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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Supply Shock Versus Demand Shock: The Local Effects Of New Housing In Low-Income Areas, Brian J. Asquith, Evan Mast, Davin Reed Dec 2019

Supply Shock Versus Demand Shock: The Local Effects Of New Housing In Low-Income Areas, Brian J. Asquith, Evan Mast, Davin Reed

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent relative to locations slightly farther away or developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. Results are driven by a large supply effect—we show that new buildings absorb many high-income households—that overwhelms any offsetting endogenous amenity effect. The latter may be small because most new buildings go into already-changing areas. Contrary to common concerns, new buildings slow local rent increases rather than initiate or accelerate them.


Adverse Life Events And Intergenerational Transfers, Jessamyn Schaller, Chase Eck Oct 2019

Adverse Life Events And Intergenerational Transfers, Jessamyn Schaller, Chase Eck

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

While there has been broad interest in the direct effects of major life events on older households that experience them, little attention has been paid to the intergenerational transmission of those effects— how negative shocks in parents’ households affect the outcomes of their adult children—or to the role that grown children play in helping their parents recover from adverse events. We use regression and event study approaches to examine within-family changes in monetary transfers and informal care following wealth loss, involuntary job displacement, spousal death, and health shocks in retirement-aged households. We find that giving to adult children is responsive …


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 …


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 …


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. …


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 Apr 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.


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


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


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 …


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.


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 …