Issue Areas
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is engaged in an array of issues to advance evidence-based ideas and policies that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth.
238 Results
What Work Does Generative AI Do? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 8, 2026
We measure how workers use genAI for their jobs in a nationally representative survey linking genAI adoption to detailed occupations and tasks. Our data provide the first task-level genAI adoption…
The Terms and Conditions of Generative AI (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 20, 2026
Generative AI raises pressing questions for myriad doctrinal areas. Policymakers and scholars have responded rapidly, devoting substantial attention to these difficult legal and policy questions. But, as a practical matter,…
Housing Wealth Accumulation and Electoral Representation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 14, 2026
We document that housing wealth accumulation systematically differs among homeowners by their political participation. Using a nationwide voter-property dataset, we find that realized housing appreciation increases monotonically the more a…
Multiple Program Participation in the Safety Net: Incidence, Impediments, and Implications (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 7, 2026
Multiple program participation is a defining feature of the U.S. safety net, with half of recipients enrolling in two or more programs. Yet most research examines programs in isolation, missing…
Barriers to Benefits: Unemployment Insurance Take-Up and Labor Market Effects (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 19, 2026
Unemployment insurance (UI) take-up is relatively low in the United States. We implement a large-scale field experiment among 50,000 likely unemployed individuals to study the causes and labor supply implications…
The Macroeconomic Effects of Climate Policy Uncertainty (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 17, 2026
We develop a novel measure of climate policy uncertainty based on newspaper coverage. Our index spikes during key U.S. climate policy events—including presidential announcements on international agreements, congressional debates, and…
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tariffs: Evidence From U.S. Historical Data (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 4, 2026
We study the macroeconomic effects of tariff policy using U.S. historical data from 1840–2024. We construct a narrative series of plausibly exogenous tariff changes–based on major legislative actions, multilateral negotiations,…
Understanding the Congestion Child Penalty: Can Remote Work Attenuate It? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 12, 2026
We study the impact of commuting time on the labor supply of women with children in the United States. We show that congestion and long commutes discourage the labor force…
Dissecting Racial Politicization: Long-Run Evidence from the Food Stamp Program (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 2, 2026
We explore long-run racial polarization induced by the original Food Stamps Program: a major policy choice to expand the social safety net in the United States in the 1960s and…
AI exposure by U.S. occupations and work tasks and the effect on wages (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 23, 2025
This analysis of labor market AI exposure builds on previous work from the Pew Research Center and the AI firm Anthropic as well as Equitable Growth’s own job quality series,…
The Benefits of Unemployment Insurance For Marginally Attached Workers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 21, 2025
Existing research consistently finds that UI benefits delay job finding with limited effects on job quality, but focuses on changes in unemployment insurance (UI) generosity while holding fixed access to…
Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 9, 2025
We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white…
Extracting O*NET Features from the NLx Corpus to Build Public Use Aggregate Labor Market Data (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 1, 2025
Data from online job postings are difficult to access and are not built in a standard or transparent manner. Data included in the standard taxonomy and occupational information database (O*NET)…
Fitting the Bill? The First Federal Paid Leave Mandate (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 23, 2025
We find that the first federal paid leave mandate in the US, enacted under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, increased paid leave taking by nearly 200% for eligible workers,…
In Her Hands: A Guaranteed Income Initiative (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 4, 2025
In Her Hands (IHH) is a guaranteed income (GI) initiative aimed at addressing persistent economic insecurity among women in neighborhoods with some of Georgia’s highest poverty rates. Co-designed with local…
Why Financial Crises Recur (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 5, 2025
Financial crises have occurred around the world for over two centuries. These crises have been so costly and frequent that one wonders why governments cannot prevent them from recurring despite…
How are Municipal-Level Fair Workweek Laws Playing Out on the Ground? Experiences of Food Service and Retail Workers in Three Cities (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 24, 2025
An updated version of this paper was posted on December 09, 2025. The first municipal-level law regulating employers’ scheduling practices was enacted in SanFrancisco in 2015. A decade later, ten…
Equity Prices, Market Power, and Optimal Corporate Tax Policy (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 22, 2025
We study the optimal design of corporate tax policy in a textbook life-cycle model featuring two key deviations: (i) firms are imperfectly competitive and (ii) households save by purchasing equity…
Optimal Monetary Policy Under Menu Costs (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 1, 2025
We analytically characterize optimal monetary policy in a multisector economy with menu costs and contrast it with the textbook New Keynesian model based on Calvo pricing. Following a sectoral productivity…
Americans Informed About the Distributional Effects of Republicans’ Budget Bill Overwhelmingly Oppose It (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 25, 2025
