Economics Commons^™

Veterans In Workforce Development: Participation And Labor Market Outcomes, Colleen Chrisinger

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper compares the employment status and earnings of veterans and nonveterans following their receipt of public workforce development services in Washington State during the years 2002–2012. It also describes workforce program participation patterns for veterans and nonveterans to determine if veterans have equal or prioritized access to key programs, where prioritization is required by law. Based on tabulations and propensity score weighted regressions using administrative data, the results indicate slightly lower levels of participation by veterans than nonveterans in two major workforce programs (Wagner-Peyser and the Workforce Investment Act Adult program), and high participation in veteran-specific programs (Disabled Veterans …

Does Increased Access To Health Insurance Impact Claims For Workers' Compensation? Evidence From Massachusetts Health Care Reform, Erin Todd Bronchetti, Melissa Mcinerney

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We study over 20 million emergency room (ER) discharges in Massachusetts and three comparison states to estimate the impact of Massachusetts health care reform on claims for Workers’ Compensation (WC). Prior evidence on the relationship between health insurance and WC claiming behavior is mixed. We find that the reform caused a significant decrease in the number of per-capita ER discharges billed to WC. This result is driven by larger decreases in WC discharges for conditions for which there is greater scope to change the payer or the location of care. Conversely, we estimate smaller impacts for weekend versus weekday admissions …

Using Behavioral Insights To Improve Take-Up Of A Reemployment Program: Trial Design And Findings, Matthew Darling, Christopher J. O'Leary, Irma L. Perez-Johnson, Jaclyn Lefkowitz, Kenneth J. Kline, Ben Damerow, Randall W. Eberts, Samia Amin, Greg Chojnacki

External Papers and Reports

No abstract provided.

Genes, Education, And Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Nicholas W. Papageorge, Kevin Thom

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a genetic score variable, are associated with human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We demonstrate that the same genetic score that predicts education is also associated with higher wages, but only among individuals with a college education. Moreover, the genetic gradient in wages has grown in more recent birth cohorts, consistent with interactions between technological change and labor market ability. We also show that individuals who grew up in economically …

Dynamic Responses To Labor Demand Shocks: Evidence From The Financial Industry In Delaware, Russell Weinstein

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper analyzes an important shock to local labor demand in the financial services sector: firm relocation to Delaware following a Supreme Court ruling and state legislation in the 1980s. Using synthetic controls and bordering states, I find significant effects on employment growth, the unemployment rate, and participation in the first decade. Employment spillovers to the nontradable sector and migration appear larger than estimates from shocks to the tradable sector. Effects persist for 10 to 20 years after Delaware loses its original policy-induced advantage. The shift towards a low unemployment sector explains this persistence, rather than direct productivity effects or …

Estimating The Impacts Of Plazacorp Investments Related To The Acquisition Of The Arcadia Ramp In Downtown Kalamazoo On The Region, Jim Robey, Kathleen Bolter, Claudette Robey

Reports

No abstract provided.

Better Incentives Data Can Inform Both Research And Policy, Timothy J. Bartik

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Working Longer, Retiring Later: Are Employers Ready For The New Employment Trend?, Robert L. Clark, Melinda Sandler Morrill

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Employment Service-Unemployment Insurance Partnership: Origin, Evolution, And Revitalization, David E. Balducchi, Christopher J. O'Leary

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This study traces the origin and evolution of the partnership between the employment service and unemployment insurance programs in the United States. We examine objectives of the framers of the Wagner-Peyser and Social Security Acts that established these programs. Using primary sources, we then analyze early actions of the architects of social insurance to facilitate cooperation between the two programs to meet economic exigencies, grapple with political cronyism, and surmount legal barriers. We also discuss factors that caused changes in the employment service–unemployment insurance partnership over time. We identify reasons for the erosion in cooperation starting in the 1980s, and …

