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Minimum Wages and Racial Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Get PDFWhen minimum wages increase, employers may respond to the regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a correspondence study with 35,000 applications around ex-ante uncertain minimum wage increases in three U.S. states. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19 percent less likely to receive a callback than equivalent applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce callbacks for all applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80 percent. Racial inequality decreases because firms disproportionately reduce callbacks to lower-quality white applicants who benefited from discrimination under lower minimum wages
The Decline of Routine Tasks, Education Investments, and Intergenerational Mobility
Get PDFHow does a large structural change to the labor market affect education investments made at young ages? Exploiting differential exposure to the national decline in routine-task intensity across local labor markets, we show that the secular decline in routine tasks causes major shifts in education investments of high school students, where they invest less in vocational-trades education and increasingly invest in college education. Our results highlight that labor demand changes impact inequality in the next generation. Low-ability and low-SES students are most responsive to task-biased demand changes and, as a result, intergenerational mobility in college education increases
Does Poor Infant Health Widen Racial Disparities in Childhood and Adulthood?
No full textThe link between improved early life conditions and upward mobility is now well established (e.g. García, Heckman, Leaf, & Prados, 2020). A wide range of studies find that increasing access to early life health care, nutrition, and education improves overall well-being throughout life in both developed and developing contexts. However, despite massive public expenditures in the U.S. on programs targeting vulnerable youth before the age of 5, large inequalities throughout the lifecycle persist across high and low-income children, especially among children born into low-income Black families (Hoynes & Schanzenbach, 2018). While literature focused on understanding the persistence of these racial gaps into adulthood tends to highlight the role of unequal access to critical early childhood programs, less is known about the extent to which current program design could also be exacerbating racial gaps throughout childhood and into adulthood
Applying Behavioral Insights to Inform Job Search: Evaluating Effects of a Behaviorally Informed Intervention on Job Search Online in West Michigan
No full textComment on Accounting for Firm Heterogeneity within US Industries: Extended Supply-Use Tables and Trade in Value Added Using Enterprise and Establishment Level Data
No full textThe Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality
Get PDFThis dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter 1, Hugo Reichardt and I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions —from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter 2, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black-white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks.
In Chapter 3, Harriet Brookes Gray, Hugo Reichardt, and I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common
Why Are Unemployment Insurance Claims So Low?
Get PDFIn this paper, we examine the reasons why unemployment insurance (UI) claims have declined so dramatically over the past three decades. The fall in the UI claims rate is concerning because it suggests a reduced countercyclical effectiveness of the UI program. Additionally, weekly initial UI claims are regarded as an important leading indicator of aggregate economic activity, so their meaning has changed. We use a Oaxaca (1973) decomposition approach to identify the main factors for the decline in claims. The procedure suggests what the level of claims would have been later in the period, had values of variables or parameters of the system been at levels observed earlier in the period. Our analysis of state-year data over the past three decades suggests that the decline in UI claims stems from changes in the industrial and occupational mix of employment interacting with changes in UI program features set by individual states. Employment declines in manufacturing and increases in the health-care and education workforce, along with lower potential UI duration and lower wage replacement rates, contribute to the decline in claims. This decline could be offset by federal rules for states to improve benefit access, replacement rates, and durations. Such changes could improve the relevance of UI to the labor market and help restore UI as meaningful social insurance against job loss and as an automatic stabilizer of the macroeconomy