Economic Policy Commons^™

Employee Financial Wellness Programs: Tips For Employers, Sloane Wolter, Jenna Hampton Bsw, Sophia Fox-Dichter, Ellen Frank-Miller

Social Policy Institute Research

There are several types of Employee Financial Wellness Programs (EFWPs), such as workplace financial counseling, workplace credit building, and employer-sponsored small dollar loans. Each program benefits the company and its employees in different ways.

The Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, with generous support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, studied the implementation of EFWPs at several diverse organizations, including a nonprofit in the Midwest and several supply chain locations of a national retailer, to understand the impact. As a result, we’ve identified four ways in which organizations can maximize the benefits of EFWPs and avoid pitfalls …

Employee Financial Wellness Programs: Tips For Providers, Jenna Hampton Bsw, Sloane Wolter, Sophia Fox-Dichter, Ellen Frank-Miller

Social Policy Institute Research

There are several types of Employee Financial Wellness Programs (EFWPs), such as workplace financial counseling, workplace credit building, and employer-sponsored small dollar loans. Each program benefits the company and its employees in different ways.

The Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, with generous support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, studied the implementation of EFWPs at several diverse organizations, including a nonprofit in the Midwest and several supply chain locations of a national retailer, to understand the impact. As a result, we’ve identified five ways in which providers can maximize the benefits of EFWPs and avoid pitfalls …

Financial Counseling For Front-Line Workers: A Pilot Study Of Engagement And Outcomes, Mathieu Despard, Yingying Zeng, Sophia Fox-Dichter, Ellen Frank-Miller, Michal Grinstein-Weiss

Social Policy Institute Research

Although financial counseling has been studied in community-based settings, programs offered in the workplace are understudied and yet may aid low- to moderate income employees in improving their financial situations. This study examines workers’ engagement in and associated credit outcomes from an employer-based financial counseling program in the New York City area. Findings suggest that participants engaged equally in services except for older and non-English speaking workers, who had lower levels of digital engagement. In-person engagement in services was minimal. Credit score improvements were modest, but greater for workers who had

scores in the lowest quartile at baseline. These credit …

Promoting Public Retirement Savings Accounts During Tax Filing: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Stephen Roll, Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Olga Kondratjeva, Sam Bufe

Social Policy Institute Research

Many U.S. households—especially those with low- to moderate-incomes (LMI)—struggle to save for retirement. To address this issue, the Department of the Treasury launched myRA, a no-fee retirement account designed primarily to help people who lacked access to employer-sponsored plans build retirement savings. In this paper, we report findings from two myRA-focused field experiments, both of which were administered to well over 100,000 LMI online tax filers before and during the 2016 tax season. The first experiment involved sending one of three different myRA-focused email messages to tax filers immediately prior to tax season, and the second experiment …

Tax-Time Saving And The Earned Income Tax Credit: Results From Online Field And Survey Experiments, Mathieu Despard, Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Stephen Roll, Bradley Hardy, Dana Perantie, Jane Oliphant

Social Policy Institute Research

Tax refunds are an opportunity for Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) recipients to build emergency savings. Randomly assigned behavioral interventions in 2015 and 2016 have statistically significant impacts on refund saving take-up and amounts among EITC recipients who filed their taxes online. From a survey experiment, we also find that EITC recipients have a 49 percent and 59 percent increased likelihood of deferring 20 percent of their refunds for six months when hypothetically offered 25 and 50 percent savings matches (p < .001), respectively. These findings can inform policy development related to encouraging emergency saving at tax time.

