Economics Commons^™

The Free College Handbook: A Practitioner’S Guide To Promise Research, Michelle Miller-Adams Co-Editor, Jennifer Iriti Co-Editor, Meredith S. Billings, Celeste K. Carruthers, Gresham D. Collum, Denisa Gándara, Douglas N. Harris, Brad J. Hershbein, Amy Li, Danielle Lowry, Lindsay C. Page, Bridget F. Timmeney

Reports

No abstract provided.

Montcalm And Ionia Counties Housing Plan, Emily Petz, Lee Adams, Gerrit Anderson, Dakota Mccracken, Brian Pittelko

Reports

No abstract provided.

Kalamazoo County Housing Plan, Emily Petz, Lee Adams, Gerrit Anderson, Dakota Mccracken, Brian Pittelko

Reports

A healthy housing continuum provides homes for those in a range of incomes or in different life situations. Kalamazoo County has a shortage of housing units at multiple price points. Low rates of construction, high construction costs, increased demand from a growing population, and housing costs that are increasing faster than wages have contributed to the shortage and affordability issues. Fortunately, many strategies are available to help alleviate some of the housing concerns found in the county. These strategies are most effective when community partners band together and implement them as a cohesive unit.

St. Joseph County 2021 Housing Plan, Molly Trueblood, Lee Adams, Gerrit Anderson

Reports

No abstract provided.

Housing Profiles, Emily Petz, Lee Adams, Gerrit Anderson, Brian Pittelko, Kathleen Bolter

Reports

No abstract provided.

Salary History And Employer Demand: Evidence From A Two-Sided Audit, Amanda Agan, Bo Cowgill, Laura K. Gee

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates’ disclosures for male and female applicants. Our findings suggest that extra dollars disclosed yield higher salary offers, willingness to pay, and perceptions of outside options by recruiters (all similarly for men and women). Recruiters make negative inferences about the quality and bargaining positions of non-disclosing candidates, though they penalize silent women less.

Recession Emerges As The Most Like Scenario, Eric Thompson

Business in Nebraska

The U.S. economy faces the prospect of a second recession as the Federal Reserve Bank continues to raise interest rates to confront inflationary forces. These forces include elevated asset prices and a wage-price spiral. Further interest rate increases are likely given a challenging environment to reduce inflation. Challenges include limited migration and a slow-growing labor force, trade restrictions, regulatory restrictions that limit energy production and raise the minimum wage as well as excessive federal government spending. Federal spending through the CARES Act, Coronavirus Supplemental Appropriations Act, American Rescue Plan, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act continue to fuel excess demand. …

How Do Broad Non-Disclosure Agreements Affect Labor Markets?, Jason Sockin, Aaron Sojourner, Evan Starr

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Quality Of Communications Infrastructure, Local Structural Transformation, And Inequality, Camilo Acosta, Luis Baldomero-Quintana

Arts & Sciences Articles

We analyze the causal impact of improvements in the quality of communication infrastructure on the structural transformation of US counties. Our treatment is the quality of communication infrastructure in a county, measured by the average Internet speed offered to businesses. We use as an instrumental variable the spatial structure of ARPANET, a network funded by the Department of Defense that is considered the precursor of the Internet, and whose location we determine using historical government documents. We show that faster Internet stimulates short-run growth and increases the shares of employment and GDP in high-skilled services, while negatively affecting sectors such …

Are Retirement Planning Tools Substitutes Or Complements To Financial Capability?, Gopi Shah Goda, Matthew R. Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner, Joshua Tasoff, Jiusi Xiao

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers’ retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers’ retirement income goals. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on defined-contribution savings, prominently displays the gap between projected goal and actual retirement income, and allows users to interactively explore how alternative, future contribution choices would affect the gap. The treatment increased average annual retirement contributions by $174 (2.3 percent). However, effects were larger for those with greater financial knowledge, suggesting this type of tool complements, rather than substitutes for, underlying financial …

The Effects Of An Ellis Act Eviction On Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status, Brian J. Asquith