Republicans in the Senate are currently considering the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, if enacted, would be the most regressive U.S. tax and budget law in at least the…
Financial and Transfer Income as Components of the Regional Economic Base (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 24, 2025
Economists and geographers have long divided industries into “basic” and “nonbasic” sectors depending on whether they bring money into a region from outside or serve local demand. Traditionally, the regional…
The Firm as Tax Shelter (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 22, 2025
I present evidence that firms serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Drawing on a unique combination of data from an electronic invoicing program in Portugal (e-Fatura), I show that individuals who…
The distribution of capital gains in the United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 26, 2025
Booming stock, housing, and private business markets have driven large capital gains in the United States, averaging 20% of national income over the past two decades. Using internal IRS tax…
The Spiderweb of Partnership Tax Structures (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 12, 2025
U.S. partnerships control more than $40 trillion in assets, vastly outnumber U.S. public firms, and contribute significantly to the U.S. tax non-compliance of pass-through entities, which is larger than the…
Who Gains from Corporate Tax Cuts? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 27, 2024
Goods producers increase their capital expenditure and employment in response to a cut in marginal corporate income tax rates or an increase in investment tax credits. In contrast, companies in…
Crypto Tax Evasion (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 21, 2024
We quantify the extent of crypto tax noncompliance and evasion, and assess the efficacy of alternative tax enforcement interventions. The context of the study is Norway. This context allows us…
Asymmetric Effects of Monetary Policy on Firms (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 16, 2024
This paper documents firm-level evidence on the asymmetric effects of monetary policy in the US. Focusing on the 1980q3-2019q4 period, I find that monetary tightenings show larger effects on firms’…
Bonus Question: How Does Flexible Incentive Pay Affect Wage Rigidity? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 17, 2024
We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of inflation and unemployment dynamics. Our main result is that wage cyclicality from incentives neither affects the slope of the Phillips curve…
Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxation: Evidence from Colombia (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 14, 2024
We study behavioral responses to personal wealth taxes in Colombia. We utilize tax microdata from 1993 to 2016 linked with the leaked Panama Papers to investigate offshoring to the country’s…
Is There Too Little Antitrust Enforcement in the US Hospital Sector? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 24, 2024
From 2002 to 2020, there were over 1,000 mergers of US hospitals. During this period, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took enforcement actions against 13 transactions. However, using the FTC’s…
Spending Responses to the Child Tax Credit Expansions (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 2, 2024
This article summarizes the literature that studied how people used the 2021 advance Child Tax Credit. Four primary findings emerged. Families more frequently reporting paying down debt during the first…
HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 20, 2023
Using data from nearly 1.2 million Black SAT takers, we estimate the impacts of initially enrolling in an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) on educational, economic, and financial outcomes.…
The Effect of Means-Tested Transfers on Work: Evidence from Quasi-Randomly Assigned SNAP Caseworkers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 13, 2023
We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the dynamic labor supply effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for a representative population using novel administrative data and an examiner design.…
Minimum wage effects and monopsony explanations (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2023
This working paper was updated on March 5, 2024 with a new version and an additional author. We present the first causal analysis of a seven-year run-up of minimum wages…
How to Fund Unemployment Insurance with Informality and False Claims: Evidence from Senegal (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 5, 2023
This paper studies the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) in low-income countries characterized by high levels of informality, weak enforcement of UI claims, and job search frictions. We assess…
Resilience in Collective Bargaining (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 27, 2023
A central finding of the theoretical literature on bargaining is that parties’ attitudes towards delay influence bargaining outcomes. However, the ability to endure delays, resilience, is often private information and…
The Rise of Pass-Throughs: an Empirical Investigation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 26, 2023
Pass-through entities have emerged as the leading U.S. business organization form in recent decades. Using comprehensive confidential administrative data, this paper highlights five core findings: (1) the rise in pass-throughs…
The New Economics of Industrial Policy (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 19, 2023
We discuss the considerable literature that has developed in recent years providing rigorous evidence on how industrial policies work. This literature is a significant improvement over the earlier generation of…
Antitrust Enforcement Increases Economic Activity (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 13, 2023
We hand-collect and standardize information describing all 3,055 antitrust lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) between 1971 and 2018. Using restricted establishment-level microdata from the U.S. Census, we…
Local and National Concentration Trends in Jobs and Sales: The Role of Structural Transformation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 6, 2023
National industrial concentration in the U.S. has risen sharply since the early 1980s, but there remains dispute over whether local geographic concentration has followed a similar trend. Using near population…
