Building on recent work in labor economics focused on the role of firms, this research seeks to shed light on the importance of firms specifically in the careers of young workers. Using administrative matched employer-employee data, the researcher seeks to document facts regarding access to high-wage firms and movements between high- and low-wage firms over the span of a worker’s career. This has the potential to improve our understanding of cohort inequality as well as potential scarring effects of recessions.
Archives: Grant
Distributional consequences of changes in labor demand and amenities: Evidence from linked census data
This project will explore the distributional implications of fracking and mass transit expansions, two important recent developments in U.S. cities and regions. Using newly available, restricted access, longitudinal U.S. Census Bureau microdata, the researcher seeks to answer: If fracking or urban rail expansions have heterogenous effects? How much do local housing costs rise? And do fracking or rail expansions lead to displacement of original residents? Policymakers are searching for policies to encourage growth in American cities, and we see this project as providing insightful and generalizable findings in that area.
Understanding debt, inequality and consumption behavior: The U.S. in the 2000s
The level of private debt in the U.S. economy rose considerably during the 2000s. This research will investigate how much of that increase was due to the weak job growth of that decade. If the debt run-up was due to consumers’ borrowing to cover necessities after a job loss, the policy implications are quite different than if it were due to reckless consumer spending. This research will also look at how debt was distributed across the population by age, race, and income, and how that distribution changed during the 2000s. A better understanding of the causes of increased debt and knowing who increased their debt load the most will help us better understand the importance of savings and the relationship between consumer demand and economic growth.
Big data and the labor market: A text-based analysis of job vacancies and skill requirements
The polarization of the labor market into high- and low-skill jobs is one of the most popular explanations for the increase in income inequality. This project will explore how much skill polarization actually happened by creating a novel new dataset of job openings by skill level spanning multiple decades. The researchers will create these data by mining the text of job advertisements in newspapers and online job sites. The new data will help researchers better understand the change in skill requirements for jobs over the long run, as well as changes during recoveries and economic expansions. This research will improve our understanding of how inequalities in human capital contribute to broader economic inequality.
School-to-work transitions and wage outcomes of Texas populations from colonias and model subdivisions
This project will study the school-to-work transitions and subsequent earnings of Texas high school students. This project will focus on some of Texas’ most socially and economically excluded populations—those living in substandard housing settlements found in unincorporated areas outside Texas border cities. This research will shed light on the efficacy of potential education and workforce interventions to assist impoverished student populations.
Inheriting inequality: Wealth transfers and racial wealth gaps
Over the past three decades, both wealth inequality and the racial wealth gap have increased significantly. Research shows that inheritances, bequests, and intrafamily transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators, including education, income, and household structure. This project will examine the significance of intergenerational transfers on wealth inequality overall, and the racial wealth gap specifically, to identify policies that address growing inequality throughout the wealth distribution.
What can 5 million households tell us about the impact of credit access on job finding and wage inequality?
This project will bring together macroeconomic theory and large-scale microeconomic datasets to advance modern economics and inform monetary and public policy. Using employment records merged to credit reports, the authors will estimate the impact of credit access on the job-finding rates and re-employment earnings of displaced workers. Past research has examined the borrowing and credit use of the unemployed, and this study builds on that line of work to examine the direct impact of credit on future outcomes. In preliminary results, the authors find that credit access increases the time before re-employment, but also increases average salary once a new job is found. This work will develop a search model capable of explaining these new findings.
The military and incarceration: Hidden mechanisms of racial inequality in the U.S. labor market, 1980-2010
This project will study the rise of mass incarceration in relation to military downsizing. The author will determine whether the military-penal crossover, occurring in the 1990s and continuing through the present, has reinforced racial inequality in the labor market, with blacks experiencing more incarceration while decreasingly enlisting in the military.
Household debt, municipal debt and aggregate demand
The researchers will use an historical accounting methodology, established in earlier work, to examine the extent to which changes in household leverage have contributed to shifts in aggregate demand over the past 80 years. They will expand this accounting framework to analyze municipal debt—both an important asset in financial markets and a critical source of finance for local public goods. The results and underlying data will likely provide new evidence on how debt affects the macroeconomy and will have implications for monetary policy as well as policy responses to levels of private and public leverage.
College and intergenerational mobility: New evidence from administrative data
Many argue that higher education is one of the best ways to increase intergenerationalmobility. Students from lower-income backgrounds can move up the income ladder if they attend the right college or university. But how equal is access to those schools? If qualified low-income students aren’t attending the schools that provide the most opportunity, then the college attendance process may be retarding upward economic mobility. This research project will look at the role of colleges and universities in transmitting income inequality into the next generation. Using gold-standard restricted-access tax data, the author will identify where students from across the income distribution attend college, and which colleges are improving the economic standing of students up and down the income ladder.