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Rent-control advocates argue that its strongest feature is offering tenants strong protections from economic displacement. Nonetheless, rent control may have negative effects on tenants, as previous research has shown that these tenants have longer commutes and higher unemployment rates because they are incentivized to stay in place even after their location is no longer optimal. I study what happens to tenants when they are displaced from their rent-controlled apartments by exploiting a California law called the Ellis Act that allows landlords in Los Angeles and San Francisco to evict tenants even if they are lease-compliant, under the condition that all …

What Happens To Residents Evicted Under California’S Ellis Act?, Brian J. Asquith

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Bridging Research And Practice To Achieve Community Prosperity, Kathleen Bolter, Michelle Miller-Adams, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein, Kyle Huisman, Bridget F. Timmeney, Brian J. Asquith, Gabrielle Pepin, Lee Adams, Jessica Brown, Gerrit Anderson, Allison Colosky

Reports

No abstract provided.

Long Social Distancing, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Many working-age Americans say they will continue some forms of social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. We uncover this long social distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. It is stronger among older persons, the less educated, and those who live with or care for persons at high risk from infectious diseases. Regression models fit to individual-level data suggest that social distancing lowered labor force participation by 2.4 percentage points in 2022, 1.2 points on an earnings-weighted basis. Daily interactions with at-risk persons and long COVID experiences lead to larger drags on participation. When combined …

Growth In High-Paying Jobs: Mountain West Metros, Joshua Padilla, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet examines data from a Stessa report titled, “U.S. Cities with the Largest Growth in High-Paying Jobs.” Data are presented for 25 metros in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah).

‘Long Social Distancing’ Reduces Potential Output Of U.S. Economy, Jose Maria Barrero

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Disability Insurance Screening And Workers’ Health And Labor Market Outcomes, Alexander Ahammer, Analisa Packham

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Disability Insurance Screening And Worker Outcomes, Alexander Ahammer, Analisa Packham

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We estimate the returns to more targeted disability insurance (DI) programs in terms of labor force participation and worker health. To do so, we analyze male workers after an acute workplace injury that experience differential levels of application screening. We find that when workers face tighter screening requirements, they are less likely to claim disability and are more likely to remain in the labor force. We observe no differences in any physical or mental health outcomes, including reinjury. Our findings imply that imposing stricter DI screening requirements has large fiscal benefits but does not yield any detectable health costs, on …

Rural-Urban Migration And The Re-Organization Of Agriculture, Raahil Madhok, Frederik Noack, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Olivier Deschenes

Discussion Papers

This paper studies the response of agricultural production to rural labor loss during the process of urbanization. Using household microdata from India and exogenous variation in migration induced by urban income shocks interacted with distance to cities, we document sharp declines in crop production among migrant-sending households residing near cities. Households with migration opportunities do not substitute agricultural labour with capital, nor do they adopt new agricultural machinery. Instead, they divest from agriculture altogether and cultivate less land. We use a two-sector general equilibrium model with crop and land markets to trace the ensuing spatial reorganization of agriculture. Other non-migrant …

Economic Perceptions And Potential Within La Marsa, Dean Roiland

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research largely focuses on the perspectives of the Tunisian youth in regards to the unemployment situation they are being faced with. These perspectives carry many insights as to the problems in Tunisia and the potential solutions to these problems. Background research was conducted to examine the specifics of the economic situation and how it ended up in such a state. The Tunisian economy was found to be heavily suffering from high unemployment, high inflation, a lack of job creation, and a lack of FDI to name a few. These negative symptoms have especially been impacting the young adults in …

College Academic Coaching Can Increase College Success And Later Earnings, Pierre Mouganie, Serena Canaan, Stefanie Fischer, Geoffrey C. Schnorr

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

The Case For Dynamic Cities, Brian J. Asquith, Margaret C. Bock

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Cities today are confronting never-before-seen challenges to their top spot in the economic hierarchy. In this chapter, we lay out four challenges, past and future, that cities face today and identify policies that can help address the problems we identify. We call attention to the need for many U.S. cities to redevelop the large amount of aging postwar single-family housing, while reforming past exclusionary zoning and infrastructure decisions that exacerbated inequality. Cities will have to fix these past mistakes against the backdrop of an aging population and the rise of remote working, both of which undercut cities’ traditional source of …