The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 26, 2023
We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current…
Disparities in Pollution Capitalization Rates: The Role of Direct and Systemic Discrimination (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 20, 2023
We examine how exogenous changes in exposure to air pollution over the past two decades have altered the disparities in home values between Black and White homeowners. We find that…
Racial Inequality in the U.S. Unemployment Insurance System (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 19, 2023
The decentralized US unemployment insurance (UI) system lets states decide on key rules. Decentralization could help states efficiently adapt to local economic conditions, but it could also generate racial inequality.…
On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 12, 2023
Recent technological developments related to the extraction and processing of data have given rise to widespread concerns about a reduction of privacy in the workplace. For a growing number of…
Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 5, 2023
We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax records since the early 1800s. The US General Property Tax was a…
The Impact of Austerity on Gender Inequality in Time Allocation in the United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 8, 2023
The Great Recession of 2007-2009 caused large declines in state revenues, prompting many states to implement austerity measures to meet their balanced budget requirements. Decreases in public spending can have…
Intergenerational Mobility using Income, Consumption, and Wealth (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 7, 2023
We use fifty years of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the intergenerational correlation in income, consumption, and wealth to answer the question: is intergenerational mobility similar across…
The Effectiveness of the Food Stamp Program at Reducing Differences in the Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 30, 2023
This paper investigates the effects of the Food Stamp Program (FSP) on racial disparities in the intergenerational persistence of poverty. We apply staggered difference-in-difference models that exploit variation in the…
Fitting the Bill? The First Federal Paid Leave Mandate (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 4, 2023
We find that the first federal paid leave mandate in the US, enacted under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, increased paid leave taking by nearly 200% for eligible workers,…
Who Cares? Paid Sick Leave Mandates, Care-Giving, and Gender (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 4, 2023
We use employment data from the Current Population Survey to assess the efficacy of state-mandated paid sick leave policies on leave-taking behavior with a focus on any variation by gender.…
Money Demand and Income Inequality: International Evidence using a Century of Data (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 14, 2023
Transactions and precautionary theories of money demand imply that aggregate money demand declines as income becomes more unequally distributed. In this paper I test this prediction using money demand regressions…
Heterogeneous Spending, Heterogeneous Multipliers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 9, 2023
Do local fiscal multipliers depend on what the government purchases? We find that government purchases of services have larger effects on employment than spending on goods. Industries producing services are…
The Impact of Paid Family Leave on Families with Health Shocks (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 6, 2023
This paper analyzes the impact of paid family leave (PFL) policies in California, New Jersey, and New York on the labor market and mental health outcomes of individuals whose spouses…
New Evidence on Employee Noncompete, No Poach, and No Hire Agreements in the Franchise Sector (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 23, 2023
This paper presents new evidence about the prevalence, source, scope, content, and variety of anti-competitive behavior in the labor market. Drawing from a text corpus of 17,785 franchise disclosure filings,…
Wealth as Control of the Future (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 19, 2023
Wealth inequality has become a major focus of social research in recent years. This research has yielded breakthroughs in describing the present distribution of wealth holdings, the impacts that access…
Political Power and Market Power (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 12, 2023
We study the link between political influence and industrial concentration. A model of an oligopoly that engages in lobbying shows that a merger may lead to an increase or a…
Power and Dignity in the Low-Wage Labor Market: Theory and Evidence from Wal-Mart Workers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 14, 2022
We measure workers’ preferences for wages and non-wage amenities at America’s largest employer, Walmart, using targeted survey experiments. We find that workers have an economically significant willingness to pay for…
Monetary Policy, Labor Income Redistribution and the Credit Channel: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee and Credit Registers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 17, 2022
We document the redistributive effects of monetary policy on labor market outcomes via the credit channel. For identification, we exploit matched administrative datasets in Portugal – employee-employer and credit registers…
Green Energy Jobs in the US: What Are They, and Where Are They? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 8, 2022
Does the growth of renewable energy benefit US workers, and which workers stand to benefit the most? Until now, evidence on green energy jobs has been limited due to measurement…
Global Trends in Income Inequality and Income Dynamics: New Insights from GRID (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 7, 2022
The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, crosscountry database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four…
Families First Coronavirus Response Act: Effect on Paid Leave Taking During the Early Pandemic (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 3, 2022
