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Four Decades Of Declining Federal Leadership In The Federal-State Unemployment Insurance Program, Stephen A. Wandner Oct 2019

Four Decades Of Declining Federal Leadership In The Federal-State Unemployment Insurance Program, Stephen A. Wandner

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The unemployment insurance (UI) program was established in 1935. Unlike other social insurance programs created by the Social Security Act, it was established as a federal-state program. The federal government initially acted as a strong partner working with state agencies that operate the UI program. Over the past four decades, however, the federal role in the UI program has declined because of reductions in federal resources dedicated to the program and weakening policy leadership and programmatic support. As a result, states operate increasingly divergent UI programs, with many programs providing limited access to the program for experienced unemployed workers who …


Immigrants And The U.S. Wage Distribution, Vasil I. Yasenov Oct 2019

Immigrants And The U.S. Wage Distribution, Vasil I. Yasenov

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

A large body of literature estimates the relative wage impacts of immigration on low- and high-skill natives, but it is unclear how these effects map onto changes of the wage distribution. I document the movement of foreign-born workers in the U.S. wage distribution, showing that, since 1980, they have become increasingly overrepresented in the bottom. Downgrading of education and experience obtained abroad partially drives this pattern. I then undertake two empirical approaches to deepen our understanding of the way foreign-born workers shape the wage structure. First, I estimate a standard theoretical model featuring constant elasticity of substitution technology and skill …


Bias And Productivity In Humans And Machines, Bo Cowgill Aug 2019

Bias And Productivity In Humans And Machines, Bo Cowgill

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Where should better learning technology (such as machine learning or AI) improve decisions? I develop a model of decision-making in which better learning technology is complementary with experimentation. Noisy, inconsistent decision-making introduces quasi-experimental variation into training datasets, which complements learning. The model makes heterogeneous predictions about when machine learning algorithms can improve human biases. These algorithms can remove human biases exhibited in historical training data, but only if the human training decisions are sufficiently noisy; otherwise, the algorithms will codify or exacerbate existing biases. Algorithms need only a small amount of noise to correct biases that cause large productivity distortions. …


Computerization Of White Collar Jobs, Marcus O. Dillender, Eliza C. Forsythe Aug 2019

Computerization Of White Collar Jobs, Marcus O. Dillender, Eliza C. Forsythe

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We investigate the impact of computerization of white-collar jobs on wages and employment. Using online job postings from 2007 and 2010-2016 for office and administrative support (OAS) jobs, we show that when firms adopt new software at the job-title level they increase the skills required of job applicants. Furthermore, firms change the task content of such jobs, broadening them to include tasks associated with higher-skill office functions. We aggregate these patterns to the local labor-market level, instrumenting for technology adoption with national measures. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in OAS technology usages reduces employment in OAS occupations …


Does The Healthcare Educational Market Respond To Short-Run Local Demand?, Marcus O. Dillender, Andrew Friedson, Cong Gian, Kosali Simon Aug 2019

Does The Healthcare Educational Market Respond To Short-Run Local Demand?, Marcus O. Dillender, Andrew Friedson, Cong Gian, Kosali Simon

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased demand for healthcare across the U.S., but it is unclear if or how the supply side has responded to meet this demand. In this paper, we take advantage of plausibly exogenous geographical heterogeneity in the ACA in order to examine the response of the healthcare education sector to increased demand for healthcare services. We look across educational fields, types of degrees, and types of institutions; we pay particular attention to settings where our conceptual model predicts heightened responses. We find no statistically significant evidence of increases in graduates and can rule …


Should Place-Based Jobs Policies Be Used To Help Distressed Communities?, Timothy J. Bartik Aug 2019

Should Place-Based Jobs Policies Be Used To Help Distressed Communities?, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Should policymakers seek to increase jobs in particular local labor markets? Yes, but only if these policies are well targeted and designed. Encouraging job growth in distressed places can cause persistent gains in employment-to-population ratios. But our current place-based jobs policies, under which state and local governments provide long-term tax incentives to megacorporations, are poorly targeted and designed. Such incentives are as large in nondistressed areas as in distressed areas, and they are excessively costly. What reforms are needed? First, job growth policies should target distressed areas. Second, tax incentives should be focused on high-multiplier businesses, such as high-tech firms. …


