during the early 1900s. Over the following three decades, Oklahoma experienced an unexpected and unprecedented oil boom, from which a small fraction of these landholders profited. This research focuses on a specific subset of these landholders—Creek Freedmen—and estimates the causal effects of oil discoveries on their land on their socioeconomic outcomes and those of their descendants. In preliminary work, the author finds that oil discovery has effects in the very short term: Landholders who found oil at all appeared to be more geographically mobile, have higher-status occupations, and invest more in their children’s human capital. This research is poised to generate insight into how large exogenous influxes of resources into Black households may affect wealth and well-being in the near- and long-term. The focus on descendants of enslaved people links the historical work to contemporary discussions about reparations and racial wealth inequality.
The Effects of Participating in Multiple Safety Net Programs on Family Well-Being
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.