This project will build on the relatively thin body of work on informal, home-based child care providers in the United States. It aims to better understand how that community can be supported in meeting societal priorities around increasing affordable access to high-quality early childhood care. Home-based care providers deliver essential care services but occupy a structurally challenging position. These providers are poorly compensated and face challenges when it comes to meeting licensing requirements or achieving high-quality ratings. This study will identify impediments to these child care providers’ abilities to provide high-quality, affordable child care that is accessible to the families that need it. The authors will take advantage of a collaboration with the Virginia Department of Education to conduct interviews with licensed and unlicensed providers in Virginia through participatory action research, a research design that helps create unsilencing opportunities for those who have been silenced. This is especially important since the voices of home-based providers are often not included in the conversation about quality care.
Archives: Grant
Welfare Effects of Common Ownership
The common ownership hypothesis suggests that when large investors own shares in more than one firm within the same industry, those firms may have reduced incentives to compete. Firms can soften competition by producing fewer units, raising prices, reducing investment, innovating less, or limiting entry into new markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have all acknowledged concerns about the anticompetitive effects of common ownership and have relied on the theory and evidence of common ownership in major merger cases. This is a series of four separate projects by the four researchers. The first project seeks to show a link between executive compensation and measures of common ownership, providing a “mechanism” for how common ownership might affect competition and consumption. The second focuses on innovation, building on recent work and seeking to incorporate effects of common ownership, which are predicted to vary according to technological and product-market relationships. The third project is largely theoretical and will study the size and magnitude of the relationship between common ownership and innovation and the extent to which that varies across the universe of publicly listed U.S. corporations. Finally, the fourth project is a data collection effort, expanding the universe of high-quality common ownership data outside of the United States.
Which Policies are Effective at Reducing Racial Differences in the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty?
Prior research suggests that the pathways through which childhood poverty shapes poverty in adulthood include physical and mental well-being, educational attainment, employment, and family structure. Income support policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, are all known to reduce levels of child poverty and have the potential to reduce racial disparities in child poverty. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1967–2018, the researchers plan to investigate how the introduction of and/or policy changes to the EITC, SNAP, and TANF programs are effective at reducing racial differences in the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The authors will disaggregate their findings by race and use individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to identify children in poverty who were exposed to these programs and will follow them through early adulthood, assessing their poverty status.
Do Mortgage Lenders Compete Locally? Implications for Credit Access
Jorring and Buchak propose to study the impact of local concentration of mortgage lenders on household credit access and homeownership. Homeownership is the primary channel through which most U.S. households build wealth. Existing literature finds little to no relationship between local lender concentration and mortgage interest rates. Therefore, federal regulators regard mortgage markets as national and view their local concentration as irrelevant to financial regulation and monetary policy. The two researchers argue that this view is incomplete, showing that although local concentration has no influence on interest rates, it strongly affects lending standards and upfront fees. In more concentrated areas, preliminary results show that lenders charge higher fees, mortgage application rejection rates are higher, and the pool of originated mortgages is less risky in terms of both credit scores and default. This may be particularly true for low-income, female, and applicants of color, suggesting that local lender concentration is particularly important when it comes to questions of credit access for traditionally underserved borrowers. Jorring and Buchak plan to combine public data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which covers the near universe of U.S. mortgage applications, as well as data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on single-family loan origination and performance, with private data to explore the effects of local concentration in mortgage lending.
Finding Work with Carceral Credentials: Peril and Paradox
Surveillance is increasing in almost all areas of U.S. society. In formerly incarcerated Black men’s lives, surveillance represents a pervasive threat that operates through both techniques and technologies. Research shows that fear of surveillance leads formerly incarcerated Black men to avoid vital economic institutions. Prior research also finds that a criminal record diminishes Black men’s employment prospects. This research will extend the literature by examining how a criminal record operates as a credential that enables work but limits upward mobility by pulling ex-offenders into community-based, low-quality crime prevention jobs and also constrains work through surveillance practices that reinforce the stigma of the criminal record. This qualitative work will utilize archival, interview, and ethnographic methods and focus on Black men in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. This research seeks to demonstrate the often-invisible ways that surveillance mechanisms reproduce racial inequalities, advancing our theoretical understanding of how surveillance mediates access to socioeconomic resources, and providing insight into substantive interventions.