Do Rent Increases Reduce The Housing Supply Under Rent Control? Evidence From Evictions In San Francisco, Brian J. Asquith Aug 2019

Do Rent Increases Reduce The Housing Supply Under Rent Control? Evidence From Evictions In San Francisco, Brian J. Asquith

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Rent control balances strong tenant protections with supply-side incentives for landlords. However, cities with rent control are also some of the United States' most unaffordable, prompting questions about how well these incentives are working. I examine how controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to price increases using a well-identified hyperlocal demand shock the privately operated commuter shuttle systems in San Francisco. Controlled landlords increased market withdrawal filings and became less likely to create vacancies via evictions in response to a shuttle stop placement. Policies raising barriers to market withdrawals prompted controlled landlords to respond my increasing their at-fault …


The Effect Of New Market-Rate Housing Construction On The Low-Income Housing Market, Evan Mast Jul 2019

The Effect Of New Market-Rate Housing Construction On The Low-Income Housing Market, Evan Mast

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Increasing supply is frequently proposed as a solution to rising housing costs. However, there is little evidence on how new market-rate construction—which is typically expensive—affects the market for lower quality housing in the short run. I begin by using address history data to identify 52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, their previous address, the current residents of those addresses, and so on. This sequence quickly adds lower-income neighborhoods, suggesting that strong migratory connections link the low-income market to new construction. Next, I combine the address histories with a simulation model to estimate that building 100 new market-rate …


Search And Multiple Jobholding, Etienne Lalé Jun 2019

Search And Multiple Jobholding, Etienne Lalé

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

A search-theoretic model of the labor market with idiosyncratic fluctuations in hours worked, search both off- and on-the-job, and multiple jobholding is developed. Taking on a second job entails a commitment to hold onto the primary employer, enabling the worker to use the primary job as her outside option to bargain with the secondary employer. The model performs well at explaining multiple jobholding inflows and outflows, and it is informative for understanding the secular decline in multiple jobholding. While some worry that this decline heralds a less-flexible labor market, the model reveals that it has contributed to reducing search frictions.


The Effect Of Job Referrals On Labor Market Outcomes In Brazil, Christopher J. O'Leary, Túlio Cravo, Ana Cristina Sierra, Leandro Justino Veloso May 2019

The Effect Of Job Referrals On Labor Market Outcomes In Brazil, Christopher J. O'Leary, Túlio Cravo, Ana Cristina Sierra, Leandro Justino Veloso

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper is the first to use program administrative data from Brazil’s National Employment System (SINE) to assess the impact of SINE job interview referrals on labor market outcomes. Data for a five-year period (2012–2016) are used to evaluate the impact of SINE on employment probability, wage rates, time until reemployment, and job tenure. Difference-in-differences estimates suggest that a SINE job interview referral increases the probability of finding a job within three months of the referral and reduces the number of months to find reemployment, the average job tenure of the next job, and the reemployment wage. Subgroup analysis suggests …


Longer-Run Effects Of Antipoverty Policies On Disadvantaged Neighborhoods, David Neumark, Brian J. Asquith, Brittany Bass May 2019

Longer-Run Effects Of Antipoverty Policies On Disadvantaged Neighborhoods, David Neumark, Brian J. Asquith, Brittany Bass

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We estimate the longer-run effects of minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare on key economic indicators of economic self-sufficiency in disadvantaged neighborhoods. We find that the longer-run effects of the EITC are to increase employment and to reduce poverty and public assistance. We also find some evidence that higher welfare benefits had longer-run adverse effects, and quite robust evidence that tighter welfare time limits reduce poverty and public assistance in the longer run. The evidence on the long-run effects of the minimum wage on poverty and public assistance is not robust, with some evidence pointing to reductions …


Local Job Multipliers In The United States: Variation With Local Characteristics And With High-Tech Shocks, Timothy J. Bartik, Nathan Sotherland Apr 2019

Local Job Multipliers In The United States: Variation With Local Characteristics And With High-Tech Shocks, Timothy J. Bartik, Nathan Sotherland

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper provides new estimates of local job multipliers, the ratio of total jobs generated to some initial number of jobs created from a demand shock. Multipliers greatly affect benefits versus costs of local job-creation policies. These new estimates rely on improved methodology and data. The methodology better captures dynamic effects of demand shocks, specifies the model so that demand shocks are more comparable, and is more general in the types of demand shocks that are considered. The data has more industry detail than that used in previous studies. The local job multipliers estimated tend to be about one-quarter lower …


