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Keep Me In, Coach: The Short- and Long-Term Effects of Targeted Academic Coaching
Get PDFTo boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at first-year college students placed on academic probation. Participants attend a workshop where coaches aim to normalize failure and improve self-confidence. Coaches also facilitate a process whereby participants reflect on their academic difficulties, devise solutions to address their challenges, and create an action plan. Participants then hold a one-time follow-up meeting with their coach or visit a campus resource. Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we show that the program raises students’ first-year GPA by 14.6 percent of a standard deviation, and decreases the probability of first-year dropout by 8.5 percentage points. Effects are concentrated among lower-income students who also experience a significant increase in the probability of graduating. Finally, using administrative data, we provide the first evidence that coaching/mentoring may have substantial long-run effects, as we document significant gains in lower-income students’ earnings seven to nine years following entry to the university. Our findings indicate that targeted, group coaching can be an effective way to improve marginal students’ academic and early career outcomes
Essays on Technology and Work
Get PDFThis thesis consists of four papers on technology, work, skills, and personality using novel large-scale data and methods. The first paper (Chapter 1, with Johannes Hirvonen and Aapo Stenhammar) presents novel evidence on the effects of advanced technologies on employment, skill demand, and firm performance. The main finding is that advanced technologies led to increases in employment and no change in skill composition. Our main research design focuses on a technology subsidy program in Finland that induced sharp increases in technology investment in manufacturing firms. Our data directly measure multiple technologies and skills and track firms and workers over time. We demonstrate novel text analysis and machine learning methods to perform matching and to measure specific technological changes. To understand our findings, we outline a theoretical framework that contrasts two types of technological change: process versus product. We document that the firms used new technologies to produce new types of output rather than replace workers with technologies within the same type of production. The results contrast with the ideas that technologies necessarily replace workers or are skill biased. The second paper (Chapter 2, with Ramin Izadi) investigates which personality traits and skills help workers to deal with a changing environment. Labor markets are in constant change. This paper documents how responses to labor-market shocks vary by individuals’ psychological traits. We construct measures of cognitive ability, extraversion, and conscientiousness using standardized personality and cognitive tests administered during military service to 79% of Finnish men born 1962–1979. We analyze establishment closures and mass layoffs between 1995–2010 and document heterogeneous responses to the shock. Extraversion is the strongest predictor of adaptation: the negative effect of a mass layoff on earnings is 20% smaller for those with one standard deviation higher scores of extraversion. Conscientiousness appears to have no differential impact conditional on other traits. Cognitive ability and education predict a significantly smaller initial drop in earnings but have no long-term advantage. Our findings appear to be driven directly by smaller dis-employment effects: extraverted and high cognitive-ability individuals find re-employment faster in a similar occupation and industry they worked in before. Extraversion’s adaptive value is robust to controlling for pre-shock education, occupation, and industry, which rules out selection into different careers as the driving mechanism. Extraverts are slightly more likely to retain employment in their current establishment during a mass layoff event, but the retention effect is not large enough to explain the smaller earnings drop. The third paper (Chapter 3, with Ramin Izadi) explores how different dimensions of personality predict school vs. labor-market performance, and how the value of these traits changed over time. We answer these questions using data that includes multidimensional personality and cognitive test scores from mandatory military conscription for approximately 80% of Finnish men. We document that some dimensions of noncognitive skills are productive at school, and some dimensions are counterproductive at school but still valued in the labor market. Action-oriented traits (activity, sociability, and masculinity) predict low school performance but high labor market performance. School-oriented traits, such as dutifulness, deliberation, and achievement striving, predict high school performance but are not independently valued in the labor market after controlling for school achievement. We further document that the labor-market premium to action-oriented personality traits has rapidly increased over the past two decades. To interpret the empirical results, we outline a model of multidimensional skill specialization. The model and evidence highlight two paths to labor-market success: one through school-oriented traits and formal skills, and one through action-oriented traits and informal skills. The fourth paper (Chapter 4) analyzes the impact of manufacturing decline on children. To do so, it considers local employment structure—characterizing lost manufacturing jobs and left-behind places—high-school dropout rates, and college access in the US over 1990–2010. To establish a basis for causal inference, the paper uses variations in trade exposure from China, following its entry to the WTO, as an instrument for manufacturing decline in the US. While the literature on job loss has emphasized negative effects on children, the main conclusion of this research is that the rapid US manufacturing decline decreased high-school dropout rates and possibly increased college access. The magnitudes of the estimates suggest that for every 3-percentage-point decline in manufacturing as a share of total employment, the high-school dropout rate declined by 1 percentage point. The effects are largest in the areas with high racial and socioeconomic segregation and in those with larger African American populations. The results are consistent with the idea that the manufacturing decline increased returns and decreased opportunity costs of education, and with sociological accounts linking the working-class environment and children’s education
Gender and Misallocation in the Labor Market