Seize The Time: Needed Research On Local Economic Development In An Era Of Increased Attention To Problems Of Place, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

With the increased attention to place-based policies comes an increased need for policy-relevant research on local economic development. Within the policy area of local economic development, this paper identifies five types of research needs: 1) better definitions of local labor markets; 2) policy know-how on how local economic development’s benefits can be better spread to distressed neighborhoods; 3) evidence on what types of jobs have both good growth prospects in the U.S. economy yet also provide good long-run job opportunities in local labor markets for the majority of U.S. workers who lack a bachelor’s degree; 4) estimates of how local …

Helping Distressed Places: Best Practices And Needed Scale, Timothy J. Bartik

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Latinas In The Labor Market, Lorna Rivera, Vishakha Agarwal, Phillip Granberry

Gastón Institute Publications

In Massachusetts, the share of Latinas in the overall population has been rapidly increasing. From 2000 to 2019, the number of Latinas increased by 81.5%1 even as the number of Non-Latina women declined by about 5.8% during that same period. The share of Non-Latina White women in the Massachusetts female population dropped from approximately 82% in 2000 to 71% in 2019.

This report offers an in-depth look at the difference between the median wage income and other labor market outcomes of Latina and Non-Latina women in the Massachusetts workforce. (A great majority of Non-Latina women workers in Massachusetts are White …

In A Gig Economy, Do People Work More When Wages Rise?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Study finds that when wages go up, how the supply of labour changes can depend on how the change in pay is communicated

Information, Intermediaries, And International Migration, Samuel Bazzi, Lisa Cameron, Simone Schaner, Firman Witoelar

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Job seekers face substantial information frictions, especially in international labor markets where intermediaries match prospective migrants with overseas employers. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about intermediary quality shapes migration outcomes. Holding access to information about the return to choosing a high-quality intermediary constant, intermediary-specific quality disclosure reduces the migration rate, cutting use of low-quality providers. Workers who do migrate receive better pre-departure preparation and have improved experiences abroad, despite no change in occupation or destination. These results are not driven by changes in beliefs about average provider quality or the return to migration. Nor …

Centering Work: Integration And Diffusion Of Workforce Development Within The U.S. Manufacturing Extension Network, Nichola Lowe, Greg Schrock, Matthew D. Wilson, Rumana Rabbani, Allison Forbes

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

As the U.S. economy rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic, strategies that promote long-term transformation toward high-quality jobs will be critical. This includes workplace-improving interventions that enable employers to upgrade existing jobs, often while enhancing their own competitive position. This paper focuses on the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a national network of federally funded centers that support small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. We document the range of workforce- and workplace-enhancing strategies that MEP centers have adopted since the network’s inception in the mid-1990s. While workforce development is unevenly implemented across today’s MEP network, leading centers within the network are devising transformative strategies …

The Great Resignation, Unemployment, And Underemployment In The Us: A Study Of Labor Market Segmentation, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

During 2021 and 2022 many news media outlets have been reporting that millions of workers in the US have been quitting their jobs in record numbers. In a global economy rebounding from the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and demanding more workers, a high rate of resignations has exacerbated labor shortages and may be aggravating underemployment rates if many workers are choosing not to be part of the labor force or only to work part time. Many reasons have been offered to explain this “Great Resignation” including high day care costs for working parents which may in turn …

Keep Me In, Coach: The Short- And Long-Term Effects Of Targeted Academic Coaching, Serena Canaan, Stefanie Fischer, Pierre Mouganie, Geoffrey C. Schnorr

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at first-year college students placed on academic probation. Participants attend a workshop where coaches aim to normalize failure and improve self-confidence. Coaches also facilitate a process whereby participants reflect on their academic difficulties, devise solutions to address their challenges, and create an action plan. Participants then hold a one-time follow-up meeting with their coach or visit a campus resource. Using a …