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’…
Consolidated Advantage: New Organizational Dynamics of Wage Inequality (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 9, 2021
The two main sources of inequality in the US labor market—occupation and workplace—have increasingly consolidated. Workers benefiting from employment at a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from…
The Grandkids Aren’t Alright: The Intergenerational Effects of Prenatal Pollution Exposure (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 11, 2021
Evidence increasingly shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations?…
Labor Non-Compete Agreements: Tool for Economic Efficiency, or Means to Extract Value from Workers? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 28, 2021
A number of theoretical arguments have been offered in favor of non-compete provisions in labor agreements. While there has been considerable empirical research on the effects of those provisions, there…
Employer Concentration and Outside Options (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 26, 2021
An updated version of this working paper was uploaded on March 8, 2022. We study the effect of within-occupation employer concentration and outside-occupation job options on wages in the US,…
A Price-Based Approach to Distributing Taxes on Business Income (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 21, 2020
This paper proposes a new approach to distributing taxes on business income based on modeling prices. Current approaches to distributing these taxes rely on explicit incidence assumptions, which amount to…
Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Family Dynamics in Economically Vulnerable Households (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 14, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis and its reverberations resulted in levels of economic distress unprecedented since the 1930s. But COVID was a seismic social shock even for families that lost no income,…
The Intergenerational Transmission of Employers and the Earnings of Young Workers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 5, 2020
This paper investigates how the earnings of young workers are affected by the intergenerational transmission of employers, which refers to individuals working for the same employer as a parent. My…
The Effect of Political Power on Labor Market Inequality: Evidence from the 1965 Voting Rights Act (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2020
A central concern for racial and ethnic minorities is having an equal opportunity to advance group interests via the political process. There remains limited empirical evidence, however, whether democratic policies…
Do Unemployment Insurance Benefits Improve Match Quality? Evidence from Recent U.S. Recessions (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 29, 2020
Unemployment insurance benefit extensions lengthened the duration of unemployment spells during the Great Recession and previous recessions. In this paper, we present new evidence for the U.S. on the impact…
Interoperability as a competition remedy for digital networks (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 23, 2020
Addressing entry barriers created by network effects is critical to remedying a monopolization violation in a social network market (e.g. Facebook). For a social network, interoperability is likely a necessary,…
The Impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. Child Care Market: Evidence from Stay-at-Home Orders (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 16, 2020
Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) have been implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the short-run impact of these containment policies on search behavior and…
Discrimination and Monopsony Power (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 13, 2020
Wage inequalities between identical workers of different race, ethnicity, and gender are a persistent feature of labor markets. However, most labor market models either ignore important empirical evidence or focus…
The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 10, 2020
We use panel data covering 118 million homes in the United States, merged with geolocation detail for 75,000 taxing entities, to document a nationwide “assessment gap” which leads local governments…
Distribution Analysis as Welfare Analysis (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 9, 2020
This paper formalizes fixed-quantities distribution analysis as the primary ingredient in the welfare analysis of tax changes. The fixed-quantities change in tax, meaning the change in household resources resulting from…
Worker earnings, service quality, and firm profitability: Evidence from nursing homes and minimum wage reforms (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 4, 2020
This paper examines whether higher wages paid to low-income workers affects the quality of services they provide to consumers. To answer this question, I combine wage variation for direct care…
Is the social safety net a long-term investment? Large-scale evidence from the food stamps program (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 11, 2020
We use novel, large-scale data on 43 million Americans from the 2000 Census and the 2001 to 2013 American Communities Survey linked to the Social Security Administration’s NUMIDENT to study…
Redistribution with Performance Pay (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 6, 2020
This working paper was updated from the April 2020 version to the May 2020 version on May 27. Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear…
The Matching Multiplier and the Amplification of Recessions (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 8, 2020
This paper shows that the unequal incidence of recessions in the labor market amplifies aggregate shocks. I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the output multiplier stemming from…
An SEIR Infectious Disease Model with Testing and Conditional Quarantine (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 7, 2020
We extend the baseline Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) infectious disease epidemiology model to understand the role of testing and case-dependent quarantine. Our model nests the SEIR model. During a period of asymptomatic…
Reducing maternal labor market detachment: A role for paid family leave (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 12, 2020
Nearly 30% of working women leave the labor force when they have a child. Ac-cess to paid family leave may allow some women to take temporary leave rather than quitting,…
Baltimore Study: Credit Scores (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 4, 2020
The Baltimore Project Phase II This report builds upon the original Baltimore study by including credit score questions to the survey instrument conducted on the Phase I sample. In Phase…
Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 3, 2020
There is substantial evidence that voters’ choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how…
Unequally Insecure: Rising Black/White Disparities in Job Displacement, 1981-2017 (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 13, 2020
Social scientists have documented vast racial disparities in labor market outcomes such as hiring and firing decisions, compensation, and opportunities for occupational advancement. Yet little is known about the racial…