Medical Innovation, Education, And Labor Market Outcomes Of Cancer Patients, Sung-Hee Jeon, R. Vincent Pohl Mar 2019

Medical Innovation, Education, And Labor Market Outcomes Of Cancer Patients, Sung-Hee Jeon, R. Vincent Pohl

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Innovations in cancer treatment have lowered mortality, but little is known about their economic benefits. We assess the effect of two decades of improvements in cancer treatment options on the labor market outcomes of breast and prostate cancer patients. In addition, we compare this effect across cancer patients with different levels of educational attainment. We estimate the effect of medical innovation on cancer patients’ labor market outcomes employing tax return and cancer registry data from Canada and measuring medical innovation by using the number of approved drugs and a quality-adjusted patent index. While cancer patients are less likely to work …


[Job] Locked And [Un]Loaded: The Effect Of The Affordable Care Act Dependency Mandate On Reenlistment In The U.S. Army, Michael S. Kofoed, Wyatt J. Frasier Feb 2019

[Job] Locked And [Un]Loaded: The Effect Of The Affordable Care Act Dependency Mandate On Reenlistment In The U.S. Army, Michael S. Kofoed, Wyatt J. Frasier

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

One concern with employer-based health insurance is job lock or the inability for employees to leave their current employment for better opportunities for fear of losing benefits. We use the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s dependency mandate as a natural experiment. Data from the United States Army overcome some limitations in previous studies including the ability to examine workers with fixed contract expiration dates, uniform pay, and health coverage. We find that the ACA decreased reenlistment rates by 3.13 percent for enlisted soldiers aged 23–25. We also find that younger veterans who leave the army are more likely to …


Payroll, Revenue, And Labor Demand Effects Of The Minimum Wage, Ekaterina (Roshchina) Jardim, Emma Van Inwegen Feb 2019

Payroll, Revenue, And Labor Demand Effects Of The Minimum Wage, Ekaterina (Roshchina) Jardim, Emma Van Inwegen

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We study the impact of the minimum wage hike in Seattle from $9.47 to $13 on wagebill, labor demand, and firm revenue using administrative data from the state of Washington. We show that the minimum wage affected businesses both at the intensive and extensive margins. At the intensive margin, businesses increased their labor costs and adjusted to the minimum wage by mildly reducing demand for low-wage jobs, but they largely did not pass the increase in labor costs to prices. At the extensive margin, the minimum wage led to higher rates of business exit and shifted the composition of entering …


Do Snap Work Requirements Work?, Timothy F. Harris Feb 2019

Do Snap Work Requirements Work?, Timothy F. Harris

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act waived Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements nationally in 2010 and broadened the eligibility for receiving waivers in subsequent years for Able-Bodied Adults without Dependents (ABAWD). From 2011 to 2016, many states voluntarily imposed work requirements, while other areas became ineligible for waivers because of improved economic conditions. Did the work requirements increase employment as intended, or did the policy merely remove food assistance for ABAWD who—despite an improving economy—still could not find employment? Using data from the American Community Survey from 2010 to 2016, I analyze the influence of work requirements on …


Climate Change And Occupational Health: Are There Limits To Our Ability To Adapt?, Marcus O. Dillender Feb 2019

Climate Change And Occupational Health: Are There Limits To Our Ability To Adapt?, Marcus O. Dillender

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This study considers the relationship between temperature and occupational health. The results indicate that both high and low temperatures increase injury rates and that high temperatures have more severe adverse effects in warmer climates, which suggests that avoiding the adverse effects of high temperatures may be easier for workers when hot days are rarer. While research on the effect of temperature on mortality finds substantial capacity for adaption with current technology, the results presented here suggest that outdoor workers face challenges in adapting to high temperatures.