Nafta And The Gender Wage Gap, Shushanik Hakobyan, John Mclaren

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Using U.S. Census data for 1990–2000, we estimate effects of NAFTA on U.S. wages, focusing on differences by gender. We find that NAFTA tariff reductions are associated with substantially reduced wage growth for married blue-collar women, much larger than the effect for other demographic groups. We investigate several possible explanations for this finding. It is not explained by differential sensitivity of female-dominated occupations to trade shocks, or by household bargaining that makes married female workers less able to change their industry of employment than other workers. We find some support for an explanation based on an equilibrium theory of selective …

Returns To Large-Scale Public School Pre-K Programs: Evidence From Within All States, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Valuing Public Goods More Generally: The Case Of Infrastructure, David Albouy, Arash Farahani

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We examine the relationship between local public goods, prices, wages, and population in an equilibrium inter-city model. Non-traded production, federal taxes, and imperfect mobility all affect how public goods (or “amenities” more broadly) should be valued from data. Reinterpreting the estimated effects of public infrastructure on prices and wages in Haughwout (2002), we find infrastructure over twice as valuable with our more general model. New estimates based on more years, cities, and data-sets indicate stronger wage and positive population effects of infrastructure. These imply higher values of infrastructure to firms, and also to households if moving costs are substantial.

The National-Level Economic Impact Of The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Mep), Jim Robey, Randall W. Eberts, Kathleen Bolter, Marie Holler, Nicholas Marsh, Brian Pittelko, Claudette Robey

Reports

No abstract provided.

A New Business Incentives Database: Implications For Michigan, Timothy J. Bartik

Testimonies

No abstract provided.

A New Panel Database On Business Incentives For Economic Development Offered By State And Local Governments In The United States, Timothy J. Bartik

Reports

No abstract provided.

Medicaid, Family Spending, And The Financial Implications Of Crowd-Out, Marcus Dillender

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

A primary purpose of health insurance is to protect families from medical expenditure risk. Despite this goal and despite the fact that research has found that Medicaid can crowd out private coverage, little is known about the effect of Medicaid on families' spending patterns. This paper implements a simulated instrumental variables strategy with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to estimate the effect of an additional family member becoming eligible from Medicaid on family-level health insurance coverage and spending. The results indicate that an additional family member becoming eligible for Medicaid increases the number of people in the family with …

Memorandum: Data Needs For Research On Domestic Outsourcing In The United States, Susan N. Houseman, Annette Bernhardt

All Staff Papers and Presentations

Available evidence points to substantial growth in U.S. firms’ outsourcing of various functions to domestic as well as foreign suppliers, a phenomenon sometimes called the vertical disintegration of the firm. Although receiving less attention than its offshore counterpart, domestic outsourcing is changing how work in the U.S. is organized across firms and industries. Good data allowing documentation of such supply networks is critical to the accuracy of many analyses, including employment impact analyses of a wide range of federal, state, and local economic policies; occupational workforce projections; and sector and industry productivity statistics. Moreover, although there are many reasons why …

Net Impact And Benefit-Cost Estimates Of The Workforce Development System In Washington State, Kevin Hollenbeck, Wei-Jang Huang

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Employee Ownership On Employment Stability And Firm Survival During The Past Two Recessions, Fidan Ana Kurtulus, Douglas L. Kruse

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Disasters In The United States : Frequency, Costs, And Compensation, Vera Brusentsev, Wayne Vroman

Upjohn Press

Disasters are increasing in both frequency and financial costs. Analysis presented here deals with what we know about disasters in the United States including their increasing frequency of occurrence and associated financial costs, compensation available to survivors, where particular types of disasters are most likely to occur, and how disasters can be mitigated.

Extending Work Life: Can Employers Adapt When Employees Want To Delay Retirement?, Robert L. Clark, Melinda Sandler Morrill

Upjohn Press

Aging men and women are increasingly remaining in the labor force. Most often the reason for this is that they need to work additional years in order to be able to support an increasing number of years in retirement. This leaves employers scrambling for ways to adapt to a growing number of retirement-aged workers. Clark and Morrill provide a thorough assessment of the costs and benefits of accommodating later retirement ages, and they describe options employers may use to create some new form of employment contract with aging workers.