Monopsony in Labor Markets: A Meta-Analysis (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 5, 2020
When jobs offered by different employers are not perfect substitutes, employers gain wage-setting power; the extent of this power can be captured by the elasticity of labor supply to the…
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 14, 2020
The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This paper shows that the extension of the minimum…
Targeted Debt Relief and the Origins of Financial Distress: Experimental Evidence from Distressed Credit Card Borrowers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 4, 2019
We study the drivers of financial distress using a large-scale field experiment that offered randomly selected borrowers a combination of (i) immediate payment reductions to target short-run liquidity constraints and…
Did Timing Matter? Life Cycle Differences in Effects of Exposure to the Great Recession (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 19, 2019
Exposure to a recession can have persistent, negative consequences, but does the severity of those consequences depend on when in the life cycle a person is exposed? I estimate the…
Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 19, 2019
We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel…
The Long-Term Effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act on Women’s Careers: Evidence from U.S. Tax Data (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 6, 2019
This paper uses IRS tax data to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (PFLA) on women’s careers. Our research design exploits the increased…
Do Teacher Strikes Make Parents Pro- or Anti-Labor? The Effects of Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 29, 2019
Strikes are a central tool of organized labor, yet existing research has focused on the economic consequences of strikes, rather than their political effects. We examine how labor actions by…
Who Cares if Parents have Unpredictable Work Schedules?: The Association between Just-in-Time Work Schedules and Child Care Arrangements (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2019
Working parents must arrange some type of care for their young children when they are away at work. For parents with unstable and unpredictable work schedules, the logistics of arranging…
Hard Times: Routine Schedule Unpredictability and Material Hardship among Service Sector Workers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2019
American policy-makers have long focused on work as a key means to reduce poverty. And yet work has become increasingly precarious and polarized. This precarity is manifest in low wages,…
Uncertain Time: Precarious Schedules and Job Turnover in the U.S. Service Sector (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2019
Existing research on the service sector in the United States documents the macro-level fundamental causes of precarious work, often with a focus on economic outcomes such as wages and fringe…
What Explains Race/Ethnic Inequality in Job Quality in the Service Sector? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2019
White workers experience significant advantages in the labor market both in hiring and in compensation compared to their non-white peers. Human capital differences and occupational segregation are commonly offered as…
Parental Exposure to Routine Work Schedule Uncertainty and Child Behavior (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 16, 2019
Parents working in the service sector often face unpredictable work schedules and children exposed to such parental schedules could suffer negative consequences. This paper takes advantage of novel survey data…
Use It or Lose It: Efficiency Gains from Wealth Taxation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Oct 10, 2019
How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are equivalent. Motivated…
From Decent to Lousy Jobs: New Evidence on the Decline in American Job Quality, 1979-2017 (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 30, 2019
A defining feature of the post-1970s American economy has been unshared growth, strikingly illustrated by the absolute decline in average incomes for the bottom 50 percent of working-age adults. This…
How U.S. Workers Think About Workplace Democracy: The Structure of Individual Worker Preferences for Labor Representation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 28, 2019
Although never as powerful as in other advanced democracies, unions remain incredibly important economic and political organizations in the United States. Yet we know little about the structure of workers’…
Imperfect competition, compensating differentials and rent sharing in the U.S. labor market (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jul 18, 2019
The primary goal of our paper is to quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the U.S. labor market by estimating the size of rents earned by American firms and…
When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers’ Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 14, 2019
While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers’ demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives.…
Demographic Origins of the Startup Deficit (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 4, 2019
We propose a simple explanation for the long-run decline in the startup rate. It was caused by a slowdown in labor supply growth since the late 1970s, largely pre-determined by…
Killer Acquisitions (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 16, 2019
This paper argues incumbent firms may acquire innovative targets solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition. We call such acquisitions “killer acquisitions.” We develop a parsimonious…
Disability and distress: The effect of disability programs on financial outcomes (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 26, 2019
We provide the first evidence on the relationship between disability programs and markers of financial distress: bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home sale. Rates of these adverse financial events peak around…
Production and learning in teams (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 5, 2019
The e ffect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data. The theory is a frictional equilibrium model of the labor…
Monopsony power and guest worker programs (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 28, 2019
Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A,…
Employer consolidation and wages: Evidence from hospitals (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 26, 2019
We test whether wage growth slows following employer consolidation by examining a decade of hospital mergers. To isolate the effects of changes in concentration due to mergers, we estimate difference-in-differences…
Who’s afraid of sunlight? Explaining opposition to transparency in economic development (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 4, 2019
Why do some firms oppose transparency of government programs? In this paper we explore legal challenges to public records requests for deal-specific, company-specific participation in a state economic development incentive…
Economic change and the social safety net: Are rural Americans still behind? (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 1, 2019
This aim of this paper is to assess the economic status of rural people five decades after The People Left Behind, with a particular focus on how changes in employment,…
