Archives: Grant

Regulating the care boom: Labor standards and in-home care work in three U.S. cities

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.

Criminal record information and access to opportunity: Using the 2010 CORI reform as a natural experiment

Russell will explore whether the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, reform affected the likelihood that ex-offenders moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This work sits at the intersection of two important policy areas—criminal justice reform and neighborhood access/mobility—and brings a racial lens to the question. It also seeks to understand whether the reform promotes statistical racial discrimination in housing, as some research has suggested “Ban the Box” laws unintentionally have.

Examining the relationship between caregiving and work productivity loss among employed family caregivers of older adults

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.

The effects of employment incentives and cash transfers on parent and child outcomes: Evidence from the long-run effects of welfare reform experiments

This project seeks to extend the evidence on welfare policies by examining the long-run effects of a high-impact set of randomized experiments conducted by the nonprofit organization MDRC in the late 1980s and 1990s involving more than 100,000 welfare recipients. This is the first study of its kind to look at the very long-term effects of welfare reform experiments on adult outcomes. In each study, welfare recipients were randomly assigned to either a control, Aid to Families with Dependent Children-like program, or to interventions involving different combinations of job training, job search assistance, financial incentives to work, childcare subsidies, time limits, and/or sanctions. Merging data from these experiments with administrative tax data and other data held at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hoynes will study the long-run impacts of welfare policies on many important outcomes, including earnings and employment, fertility, marriage, mortality, and program participation for adult welfare recipients and, importantly, their children.

Evaluating the Philadelphia Fair Workweek Standard to identify the consequences of scheduling regulation on workers and families

This research will assess before and after data in Philadelphia across industries that are and are not subject to the recent scheduling regulation in order to investigate the effectiveness of the policy, including unintentional consequences such as a reduction in the total number of hours offered to an employee. Using a daily diary study conducted via cellphone text message in English and Spanish, the project will survey 1,000 Philadelphia workers in low-wage service occupations who have a young child (ages 2 to 7). It will compare voluntary and involuntary schedule changes by using daily diaries to assess changes in hours and schedules in order to discern not only the frequency and distribution of unpredictability, but also its effect on low-wage parents and children. The results of this study will provide unique, causal information on the potential effects of new scheduling laws on both parents and children.

Stratification, Stress-Related Morbidity, and Labor Supply at Older Ages

This research brings together social psychology, epidemiology, and stratification economics using the Health and Retirement Study’s Psychosocial Leave-Behind Questionnaire and Enhanced Face-to-Face Interviews (2006-2012) to investigate whether Blacks’ higher rates of both hypertension and inflammation (as measured by elevated levels of C-reactive protein) can be explained through their higher exposure to psychosocial and economic liabilities, and their limited access to economic resources. Further, this research explores whether this heightened exposure to hypertension and inflammation increases Blacks’ likelihood of early labor force exit (leaving the labor force before 62).

The long-run impact of Temporary Disability Insurance on SSDI claims, earnings stability, and labor force participation

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.

Using linked Census data to examine occupation mobility in the United States

Recent research by Raj Chetty and other economists using tax return data has allowed for a deeper understanding of the levels and trends of economic mobility in the United States, but there hasn’t been equivalent data for the analysis of social mobility. This study will develop a new longitudinally linked U.S. Census American Community Survey dataset that will allow for parallel analyses of occupational mobility. This will be an important complement to the recent work on economic mobility that will allow for a richer understanding of what mobility actually looks and feels like for Americans. An analysis of occupational mobility in addition to economic mobility will allow for an analysis of whether individuals trade higher earnings for other occupational traits such as prestige, creating a more nuanced understanding of what opportunity looks like. In addition, the project will advance the literature by decomposing intergenerational occupational mobility by race, migration status, family structure, and type of occupation. This work is part of a larger database creation effort at the U.S. Census Bureau, the American Opportunity Study, which will create a panel that will represent the full U.S. population over the past 70 years, increasing the ability of researchers to use linked census data to study many demographic and economic questions in the later half of the 20th century.

Using IRS tax data to measure the long-term effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act

This project will use IRS tax records to study the effects of California’s 2004 paid family leave insurance on labor market and family formation outcomes for both men and women. Byker and Bailey’s research has two significant advantages over the existing literature on paid parental leave in the United States. First, because they are using administrative data, they have an extremely large sample size, which will allow for potentially stronger conclusions than previous studies to date. The large sample size also allows for the study of heterogeneous effects, which has previously been difficult due to data limitations. Second, the long-term longitudinal nature of their panel allows for the first-ever study of long-term policy effects on employment, earnings, fertility, family formation, and other important impacts. This research comes at a time when many states are actively debating public paid family leave policies, and a national-level conversation is ongoing.