We study the effect of access to Emergency Paid Sick and Family Leave on leave-taking behavior during the early months of the pandemic. We compare monthly paid absence from January…
Do Minorities Pay More for Congestion Taxes? Evidence from a Tax on Ride-sharing (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 18, 2022
I study the heterogeneous consequences across areas in which different racial groups are concentrated of a congestion tax on ride-sharing. I find that, on average, the price increase was the…
Wealth of two nations: The U.S. racial wealth gap, 1860-2020 (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 5, 2022
The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also…
The effects of income on the economic wellbeing of families with low incomes: Evidence from the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 3, 2022
We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and…
Marginal Propensity to Consume in Recessions: a Meta-analysis (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 12, 2022
This paper assembles a dataset of 1244 estimates of marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of stimulus checks and other small transitory or predictable payments—as reported by 40 studies. I…
Taxing the Rich: How Incentives and Embeddedness Shape Millionaire Tax Flight (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 28, 2022
Taxing the rich is one of the central debates in this era of rising inequality. Elite taxation can alleviate income disparities and fund public investments. Yet, if top earners engage…
Understanding Disparities in Unemployment Insurance Recipiency (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 13, 2022
Using data from before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, we show that the expansion of benefits under the CARES Act only modestly increased self-reported UI recipiency among UI eligible workers,…
A Goldilocks Theory of Fiscal Deficits (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 30, 2022
This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater…
Socioeconomic Diversity of Economics PhDs (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 29, 2022
It is well documented that women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the economics profession, relative to both the general population and many other academic disciplines. Less is…
A Tale of Two Networks: Common Ownership and Product Market Rivalry (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 25, 2022
We study the welfare implications of the rise of common ownership in the United States from 1994 to 2018. We build a general equilibrium model with a hedonic demand system…
Black Lives: The High Cost of Segregation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 9, 2022
Exploiting the arrangement of railroad tracks in northern cities, we explore the extent to which segregation impacts homicide victimization by race. Our results reveal a robust positive relationship between segregation…
Understanding Climate Damages: Consumption versus Investment (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 22, 2022
Existing climate-economy models use aggregate damage functions to model the effects of climate change. This approach assumes climate change has equal impacts on the productivity of firms that produce consumption…
Compensation for Unstable and Unpredictable Work Schedules: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 15, 2022
Prior research shows unpredictable and unstable work schedules are associated with negative health, family, and economic outcomes. But little research has examined what, if anything, workers gain from such schedule…
Can you move to opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 14, 2022
This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940-1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27%…
Why is Workplace Sexual Harassment Underreported? The Value of Outside Options Amid the Threat of Retaliation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 10, 2022
Why is workplace sexual harassment chronically underreported? We hypothesize that employers coerce victims into silence through the threat of a retaliatory firing. To test this, we estimate how two external…
Anticipation and Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 9, 2022
Cash transfer payments are an increasingly widespread policy tool in developed and developing countries, used for both short-term and long-term objectives. We study the design of these policies by examining…
Money Matters: Consumption Volatility Across the Income Distribution (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 3, 2022
Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we document the level and volatility of quarterly consumption across the socioeconomic distribution. While the measurement of well-being is focused on income, the secular and…
Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 28, 2022
This paper considers the extent and impact of monopsony power exercised by Walmart Supercenters. I focus on Walmart as it has long been the largest private-sector employer in the U.S.,…
Support for Paid Family Leave among Small Employers Increases during the COVID-19 Pandemic (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 14, 2022
The United States is one of the few countries that does not guarantee paid family leave (PFL) to workers. Proposals for PFL legislation are often met with opposition from employer…
Mandated Sick Pay: Coverage, Utilization, and Welfare Effects (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 12, 2022
To enable more employees to take paid sick leave, a dozen states have passed sick leave mandates over the past decade in the United States. This paper evaluates empirically and…
Capital Investment and Labor Demand (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 11, 2022
We study how tax policies that lower the cost of capital impact investment and labor demand. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential US Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies…
Cyclical Demand Shifts and Cost of Living Inequality (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 11, 2022
This paper examines the cyclical behavior of low-income versus high-income household price indices and documents two new facts: (1) during recessions prices rise more for products purchased relatively more by…
Closing the Innovation Gap in Pink and Black (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 10, 2022