Simplified distributional national accounts (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 28, 2019
This paper develops a simplified methodology that starts from the fiscal income top income share series and makes very basic assumptions on how each income component from national income that…
How does market power affect wages? Monopsony and collective action in an institutional context (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 20, 2018
To better understand the theoretical implications of new empirical findings which show that firms have monopsony power, we construct a monopsony-wage-model that integrates strategic interaction between workers and employers in…
Patent publication and technology spillovers (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 18, 2018
How does publication of new ideas through patents affect technology spillovers? To answer this, we develop a model which predicts that invention disclosure through patents (i) increases technology spillovers at…
Who profits from patents? Rent-sharing at innovative firms (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 18, 2018
This paper analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of US patent applications to US business and worker tax records. We infer…
Control without responsibility: The legal creation of franchising 1960-1980 (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 13, 2018
While the first business organizations to reach large size in the late nineteenth-century did so through the route of vertical integration—formal ownership of assets and direct employment of workers—mid-twentieth-century franchising…
Short and medium run impacts of preschool education: Evidence from state pre-k programs (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Dec 4, 2018
I study the effects of state preschool programs on child development, health, and academic progress from ages 5 to 12. I leverage variation in the timing of implementation of pre-K…
Job quality and the educational gradient in entry into marriage and cohabitation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Nov 27, 2018
Men’s and women’s economic resources are important determinants of marriage timing. Prior demographic and sociological literature has often measured resources in narrow terms, considering employment and earnings and not more…
Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 26, 2018
The American labor market is increasingly unequal, characterized by extraordinary returns to work at the top of the market but rising precarity and instability at the bottom of the market.…
Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 25, 2018
Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product…
Liquidity vs. wealth in household debt obligations: Evidence from housing policy in the Great Recession (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Sep 4, 2018
We use variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments (“wealth”), and reducing short-term payments with approximately no change in…
Returns in the labor market: A nuanced view of penalties at the intersection of race and gender (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Aug 7, 2018
There have been decades of research on wage gaps for groups based on their socially salient identities such as race and gender, but little empirical investigation on the effects of…
Anticompetitive mergers in labor markets (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 20, 2018
Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. Mergers…
Housing wealth effects: The long view (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jun 19, 2018
We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house…
The distributional effects of minimum wages: Evidence from linked survey and administrative data (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 15, 2018
States and localities are increasingly experimenting with higher minimum wages in response to rising income inequality and stagnant economic mobility, but commonly used public datasets offer limited opportunities to evaluate…
New technologies and the labor market (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers May 1, 2018
Using newspaper job ad text from 1960 to 2000, we measure job tasks and the adoption of individual information and communication technologies (ICTs). Most new technologies are associated with an…
Inequality of educational opportunity? Schools as mediators of the intergenerational transmission of income (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 23, 2018
Chetty et al. (2014b) show that children from low-income families achieve higher adult incomes, relative to those from higher income families, in some commuting zones (CZs) than in others. I…
Estimating the marginal propensity to consume using the distributions of income, consumption, and wealth (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 19, 2018
Recent studies of economic inequality almost always separately examine income inequality, consumption and wealth inequality, and hence, these studies miss the important synergy between the three measures explicit in the…
The evolution of charter school quality (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Apr 10, 2018
Download File 041018-WP-charter-school-quality Read the full PDF in your browser Studies of the charter sector typically compare charters and traditional public schools at a point in time. These comparisons are…
Motherhood penalties in the U.S., 1986-2014 (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Mar 13, 2018
Download File 0313018-WP-motherhood-penalties Read the full PDF in your browser Previous research has found that mothers earn less than childless women; this parenthood effect helps explain gender inequality as well.…
Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 27, 2018
Download File 02272018-WP-inventor-america-exposure Read the full PDF in your browser We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in America by using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors…
Inequality and aggregate demand (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 19, 2018
Download File 02192018-WP-inequality-aggregate-demand Read the full PDF in your browser We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output. In the short run, higher inequality reduces output because marginal…
Kaldor and Piketty’s facts: The rise of monopoly power in the United States (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 12, 2018
Download File 02052018-WP-kaldor-piketty-monopoly-power Read the full PDF in your browser The macroeconomic data of the last thirty years has overturned at least two of Kaldor’s famous stylized growth facts: constant…
Sources of displaced workers’ long-term earnings losses (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Feb 1, 2018
We estimate the magnitudes of lost earnings, reduced work hours, and lower wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data. We find that displaced…
Lobbying with Lawyers: Financial Market Evidence for Banks’ Influence on Rulemaking (opens in a new tab)
Working Papers Jan 16, 2018
Download File 01162018-WP-lobbying-w-lawyers Read the full PDF in your browser How do business firms shape regulation? Can firms use administrative procedures to influence the regulatory environment in which they operate,…
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