Using Financial Tips To Guide Debt Repayment: Experimental Evidence From Low-And Moderate-Income Tax Filers, Olga Kondratjeva, Stephen Roll, Sam Bufe, Michal Grinstein-Weiss

Social Policy Institute Research

Much of the literature on household finances tends to focus on discrete or relatively objective measures like savings, debt, economic mobility, and there has been a lack of research on holistic measures of financial well-being. This gap is due in part to the absence of a common understanding of how to define and measure financial well-being; a gap that was recently addressed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s development of a financial well-being scale. However, the research on this scale is still scarce and little is known about how financial well-being evolves over time. To that end, this paper uses …

Covid-19: The Impact On Young, Low-Wage Workers Without College Degrees, Marie A. Falcone, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This Fact Sheet highlights select data from the Brookings Institution report “We can’t recover from coronavirus recession without helping young workers” released May 7, 2020 by Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman. In the context of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the report includes data on the long-term, near-term, and immediate-term risk for occupations held by young workers without college credentials. This Fact Sheet focuses on data pertaining to the employment demography of young workers without a college degree in Mountain West states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah).

Final Project Report, Anurag Pande, Subhrajit Guhathakurta

CTEDD Final Project Reports - Archive

No abstract provided.

Contemporary High-Skilled Mexican Immigrant Entrepreneurs In Texas, Elizabeth Salamanca, Jorge Alcaraz

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

The number of Mexican entrepreneurs relocating to the United States has significantly increased during the last decade and their profile, as well as that of their businesses, have changed. This study develops a typology of Mexican migrant entrepreneurs living in the U.S., particularly in Texas, and of the business ventures that they undertake, and it determines the association between the entrepreneurs' profile and the kind of businesses they create. Through the analysis of migrant entrepreneurs' profiles, this paper identifies in what kind of transnational activities these entrepreneurs participate. The research follows both a qualitative approach based on the Gioia methodology …

Increasing Odds: The Impact Of Casino Gaming Size, Location, And Economic Stream Style Differences On County Revenue In Pennsylvania, Brandon W. Koch

Dissertations

As county administrators seek new revenue streams, casino gaming becomes a valuable local revenue production mechanism. Recently, Pennsylvania has been vastly successful with developing a conunercial casino market. The American Gaming Association in 2017 found that Pennsylvania has the largest sole commercial casino industry and highest effective tax rate in the United States. The case study of the Pennsylvania gaming industry is utilized to investigate plannable casino born factor impacts on county revenue. State and local regulations dictate the method and location (plannable factors) of permitted casino gaming via quotas and licensure. Casino born factors created as a result of …

Growth Empirics: A Bayesian Semiparametric Model With Random Coefficients For A Panel Of Oecd Countries, Badi Baltagi, Georges Bresson, Jean-Michel Etienne

Center for Policy Research

This paper proposes semiparametric estimation of the relationship between growth rate of GDP per capita, growth rates of physical and human capital, labor as well as other covariates and common trends for a panel of 23 OECD countries observed over the period 1971-2015. The observed differentiated behaviors by country reveal strong heterogeneity. This is the motivation behind using a mixed fixed and random-coefficients model to estimate this relationship. In particular, this paper uses a semiparametric specification with random intercepts and slopes coefficients. Motivated by Lee and Wand (2016), we estimate a mean field variational Bayes semiparametric model with random coefficients …

Labor Market Policies In A Roy-Rosen Bargaining Economy, Hugo Jales, Zhengfei Yu

Center for Policy Research

We study the effects of labor market policies using a bargaining model featuring compensating differentials (Rosen, 1986) and self-selection (Roy, 1951). The framework allows us to create a taxonomy of formal and informal employment. We use the model to estimate the effects of the minimum wage for the Brazilian economy using the “PNAD" dataset for the years 2001-2005. Our results suggest that, although the minimum wage generates unemployment and reallocation of labor to the informal sector, the policy might be desirable if the employment losses are concentrated in jobs characterized by low surplus.

