Rebecca Jack (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) will use data from the competitive 21st Community Learning Center Grants – federal funding targeted at providing afterschool care – to estimate how expanded afterschool care affects mothers’ employment and earnings. Co-funded with the Russell Sage Foundation. Additional support provided by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Archives: Grant
Information, Beliefs, and Filing-Method Choice of Low-Income Taxpayers
Francisca Alba (Michigan State University) will explore why many EITC recipients in Michigan rely on costly, low-quality tax filing methods over a free, state-provided tax preparation program and test whether providing information about the program can shift their behavior. Co-funded with the Russell Sage Foundation. Additional support provided by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Adapting to Policy Changes: Private Early Care and Education Providers’ Responses to Chicago’s Public Preschool Expansion and Illinois’ Smart Start Workforce Grants
Aida Pacheco-Applegate (University of Chicago) will study the effects of preschool expansion and wage grants on early care and education providers in Chicago to demonstrate how public investments affect provider stability, service distribution, and equitable access. Co-funded with the Russell Sage Foundation. Additional support provided by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Beyond Direct Discrimination
Darien Kearney (Howard University) will use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2005–2015) and structural modeling to examine how perceived racial discrimination affects labor market outcomes among Black Americans. Co-funded with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the Russell Sage Foundation. Additional support provided by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Quantifying the effects of energy transitions on the U.S. labor market and implications for the Inflation Reduction Act
Due to a lack of longitudinal, nationwide labor market data, evaluations of the impacts of energy communities remain unexplored. The authors propose a quasi-experimental approach using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau to evaluate labor market outcomes in energy communities as defined by the Inflation Reduction Act. The authors will use the definition of an energy community to define an area “treated” by the law and then estimate labor market outcomes in these treated areas versus untreated areas. Based on this treatment definition, they will use a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of the IRA tax credits to explore the heterogeneous impacts across worker demographic characteristics, geographic factors, and structural factors, such as local economies and energy mixes.
How Do Place-Based Policies Affect People? Lessons and Implications for the Inflation Reduction Act
This project will use newly linked administrative microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide the first comprehensive descriptive portrait of “energy communities,” evaluating whether the Inflation Reduction Act’s geographic targeting aligns with its stated equity goals. The authors will then examine historical patterns of firm entry and exit in these regions and track employment and earnings outcomes for affected workers. The analysis asks whether displaced fossil fuel workers or other local residents benefit when new firms enter—or whether these opportunities disproportionately go to in-migrants. These findings are poised to offer critical insights into the distributional impacts of place-based policy and establish an empirical foundation for evaluating the equity and effectiveness of clean energy investments.
The Economic Effects of Clean Energy Manufacturing Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act: Evidence from the Solar Supply Chain
This project will investigate how the Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit (45X MPTC) and the Advanced Energy Project Investment Tax Credit (48C ITC) affect manufacturing activity throughout the solar photovoltaic supply chain, with a focus on its impacts in the United States. The central research questions are: How do the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic manufacturing and content-based tax credits affect investment, production, and employment across different stages of the solar manufacturing supply chain? How do these effects propagate downstream to influence solar technology adoption and environmental outcomes? The author will do a reduced form analysis of manufacturing investment and output, develop a structural model of the global solar photovoltaic supply chain, and conduct simulations using the structural model. By focusing on the entire supply chain, from polysilicon and wafers to cells and modules, this research aims to provide the first comprehensive assessment of the Inflation Reduction Act’s economic and environmental implications in the solar industry.
IRA Subsides for EVs, Import Tariffs, and Domestic Industry
This study seeks to compare the Inflation Reduction Act and tariff approaches by quantifying how each policy affects the new vehicle market and domestic manufacturing activity. The authors will evaluate how these policies affect purchase decisions and welfare of different consumer groups (by income, geography, and other demographics), as well as the production and profits of different manufacturer groups (based in the United States versus abroad) and the incentives each policy creates to expand U.S. industrial capacity. The authors will use an existing model of the electric vehicle market to examine the impact of switching from IRA subsidies to tariffs on EV prices, the impact of switching from IRA subsidies to tariffs on short-run domestic production and profits, and the impact of IRA subsidies on long-run investments in capacity and production.
AI in telecommunications and game development: The role of worker voice in management strategy and job quality
AI and algorithms are being used in new workplace technologies to automate and augment production, service, and management tasks. Companies in the information and communications technology industry are at the forefront of both developing new AI-based tools and adopting them in their workplaces. This mixed-method study will examine how these companies in the telecommunications and video game development industries are applying AI and algorithm-based technologies in different service and technical occupations. These include call-center agents and technicians (telecoms) and quality-assurance workers and software engineers (game development). They will compare the role of management strategy, occupational characteristics, and collective worker voice through labor unions in these decisions, as well as their impacts on workers’ job quality. Findings will help to inform policies and labor union strategies to encourage productive and socially sustainable approaches to workplace AI adoption and deployment.
Competitive Implications of Generative AI Terms & Conditions: An Empirical Study
Firms in the generative AI ecosystem offer their products with strings attached: terms and conditions that purport to impose legal restrictions on user behavior. This project will study the terms and conditions of more than 100 genAI firms and would be the first large-scale effort to document this issue systematically. Research in other digital markets and exploratory research in the genAI space indicate that these terms could pose at least two significant competition problems. First, by effectively depriving users of the right to bring private antitrust claims against genAI firms, genAI terms and conditions could erode one of the three pillars of an effective antitrust enterprise. Second, genAI firms have begun to impose noncompete restrictions on users. These restrictions could raise entry barriers and lead to more highly concentrated markets—a recipe for less dynamism and dampened innovation. Yet policymakers and researchers currently know very little about how ubiquitous or restrictive these genAI terms actually are in practice. This research will offer data-driven analysis and responsive policy prescriptions for these nascent, critically important markets.