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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Do Snap Work Requirements Work?, Timothy F. Harris Dec 2018

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 …


An Apple A Day? Adult Food Stamp Eligibility And Health Care Utilization Among Immigrants, Chloe N. East, Andrew I. Friedson Dec 2018

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 …


Promise Scholarship Programs And Local Prosperity, Michelle Miller-Adams, Edward Smith Oct 2018

Promise Scholarship Programs And Local Prosperity, Michelle Miller-Adams, Edward Smith

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

We argue that place-based college scholarships, if designed intentionally and leveraged effectively, can foster local economic development. Since the introduction of the Kalamazoo Promise in 2005, a growing number of communities have applied the place-based approach to investments in human capital through the creation of college scholarship programs. Reviewing the existing literature on educational and economic outcomes associated with Promise programs reveals that they can expand students’ postsecondary aspirations, improve a school district’s college-going culture, and increase college enrollment and degree attainment while promoting in-migration of residents and positive growth in housing prices. Therefore, these programs can serve a broader …


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 …


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 …


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 …


Incentives And Local Job Creation, Timothy J. Bartik Jul 2018

Incentives And Local Job Creation, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


"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 …


Preparing U.S. Workers And Employers For An Autonomous Vehicle Future, Erica L. Groshen, Susan Helper, John Paul Macduffie, Charles Carson Jun 2018

Preparing U.S. Workers And Employers For An Autonomous Vehicle Future, Erica L. Groshen, Susan Helper, John Paul Macduffie, Charles Carson

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

No abstract provided.


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.


What Works To Help Manufacturing-Intensive Local Economies?, Timothy J. Bartik May 2018

What Works To Help Manufacturing-Intensive Local Economies?, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

No abstract provided.


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. …


Improving Economic Development Incentives, Timothy J. Bartik Mar 2018

Improving Economic Development Incentives, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


Who Benefits From Economic Development Incentives? How Incentive Effects On Local Incomes And The Income Distribution Vary With Different Assumptions About Incentive Policy And The Local Economy, Timothy J. Bartik Mar 2018

Who Benefits From Economic Development Incentives? How Incentive Effects On Local Incomes And The Income Distribution Vary With Different Assumptions About Incentive Policy And The Local Economy, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

This report presents results from a simulation model that examines the effects of economic development incentives (e.g., tax incentives such as property tax abatements or job creation tax credits) provided to businesses by state and local governments in the United States. The model simulates effects of incentive policies on the incomes of local residents, both for different income types (e.g., labor income versus property income) and for different income quintiles, under different assumptions about the economy’s workings and public policy. Net benefits of incentives for local incomes are greater if the incentives have greater job-creation effects conditional on their effects …


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 …