An Apple A Day? Adult Food Stamp Eligibility And Health Care Utilization Among Immigrants, Chloe N. East, Andrew I. Friedson Jan 2019

An Apple A Day? Adult Food Stamp Eligibility And Health Care Utilization Among Immigrants, Chloe N. East, Andrew I. Friedson

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this study, we document the effect of food stamp access on adult health care utilization. While the Food Stamp Program provides one of the largest safety nets in the United States today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental analysis. To circumvent this, we use variation in documented immigrants’ eligibility for food stamps across states and over time due to welfare reform in 1996. Our estimates indicate that access to food stamps reduced physician visits. Additionally, we find that for single women, food stamps increased the affordability of specialty …


Unobserved Heterogeneity And Labor Market Discrimination, Miguel Sarzosa Nov 2018

Unobserved Heterogeneity And Labor Market Discrimination, Miguel Sarzosa

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Sexual minorities have historically been subject to many kinds of discrimination. Prejudicial treatment in the labor market could arguably be one of them. Despite that, economic literature has remained mostly silent on the topic. This paper fills that void by leveraging on a novel longitudinal data set that collects detailed information on sexual orientation. I develop an empirical strategy that exploits the fact that sexuality is not a dichotomous trait but rather a wide assortment of sexual preferences. I use empirical models that rely on the identification of unobserved heterogeneity, in the forms of skills and sexual orientation, to allow …


Labor Market Effects Of U.S. Sick Pay Mandates, Stefan Pichler, Nicolas R. Ziebarth Sep 2018

Labor Market Effects Of U.S. Sick Pay Mandates, Stefan Pichler, Nicolas R. Ziebarth

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper exploits temporal and spatial variation in the implementation of nine-city- and four state-level U.S. sick pay mandates to assess their labor market consequences. We use the synthetic control group method and traditional difference-in-differences models along with the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages to estimate the causal effects of mandated sick pay on employment and wages. We do not find much evidence that employment or wages were significantly affected by the mandates that typically allow employees to earn one hour of paid sick leave per work week, up to seven days per year. Employment decreases of 2 percent …


The Occupational Structures Of Low- And High-Wage Service Sector Establishments, Eliza C. Forsythe Aug 2018

The Occupational Structures Of Low- And High-Wage Service Sector Establishments, Eliza C. Forsythe

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The occupational structure of an establishment provides a description of its production process by detailing the distribution and relative intensity of tasks performed. In this paper, I investigate whether there are substantive differences in the occupational structures of low- and high-wage service sector establishments. I show that low-wage establishments organize production to use less labor in professional occupations compared to high-wage establishments operating in the same local-labor market and industry. In addition, low-wage establishments employ fewer individuals in information technology occupations, employ fewer managers, and have substantially wider supervisory spans of control. These results indicate that, despite operating in the …


Striking A Balance: A National Assessment Of Economic Development Incentives, Mary Donegan, T. William Lester, Nichola Lowe Aug 2018

Striking A Balance: A National Assessment Of Economic Development Incentives, Mary Donegan, T. William Lester, Nichola Lowe

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The use of incentive packages has intensified as local governments compete for new plants and corporate relocations, and as private firms increasingly demand a deal. While incentives promise jobs and tax revenue, scholars and practitioners criticize their high cost and limited accountability. Through a comparison of matched establishments, this paper explores how governmental incentive-granting strategy impacts incentive performance. We examine the overall impact of incentives and whether incentives granted to smaller firms perform better. Using economic development budget data, we also assess the state’s overall approach to economic development to determine which strategies are prioritized through funding. By showing that …


"But For" Percentages For Economic Development Incentives: What Percentage Estimates Are Plausible Based On The Research Literature?, Timothy J. Bartik Jul 2018

"But For" Percentages For Economic Development Incentives: What Percentage Estimates Are Plausible Based On The Research Literature?, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper reviews the research literature in the United States on effects of state and local “economic development incentives.” Such incentives are tax breaks or grants, provided by state or local governments to individual firms, that are intended to affect firms’ decisions about business location, expansion, or job retention. Incentives’ benefits versus costs depend greatly on what percentage of incented firms would not have made a particular location/expansion/retention decision “but for” the incentive. Based on a review of 34 estimates of “but for” percentages, from 30 different studies, this paper concludes that typical incentives probably tip somewhere between 2 percent …


Understanding The Decline Of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman Jun 2018

Understanding The Decline Of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

U.S. manufacturing experienced a precipitous and historically unprecedented decline in employment in the 2000s. Many economists and other analysts—pointing to decades of statistics showing that manufacturing real (inflation-adjusted) output growth has largely kept pace with private sector real output growth, that productivity growth has been much higher, and that the sector’s share of aggregate employment has been declining—argue that manufacturing’s job losses are largely the result of productivity growth (assumed to reflect automation) and are part of a long-term trend. Since the 1980s, however, the apparently robust growth in manufacturing real output and productivity have been driven by a relatively …