Density Deconvolution With Laplace Errors And Unknown Variance, Jun Cai, William C. Horrace, Christopher Parmeter

Center for Policy Research

We consider density deconvolution with zero-mean Laplace noise in the context of an error component regression model. We adapt the minimax deconvolution methods of Meister (2006) to allow estimation of the unknown noise variance. We propose a semi-uniformly consistent estimator for an ordinary-smooth target density and a modified “variance truncation device" for the unknown noise variance. We provide a simulation study and practical guidance for the choice of smoothness parameters of the ordinary-smooth target density. We apply restricted versions of our estimator to a stochastic frontier model of US banks and to a measurement error model of daily saturated fat …

Building For Culture: How Municipal Ownership Of Cultural Facilities Influences Annual Arts Funding In American Cities, Adam M. Sachs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how local government support for arts and culture varies across 24 American cities. It has proven to be challenging for researchers to accurately measure municipal arts support. Research on cultural policy has also often focused on the federal level, despite total city expenditures far exceeding national or state government support. This thesis attempts to take an accurate pulse of city expenditures in 2017 and correlates those spending levels to the variation in city ownership of arts facilities. Rooted in the historical perspectives of the ‘new institutionalism’ and path-dependency, this paper argues that past decisions about taking ownership …

Neighborhood Change In Las Vegas, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This Fact Sheet analyzes indicators of demographic and economic change in Las Vegas neighborhoods and suburbs, provided by “American Neighborhood Change in the 21st Century,” a study published by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) at the Minnesota Law School. Researchers reviewed data from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS) for the top 50 largest metros in the U.S. The study reports levels of neighborhood change, including economic growth, poverty concentration, gentrification, and low-income displacement. Data pertaining to the Las Vegas metropolitan region are synthesized to measure indicators of economic viability and housing availability.

Nonparametric Tests Of Tail Behavior In Stochastic Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Yulong Wang

Center for Policy Research

This article studies tail behavior for the error components in the stochastic frontier model, where one component has bounded support on one side, and the other has unbounded support on both sides. Under weak assumptions on the error components, we derive nonparametric tests that the unbounded component distribution has thin tails and that the component tails are equivalent. The tests are useful diagnostic tools for stochastic frontier analysis and kernel deconvolution density estimation. A simulation study and an application to a stochastic cost frontier for 6,100 US banks from 1998 to 2005 are provided. The new tests reject the normal …

Fomc Playbook: The Only New Game In Town?, Thomas Lam

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), while taking more aggressive actions, seems to have stuck more or less to the standard playbook of responding to “unusual and exigent circumstances”. This essentially calls for slashing conventional policy rates to their effective lower bound, accompanied by forward guidance, embarking on asset purchases, rolling out emergency liquidity facilities and experimenting with lending programmes. But policymakers, with the required US Treasury backstop, have also introduced more creative programmes to encourage credit extension and reached into different market segments.

The Correlation Between County Expenditures And Ab109 Recidivism: A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Maya Crim

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In response to a federal mandate, California passed Public Safety Realignment policies in 2011 to reduce its prison population. Popularly known as Assembly Bill 109 (AB109), these policies sought to reform the prison system on multiple fronts. One of these fronts is preventing recidivism among offenders. Most studies on recidivism look at individual factors or specific micro interventions. However, the aim of this research was to examine the relationship between external factors and recidivism rates across 55 California counties. Using Spearman’s Correlation, this study tested the hypothesis that external factors such as county funding/expenditure, poverty level, and unemployment level monotonically …

Metro Monitor 2020: Las Vegas & Reno, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This Fact Sheet presents changes in indicators of economic health for the State of Nevada using data provided by the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor analysis. Looking beyond gross domestic product (GDP) and job growth, researchers at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program measure various indicators of economic well-being across 192 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for a 1-year period (from 2017-2018) and a 10-year period (from 2008-2018). Metro areas are classified by size: midsized metros (with populations between 250,000 and 500,000), large metros (with populations between 500,000 and 1 million), and very large metros (with populations over 1 million). For the purpose of …

Are Coco Bonds Suitable As Core Capital Instruments?, Kevin Dowd

Journal of New Finance

Basel III introduced significant innovations in bank regulation. One of them is the minimum required leverage ratio. To help banks implementing the new measure , Basel III created two different core capital measures: Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) and Additional Tier 1 (AT1). Since raising capital for CET1 is expensive, other instruments are used to build up AT1 in case of need, like for example Contingent Convertible (CoCo), which can convert to equity or written-down when a bank is under stress. In this paper we show that CoCos are not suitable as regulatory core capital instruments. Problems of timing, incentives, …