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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Grads On The Go: Measuring College-Specific Labor Markets For Graduates, Johnathan G. Conzelmann, Steven W. Hemelt, Brad J. Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Andrew Simon, Kevin M. Stange Dec 2023

Grads On The Go: Measuring College-Specific Labor Markets For Graduates, Johnathan G. Conzelmann, Steven W. Hemelt, Brad J. Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Andrew Simon, Kevin M. Stange

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market …


Gains From Reassignment: Evidence From A Two-Sided Teacher Market, Mariana Laverde, Elton Mykerezi, Aaron Sojourner, Aradhya Sood Nov 2023

Gains From Reassignment: Evidence From A Two-Sided Teacher Market, Mariana Laverde, Elton Mykerezi, Aaron Sojourner, Aradhya Sood

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Although the literature on assignment mechanisms emphasizes the importance of efficiency based on agents’ preferences, policymakers may want to achieve different goals. For instance, school districts may want to affect student learning outcomes but must take teacher welfare into account when assigning teachers to students in classrooms and schools. This paper studies both the potential efficiency and equity test-score gains from within-district reassignment of teachers to classrooms using novel data that allows us to observe decisions of both teachers and principals in the teacher internal transfer process, and test-scores of students from the observed assignments. We jointly model student achievement …


Predictive Analytics Supporting Labor Market Success: A Career Explorer For Job Seekers And Workforce Professionals In Michigan, Christopher J. O'Leary, Salomon Orellana, Kevin Doyle, Randall W. Eberts, Ben Damerow, Amy Meyers, Kenneth J. Kline, Anna Wilcoxson, Beth C. Truesdale, Scott Powell Nov 2023

Predictive Analytics Supporting Labor Market Success: A Career Explorer For Job Seekers And Workforce Professionals In Michigan, Christopher J. O'Leary, Salomon Orellana, Kevin Doyle, Randall W. Eberts, Ben Damerow, Amy Meyers, Kenneth J. Kline, Anna Wilcoxson, Beth C. Truesdale, Scott Powell

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Career Explorer provides customized career exploration tools for workforce development staff and job seekers in Michigan. There are separate Career Explorer modules for mediated staff services and self-service by job seekers. The system was developed by the Michigan Center for Data and Analytics in collaboration with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Michigan Works! Southwest. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workforce Investment and the Schmidt Futures foundation’s Data for the American Dream (D4AD) project. In this paper, we describe specifications of the models behind the frontline-staff-mediated version of Career Explorer, which are …


Minimum Wages And Racial Discrimination In Hiring: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida Nov 2023

Minimum Wages And Racial Discrimination In Hiring: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

When minimum wages increase, employers may respond to the regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a correspondence study with 35,000 applications around ex-ante uncertain minimum wage increases in three U.S. states. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19 percent less likely to receive a callback than equivalent applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce callbacks for all applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80 percent. Racial inequality decreases because firms disproportionately reduce callbacks to lower-quality white applicants who benefited from discrimination under lower …


Jobseekers’ Beliefs About Comparative Advantage And (Mis)Directed Search, Andrea Kiss, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, Lukas Hensel Oct 2023

Jobseekers’ Beliefs About Comparative Advantage And (Mis)Directed Search, Andrea Kiss, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, Lukas Hensel

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Worker sorting into tasks and occupations has long been recognized as an important feature of labor markets. But this sorting may be inefficient if jobseekers have inaccurate beliefs about their skills and therefore apply to jobs that do not match their skills. To test this idea, we measure young South African jobseekers’ communication and numeracy skills and their beliefs about their skill levels. Many jobseekers believe they are better at the skill in which they score lower, relative to other jobseekers. These beliefs predict the skill requirements of jobs where they apply. In two field experiments, giving jobseekers their skill …


Gender Gaps From Labor Market Shocks, Ria Ivandić, Anne Sophie Lassen Aug 2023

Gender Gaps From Labor Market Shocks, Ria Ivandić, Anne Sophie Lassen

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Job loss leads to persistent adverse labor market outcomes, but assessments of gender differences in labor market recovery are lacking. We utilize plant closures in Denmark to estimate gender gaps in labor market outcomes and document that women face an increased risk of unemployment and lose a larger share of their earnings in the two years following job displacement. When accounting for observable differences in human Capital across men and women, half of the gender gap in unemployment remains. In a standard decomposition framework, we document that child care imposes an important barrier to women’s labor market recovery regardless of …


Taxing The Gender Gap: Labor Market Effects Of A Payroll Tax Cut For Women In Italy, Enrico Rubolino Jul 2023

Taxing The Gender Gap: Labor Market Effects Of A Payroll Tax Cut For Women In Italy, Enrico Rubolino