Health Shocks, Human Capital, And Labor Market Outcomes, Francisco Parro, R. Vincent Pohl Jun 2018

Health Shocks, Human Capital, And Labor Market Outcomes, Francisco Parro, R. Vincent Pohl

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Health, human capital, and labor market outcomes are linked though complex connections that are not fully understood. We explore these links by estimating a flexible yet tractable dynamic model of human capital accumulation in the presence of health shocks using administrative data from Chile. We find that (i) human capital mitigates the negative labor market effects of health events, (ii) these alleviating effects operate through channels involving occupational choice, the frequency of exposure to health events, and access to health care, and (iii) the effect of health shocks on labor market outcomes is heterogeneous across industries and types of diagnoses.


Why Leave Benefits On The Table? Evidence From Snap, Colin Gray May 2018

Why Leave Benefits On The Table? Evidence From Snap, Colin Gray

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Studies of take up in social insurance programs rarely distinguish between initial enrollment and retention of beneficiaries. This paper shows that retention plays a meaningful role in incomplete take up: despite knowledge of and eligibility for a near-cash public benefit, many participants exit the program rather than complete administrative requirements. Using administrative data on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for multiple states, I show that over half of entering households exit SNAP within one year of entry. Exits are concentrated in key reporting and recertification months, when participants must submit substantial paperwork in order to remain on the program. …


Pre-K In The Public Schools: Evidence From Within U.S. States, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein May 2018

Pre-K In The Public Schools: Evidence From Within U.S. States, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In the past 15 years, four-year-olds’ enrollment in state-funded pre-kindergarten in the United States has doubled, and advocates have pushed for further expansion. Although research has shown that pre-K programs can have important benefits, most existing studies have focused on small or state-specific programs that may not generalize to other areas or contexts. The uniqueness of our paper is its scope: our data cover the last two decades, span nearly all states, and allow for intrastate variation. For the average state program, we find no evidence of effects on the average student’s test scores, assignment to special education, or grade …


Careers Within Firms: Occupational Mobility Over The Life Cycle, Eliza C. Forsythe Apr 2018

Careers Within Firms: Occupational Mobility Over The Life Cycle, Eliza C. Forsythe

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

With falling labor market dynamism in the United States, opportunities within firms take on increasing importance in young workers’ career progression. Developing a variety of occupational ranking metrics, I show that occupational mobility within firms follows a standard life cycle pattern in which the frequency, distance, and wage return from mobility falls with age. However, when upward and downward mobility are considered separately, the average magnitude of directional mobility increases through middle age. I find that wage growth for young workers deteriorated substantially in the first decade of the 2000s, primarily driven by a reduction in wage growth within firms. …


Degrees Of Poverty: The Relationship Between Family Income Background And The Returns To Education, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein Mar 2018

Degrees Of Poverty: The Relationship Between Family Income Background And The Returns To Education, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Drawing on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we document a startling empirical pattern: the career earnings premium from a four-year college degree (relative to a high school diploma) for persons from low-income backgrounds is considerably less than it is for those from higher-income backgrounds. For individuals whose family income in high school was above 1.85 times the poverty level, we estimate that career earnings for bachelor’s graduates are 136 percent higher than earnings for those whose education stopped at high school. However, for individuals whose family income during high school was below 1.85 times the poverty level, the career …


Understanding The Effects Of Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants, Joan Monràs, Javier Vázquez-Grenno, Ferran Elias Feb 2018

Understanding The Effects Of Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants, Joan Monràs, Javier Vázquez-Grenno, Ferran Elias

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper investigates the consequences of the legalization of around 600,000 immigrants by the unexpectedly elected Spanish government of Zapatero following the terrorist attacks of March 2004 (Garcia-Montalvo, 2011). Using detailed data from payroll-tax revenues, we estimate that each newly legalized immigrant increased local payroll-tax revenues by 4,189 euros on average. This estimate is only 55 percent of what we would have expected from the size of the influx of newly documented immigrants, which suggests that newly legalized immigrants probably earned lower wages than other workers and maybe affected the labor-market outcomes of those other workers. We estimate that the …