Unequal Protections: Regional Disparities in Labor Standards Policies, Enforcement, and Violations
Fine, Galvin, Round, and Shepherd seek to understand the relationship between region, race, state enforcement capacities, and minimum wage violations in the United States, and what the mechanisms are by which weaker state enforcement capacities might produce a higher incidence of minimum wage violations. This exploratory, theory-building project involves three major empirical components. First, the four researchers will improve upon, merge, and expand separate datasets they previously compiled on subnational labor standards enforcement capacity to create a novel and flexible database of all the enforcement capacities of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data and coding rules will be made fully transparent to enable future researchers to use whichever combination of codes best suits their particular research questions. Second, the researchers will use CPS-MORG data to estimate the minimum wage violation rate in every state and region of the United States. Third, they will use exploratory, in-depth comparative case studies to identify and theorize a repertoire of mechanisms linking the legacy of slavery and the post-slavery racialized economy in the South to weak state enforcement capacity and minimum wage violations in order to understand the role of federalism in creating and maintaining Black-White racial disparities.
Green Jobs or Lost Jobs? The Distributional Implications for US Workers in a Low Carbon Economy
Confronting climate change will require the United States to dramatically reshape large portions of its economy. Carbon-intensive sectors in manufacturing and mining, which have long been bastions for middle-class jobs in communities across the country, are expected to shrink. Fears among workers and the communities that rely on these jobs are not unjustified, given recent economic research on the effect of trade shocks and environmental regulations. Yet reductions in carbon-intensive industries are only one side of the coin in addressing climate change. While many industries may shrink, a dramatic investment in green and renewable industries may create new opportunities for workers throughout the country. There is almost no economic research, however, exploring whether and how green jobs will benefit workers and their communities. Leveraging job-posting data from Burning Glass Technologies, along with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, Curtis and Marinescu will estimate the long-run benefits that workers accrue when green technology investments in solar and wind are made in their communities, as well as which types of workers benefit and which do not. The three researchers also are planning to estimate the effect of having more green jobs on local economic outcomes, such as the employment rate, poverty rate, and average incomes.
Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets
This project seeks to determine the overall impact of Walmart supercenters on local employment and earnings, and more generally on the competitive structure of affected local labor markets. The research design exploits the fact that Walmart Inc. attempted to place a supercenter in 39 counties but was prevented from doing so as the result of local efforts. These counties are compared to those where a supercenter was opened. Data on employment and earnings is gathered from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and county-by-year labor force data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics, both from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary results show that the entry of Walmart supercenters caused significant reductions in aggregate local employment and earnings, with retail employment increasing immediately upon entry before largely reverting to pre-entry levels. This research will help us understand how large employers can exercise monopsony power locally in the market for less-skilled labor and what the consequences are for workers.
Carbon Pricing and Innovation in a World of Political Constraints
This project will convene economists, political scientists, energy scholars, and policy practitioners to synthesize collective expertise on the role of carbon pricing and innovation in climate policy. Participants will discuss how carbon pricing has been used around the world, its economic and political potential as a climate policy tool, and the importance of considering political economy in the design, implementation, and durability of climate policies.
COVID-19 and Paid Leave: Assessing the Impact of the FFCRA
Using monthly Current Population Survey data, this study will examine leave-taking behavior during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Specifically, the authors will investigate whether and how leave-taking was influenced by the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. The researchers will analyze the impact of FFCRA on several employment and leave-taking outcomes such as employment status, usual hours worked, and reasons for work absence (including child-care problems or one’s own illness). They will use these variables to measure leave-taking behavior, including total leave-taking and reasons for leave taking. These data allow them to explore how workers trade off the alternatives to leave-taking, including working while sick or separation from the labor force. Using a difference-in-difference empirical estimation strategy, the authors will compare leave taking in states that do or do not have state-based paid family and medical leave programs.