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper studies the labor market effects of a large payroll tax cut for female hires in Italy. Starting in January 2013, the payroll tax rate paid by the employer for female hires was reduced by 50 percent for a period of 12 months for temporary jobs and 18 months for permanent jobs. Eligibility for the tax cut depends on the time elapsed in nonemployment status and varies discontinuously by the worker’s municipality of residence, age, and occupation. Combining social security data on the universe of Italian private-sector workers with several empirical approaches, I find that the tax cut increases …


Why Are Unemployment Insurance Claims So Low?, Christopher J. O'Leary, Kenneth J. Kline, Thomas A. Stengle, Stephen A. Wandner Apr 2023

Why Are Unemployment Insurance Claims So Low?, Christopher J. O'Leary, Kenneth J. Kline, Thomas A. Stengle, Stephen A. Wandner

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this paper, we examine the reasons why unemployment insurance (UI) claims have declined so dramatically over the past three decades. The fall in the UI claims rate is concerning because it suggests a reduced countercyclical effectiveness of the UI program. Additionally, weekly initial UI claims are regarded as an important leading indicator of aggregate economic activity, so their meaning has changed. We use a Oaxaca (1973) decomposition approach to identify the main factors for the decline in claims. The procedure suggests what the level of claims would have been later in the period, had values of variables or parameters …


College Majors And Skills: Evidence From The Universe Of Online Job Ads, Steven W. Hemelt, Brad J. Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Kevin M. Stange Apr 2023

College Majors And Skills: Evidence From The Universe Of Online Job Ads, Steven W. Hemelt, Brad J. Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Kevin M. Stange

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We use the near universe of U.S. online job ads to document four new facts about the skills employers demand from college majors. First, some skills––social and organizational––are demanded from all majors whereas others––financial and customer service––are demanded from only particular majors. Second, some majors have skill demand profiles that mirror overall demand for college graduates, such as Business and General Engineering, while other majors, such as Nursing and Education, have relatively rare skill profiles. Third, cross-major differences in skill profiles explain considerable wage variation. Fourth, although major-specific skill demand varies across place, this variation plays little role in explaining …


The Decline Of Routine Tasks, Education Investments, And Intergenerational Mobility, Patrick Bennett, Kai Liu, Kjell Salvanes Mar 2023

The Decline Of Routine Tasks, Education Investments, And Intergenerational Mobility, Patrick Bennett, Kai Liu, Kjell Salvanes

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

How does a large structural change to the labor market affect education investments made at young ages? Exploiting differential exposure to the national decline in routine-task intensity across local labor markets, we show that the secular decline in routine tasks causes major shifts in education investments of high school students, where they invest less in vocational-trades education and increasingly invest in college education. Our results highlight that labor demand changes impact inequality in the next generation. Low-ability and low-SES students are most responsive to task-biased demand changes and, as a result, intergenerational mobility in college education increases.


Not Just For Kids: Child And Dependent Care Credit Benefits For Adult Care, Gabrielle Pepin, Yulya Truskinovsky Mar 2023

Not Just For Kids: Child And Dependent Care Credit Benefits For Adult Care, Gabrielle Pepin, Yulya Truskinovsky

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC) allows households to receive tax credits for certain expenses associated with the care of a spouse or adult dependent who is incapable of self care, but very few childless households claim the credit. We examine the value of the CDCC for qualifying households caring for adults. We find that, as of 2016, more than 10 percent of individuals aged 50 to 65 had a coresident spouse or parent likely to be a qualifying individual for the CDCC. We document how state and federal CDCC benefits decrease post-tax costs of typical caregiving services, such …


The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence On Its Size And Composition And Ways To Improve Its Measurement In Household Surveys, Katharine G. Abraham, Brad J. Hershbein, Susan N. Houseman, Beth C. Truesdale Feb 2023

The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence On Its Size And Composition And Ways To Improve Its Measurement In Household Surveys, Katharine G. Abraham, Brad J. Hershbein, Susan N. Houseman, Beth C. Truesdale

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work. Based on these findings, we designed and fielded a large-scale telephone survey to elicit more accurate and complete information on independent contractors, including those who may be coded incorrectly as employees in conventional household survey data and those who are independent contractors in a secondary work activity. We find that, upon probing, roughly one in …


Estimating The Effects Of The Ada Amendments Act On The Hiring And Termination Of Individuals With Disabilities, Using New Disability Categorizations, Patrick Button, Philip Armour, Simon Hollands Jan 2023

Estimating The Effects Of The Ada Amendments Act On The Hiring And Termination Of Individuals With Disabilities, Using New Disability Categorizations, Patrick Button, Philip Armour, Simon Hollands

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Disability discrimination laws are often used to potentially increase employment for individuals with disabilities. However, legal theory and empirical economics research do not provide conclusive answers as to how expansions in disability discrimination laws affect economic outcomes, namely hiring rates, for individuals with disabilities. We estimate the effect of the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) on employment transitions: hirings and terminations for individuals with disabilities relative to those without disabilities. To calculate employment transitions, we use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We also use the SIPP to develop additional measures and categorizations of disability based on …