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.
Archives: Grant
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.
The Highway to Displacement: Interstate 10 and Black Communities in New Orleans
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.
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.
The Distributional Consequences of Private Equity
This project will use administrative tax data to better understand the distributional consequences of the tax subsidy for private equity. The study includes three analyses: First, the co-authors will quantify the preferential tax treatment of private equity profits in several stages and then calculate the change in tax liability if carried interest was taxed as ordinary income. Second, they will compare tax on private equity income and loss flows to the counterfactual tax liability to understand how private equity firms make strategic decisions to distribute profits to nontaxable investors. Third, they will examine the consequences of private equity acquisitions for workers across the income distribution by tracking the long-run labor market outcomes of workers employed at firms acquired by private equity.
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.
Employment Effects of the Employee Retention Tax Credit
In contrast to the wide literature on the effects of permanent business wage subsidies on employment and wages, which generally finds small effects, less research has examined the effects of temporary wage subsidies on labor markets. In response to the economic shock induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. federal government created the Employee Retention Tax Credit, or ERTC, to aid businesses adversely affected by the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. The tax credit provided businesses a maximum of $26,000 per worker over the 2020–2021 period, depending on firm size and the fiscal quarters in which the worker was furloughed vs. employed. Using matched employer-employee data from a payroll processing company covering one-twelfth of the U.S. private-sector workforce, the author will study the effects of the Employee Retention Tax Credit on employment, payroll, and small business reopening. We know relatively little about how to efficiently and effectively help firms during recessions. This research can inform policy design intended to preserve job matches, both to protect workers from the consequences of a recession and to lead to a strong economic recovery.
Cash Grants to Firms as Counter-Cyclical Policy: Evidence from $125 Million in Lottery Awards
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, forgivable loans or grants to firms became a large-scale countercyclical income support strategy. This project studies the effect of such programs on short- and medium-run outcomes for U.S. firms and workers using $125 million in grants to 12,129 small businesses administered by the state of Minnesota via random lottery. The dataset will link the full set of program applicants and awardees to business and individual tax records and to credit histories. The authors will use the random assignment of grants to investigate the causal impact of loans on firm employment and payroll, borrowing and delinquency, and worker attachment to recipient firms. The Minnesota program closely mirrors the design of the federal Paycheck Protection Program but provides for a much cleaner research design due to the random lottery for recipients. Supporting small businesses during economic downturns is critical, but more evidence is needed to inform effective policy design of direct support to firms. This research promises to provide such evidence.