Upjohn Research
Not a member yet
3819 research outputs found
Sort by
Employer Market Power in Silicon Valley
Get PDFAdam Smith alleged that employers often secretly combine to reduce labor earnings. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: illegal no-poaching agreements through which information-technology companies agreed not to compete for each other’s workers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, I estimate the effects of these agreements using a difference-in-difference design. Data from Glassdoor permit the inclusion of rich employer- and job-level controls. On average the no-poaching agreements reduced salaries at colluding firms by 5.6 percent, consistent with considerable employer market power. Stock bonuses and job satisfaction were also negatively affected
New Employer Payroll Taxes and Entrepreneurship
Get PDFHow costly are taxes for young firms? In this paper, we demonstrate that even small payroll taxes significantly distort entry, growth, and hiring decisions. First, leveraging cross-sectional variation in the taxes faced by new employers, we find that higher taxes discourage new firms from hiring their first workers, with an elasticity of the number of new employers to taxes of −0.1. Second, studying changes in taxes after entry, we find that higher taxes lead more firms to exit, while also reducing employment for those who survive and leading some firms to avoid taxes by using non-taxable contract labor
Efficiency Costs of Unemployment Insurance Denial: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Examiners
Get PDFApproximately 10 percent of Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants in the United States are denied benefits after being deemed at-fault for their job loss by a government examiner. Using administrative data from California and an examiner leniency design, we estimate the causal effects of extending eligibility to marginally at-fault claimants—those whose job separation reason would be deemed UI-eligible by some examiners but UI-ineligible by others. Approving a marginally at-fault claimant increases UI benefits paid by over $3,000 and lengthens the nonemployment spell by just under two weeks, but it does not decrease labor income. We combine these estimates and other relevant claimant responses to calculate the fiscal externality of expanding eligibility on this margin and find that it accounts for 16 percent of the expansion’s total cost. Using two regression kink designs in the same data, we show that other more commonly studied UI benefit expansions have significantly larger fiscal externalities. We provide suggestive evidence that lower efficiency costs for the at-fault eligibility expansion are driven by smaller responses among lower-income claimants who are disproportionately affected by at-fault eligibility criteria
The Impact of Prisoner Education on Recidivism, Labor Market Outcomes, and Public Assistance Utilization
No full textThis project will study how access to various forms of education within the prison system affects recidivism rates, labor market outcomes, and the use of public assistance programs by inmates once they are released. The research design is predicated on the following facts, determined in consultation with our partners:
a) The facility in which an individual is placed to serve their sentence, conditional on security risk and gender, is largely determined by space availability. Therefore, an inmate may be located and relocated across facilities in the state of Alabama that vary in terms of the educational programs offered.
b) Whether a facility offers education to its inmates and, if education is offered, what specific credentials and courses are offered is determined by space and physical requirements; a needs assessment based on statewide economic data, employer feedback, college advisory boards, and institutional stakeholders; the availability of financial resources; and the availability of instructors.
c) Prison wardens have full authority to dictate whether inmates are allowed to participate in education programs, and they vary considerably in how they determine which inmates can participate. The turnover rate of prison wardens is relatively high within the state as well
Corrections Worker Safety and Free Communications in Prisons
No full textCorrections workers experience far greater amounts of workplace violence than any other occupation. Yet, no causal evidence exists to date on how changes to the workplace environment (i.e., prisons) might improve employee safety. In this study, we partner with and propose to evaluate the largest non-profit led effort to offer free communication technology to incarcerated individuals, and its impact on changes in the amount of prison infractions, and specifically prisoner on staff assaults. We use data from Iowa and Colorado, where hundreds of prisoner on staff assaults occur per year, and we apply a staggered difference-in-differences estimate reflecting the rollout of the policy