The most prominent issues employers with aging workers face are declining …

How Did Employee Ownership Firms Weather The Last Two Recessions?: Employee Ownership, Employment Stability, And Firm Survival In The United States: 1999-2011, Fidan Ana Kurtulus, Douglas L. Kruse

Upjohn Press

Employee ownership firms offer workers the opportunity to own a stake in the firms where they work. This affords them the ability to share in profits and have a voice in firm-related decision-making. In this comprehensive new book, Kurtulus and Kruse provide new evidence on whether employee ownership firms are better equipped to survive recessions. In particular, they focus on broad-based employee ownership, which includes ownership at all levels in the firm’s hierarchy.

Lessons Learned From Public Workforce Program Experiments, Stephen A. Wandner Editor

Upjohn Press

This book chronicles many of the most important experiments and the key lessons derived from the evaluations of both existing large-scale public workforce programs and the development of new interventions—including low-cost experiments based on behavioral science methods.

Workers' Compensation: Analysis For Its Second Century, H. Allan Hunt, Marcus Dillender

Upjohn Press

Hunt and Dillender review the status of workers' compensation programs on three critical performance areas: 1) the adequacy of compensation for those disabled in the workplace, 2) return-to-work performance for injured workers, and 3) prevention of disabling injury and disease.

Confronting Policy Challenges Of The Great Recession: Lessons For Macroeconomic Policy, Eskander Alvi Editor

Upjohn Press

This book presents several notable economists who describe the perils the economy faced during the Great Recession and the policies—some successful, others not so much—that were implemented and why. By now, economists have had nearly a decade to examine the causes and consequences of the damage wrought by the Great Recession, and to assess the ensuing efforts to right the economy. The unprecedented losses, which spread across the global economy, posed extraordinary challenges for central bankers and policymakers alike, who were forced to throw out the playbook and create new, untested means for restoring growth.

The Stem Dilemma: Skills That Matter To Regions, Fran Stewart

Upjohn Press

Fran Stewart dives into the murky waters where education and economic goals meet to confront several key issues facing policymakers and educators, including the role of public investment in human capital, the types of human capital investment that provide the greatest public return, and whether those investments should vary by region.

She shows that not all high-paying jobs require STEM skills; that not all good-paying, highly skilled STEM jobs require college degrees; and that "soft skills" are important for STEM as well as other high-paying jobs.

Net Impact And Benefit-Cost Estimates Of The Workforce Development System In Washington State, Kevin Hollenbeck, Wei-Jang Huang

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Wage Shocks And The Technological Substitution Of Low-Wage Jobs, Daniel Aaronson, Brian Phelan

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We extend the task-based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We find that increases in the cost of low-wage labor, via minimum wage hikes, lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manually-routine or non-routine low-wage occupations. This suggests that low-wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution. While the short-run employment consequence of this reshuffling on individual workers is economically small, due to concurrent employment growth in other low-wage jobs, workers previously employed in cognitively routine jobs experience relative wage losses.

Who Wins In An Energy Boom? Evidence From Wage Rates And Housing, Grant D. Jacobsen

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper presents evidence on the distributional effects of energy extraction by examining the recent U.S. energy boom. The boom increased local wage rates in almost every major occupational category. The increase occurred regardless of whether the occupation experienced a corresponding change in employment, suggesting a more competitive labor market that benefited local workers. Local housing values and rental prices both increased, thereby benefiting landowners. For renters, the increase in prices was completely offset by a contemporaneous increase in income. The results indicate that bans on drilling have negative monetary consequences for a large share of local residents.

Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence From Vacancy Postings, Brad J. Hershbein, Lisa B. Kahn

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We show that skill requirements in job vacancy postings differentially increased in MSAs that were hit hard by the Great Recession, relative to less hard-hit areas, and that these differences across MSAs persist through the end of 2015. The increases are prevalent within occupations, more pronounced in the non-traded sector, driven by both within-firm upskilling and substitution from older to newer firms, accompanied by increases in capital stock, and are evident in realized employment. We argue that this evidence reflects the restructuring of production toward more skilled workers and routine-labor saving technologies, and that the Great Recession accelerated this process.