Recent research shows the negative impact of discrimination not only on the targets of discrimination but also on the economy as a whole. Racial and gender inequality can limit the…
Falling Rates and Rising Superstars (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 7, 2022
Do low interest rates contribute to the rise in market concentration? Using data on firm financials and high frequency monetary policy shocks, we find that falling interest rates disproportionately benefit…
What explains the decline in r*? Rising income inequality versus demographic shifts (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 7, 2022
Downward pressure on the natural rate of interest (r*) is often attributed to an increase in saving. This study uses microeconomic data from the SCF+ to explore the relative importance…
The impact of affirmative action litigation on police killings of civilians (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 2, 2021
Although research has shown that court-ordered hiring quotas increase the number of minority police officers in litigated cities, there has been little insight into how workforce diversity, or lack thereof,…
Beyond Health: Non-Health Risk and the Value of Disability Insurance (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 22, 2021
The public debate over disability insurance has centered on concerns about individuals without severe health conditions receiving benefits. We go beyond health risk alone to quantify the overall insurance value…
Wage Posting or Wage Bargaining? A Test Using Dual Jobholders (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 16, 2021
This paper examines the behavior of dual jobholders to test a simple model of wage bargaining and wage posting. We estimate the sensitivity of wages and separation rates to wage…
Do US Firms Have an Incentive to Comply with the FLSA and the NLRA? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 23, 2021
To what extent do US firms have an incentive to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)? I examine this question through…
Diverse Policy Committees Can Reach Underrepresented Groups (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 16, 2021
In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy committee, the FOMC, we test whether diversity affects how Fed…
How Exceptional is American Job Quality? Decent- and Poverty-Pay Rates by Age, Gender, and Education in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and France* (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 3, 2021
Social protection for working-age American adults is almost entirely conditional on employment, which makes earnings a particularly important dimension of job quality for workers. This paper employs new indicators (Howell,…
Low Pay in Rich Countries: Institutions, Bargaining Power, and Earnings Inequality in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and France (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 3, 2021
This paper was revised December 2021. The canonical explanation for four decades of American wage stagnation and rising inequality has been that competitive market forces, driven by new computer-driven production…
Does Paid Sick Leave Affect Job Turnover? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 31, 2021
An updated version of this paper was uploaded on May 17, 2022. This paper examines the impact of Seattle’s 2012 paid sick leave law on job turnover using unique administrative…
Bring the Households Back In: The Effect of Poverty on the Mobility of Low-Wage Workers to Better Wages (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 26, 2021
Although eighty percent of low-wage workers are not in poverty, low-wage work and poverty are often conflated. I distinguish the two and investigate how household conditions affect workers’ mobility out…
Temperature, workplace safety, and labor market inequality (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 19, 2021
Using data covering the universe of injury claims from the nation’s largest worker’s compensation system (2001-2018), we explore the relationship between temperature and workplace safety and its implications for labor…
The Contribution of Enslaved Workers to Output and Growth in the Antebellum United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 24, 2021
This working paper and its accompanying column are now undergoing revisions by the author, with the intention of reposting the updated version of the working paper and a new column…
Covid-19 Businesses Reopenings and Consumer Spending (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 27, 2021
This paper studies if Covid-19 retail and restaurant shutdowns and reopenings were responsible for tin the United States. We find reopening policies substantially increased he dramatic ‘V’ shaped pattern of…
Trends in Absolute Income Mobility in North America and Europe (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 28, 2021
We compute rates of absolute upward income mobility for the 1960-1987 birth cohorts in eight countries in North America and Europe. Rates and trends in absolute mobility varied dramatically across…
Tax Refund Uncertainty: Evidence and Welfare Implications (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 8, 2021
Transfers paid through annual tax refunds are a large but uncertain source of income for poor households. We document that low-income tax-filers have substantial subjective uncertainty about these refunds. We…
Caregiving in a Pandemic: COVID-19 and the Well-being of Family Caregivers 55+ in the U.S. (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 7, 2021
Little is known about the effects of COVID-19 on family caregivers in the US. Using data from a national sample of 2,485 US adults aged ≥55, we aimed to describe…
Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income Distribution: Theory and Evidence (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 22, 2021
This paper studies tax evasion at the top of the U.S. income distribution using IRS micro-data from (i) random audits, (ii) targeted enforcement activities, and (iii) operational audits. Drawing on…
Dual-Earner Migration Decisions, Earnings, and Unemployment Insurance (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 16, 2021
Dual-earner couples’ decisions of where to live and work often result in one spouse-—the trailing spouse—-experiencing earnings losses at the time of a move. This paper examines how married couples’…
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