Get PDFManagers are important for firm productivity (Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007, Lazear, Shaw and Stanton, 2015). Consequently, firms must decide how to assign the right workers to higher-level jobs (Rosen, 1982, Holmstrom and Tirole, 1989). However, little is known about how firms’ organizational design affects different groups of workers and whether it can explain why women continue to be underrepresented in higher-level positions. In this dissertation, I collect a unique dataset in collaboration with a large multinational firm in order to provide new insights on the key impediments that women face in their career progression. In the first chapter, I focus on the role of managers for workers’ career progression, which is motivated by the fact that most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers for promotions. However, managers who are evaluated on team performance have an incentive to hoard workers. I find that talent hoarding reduces workers’ applications for promotions by more than half, with particularly large effects on women. Marginal female applications who would have not applied under talent hoarding are twice as likely than their male counterparts to land a promotion and three times as likely to outperform their team at a higher level. Talent hoarding thus contributes to misallocation of talent and perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay. The second chapter builds on these findings and attempts to identify when and why gender differences in representation first emerge in the leadership hierarchy. The rich personnel records allow me to construct a new and granular measure of job hierarchy that captures career progression throughout the job ladder. I find that the transition to first-level leadership positions represents a key bottleneck in women’s career progression. This early leadership gap is not fully explained by employee characteristics and is driven by internal promotions, not differential entry to or exit from the firm. Women who make it to the first-level leader- ship level are not less likely to get promoted than men, which contrasts the common notion of a glass ceiling. The third chapter demonstrates why women are less likely to advance to first-level leadership positions than men. Identifying the drivers of female underrepresentation is difficult, because the promotion gap can arise due to both labor supply and labor demand factors. By combining rich personnel records and the universe of application and hiring decisions at a large multinational firm, I am able to analyze employees’ labor supply decisions separately from the firm’s labor demand decisions. I find that women at lower hierarchy levels are less likely to apply for promotions to first-level leadership positions than observationally similar men, but do not experience lower hiring likelihoods than men. Using detailed information on every internal job opening in employees’ choice sets, I show that preferences for leading a team are a key determinant of the gender gap in applications for promotions. These gender differences in preferences for team leadership are not fully explained by other factors, including correlated job features such as flexibility and skill requirements or the gender composition of the coworkers associated with a job opening. Together, these findings imply that the organizational design within firms may have large impacts on gender differences in career progression, deterring high-quality women from climbing the job ladder and contributing to misallocation of talent. While all three chapters use the same setting and data, each chapter is intended to be a stand-alone set of research questions, so the respective description is included within each chapter
Long-Term Care in the United States: History, Financing, and Directions for Reform
Get PDFThis book is a concise survey of the development of U.S. long-term care and its financing, with comparisons with other rich countries. It also includes a brief comparative account of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and several other countries. The study finds much that is amiss with American long-term care and proposes three sets of progressively more ambitious reforms.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1290/thumbnail.jp
Place-Based Consequences of Person-Based Transfers: Evidence from Recessions
Get PDFThis paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in earnings per capita. However, these areas also experience persistent increases in transfers per capita, which offset 16 percent of the earnings loss on average. The increase in transfers is driven by unemployment insurance in the short run, and medical, retirement, and disability transfers in the long run. Our results show that nominally place-neutral transfer programs redistribute considerable sums of money to places with depressed economic conditions
The Impact of the Gig Economy on Entrepreneurship and Firm Growth
No full textOur project seeks to answer the following questions to inform policymakers, entrepreneurs, and academics. The first direction of our research focuses on how the gig economy might mitigate frictions in raising capital to start and support a business. How does the gig economy affect entrepreneurial entry and growth? Is there heterogeneity in these effects based on the characteristics and background of entrepreneurs? Does the gig economy provide an alternative funding source for entrepreneurs who are financially constrained? The opportunities in the gig economy might facilitate entry into entrepreneurship particularly for individuals who are disadvantaged. The second direction of our research investigates how the gig economy changes growth dynamics. The gig economy could change the way that entrepreneurs create jobs and how they scale their businesses
Strike from the Record: Administrative Burden in Expungement of Criminal Records
No full textToo few people eligible for clearing their criminal record take up the program. Although the policy is designed to help mitigate the collateral consequences of an arrest or criminal conviction, few proceed through the administrative process. Previous research estimates that only 6.5% of eligible record-bearers in Michigan petitioned for expunction (Prescott & Starr, 2019), creating what Chien (2020) calls a “second chance gap.” This likely perpetuates social, economic, and political inequalities because an arrest and/or conviction is often accompanied by collateral consequences. Justice-involved individuals may be disqualified from, or have restrictions placed on employment, public benefits, and rights. However, some evidence suggests that a clean slate, in the form of record clearance, can boost employment rates and wages and is helpful at reducing re-offending (Presscott and Star 2019; Selbin, Mccrary, and Epstein 2017; Shloberg et al. 2014). Why, then, don’t more eligible record-bearers participate in expungement programs
Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Resiliency
No full textWhat makes some local labor markets more resilient to business cycle fluctuations than others? Despite evidence of large disparities in local responses to recessions, policymakers have little guidance on how to build resiliency to secular declines in labor demand. This project proposes and tests the notion that immigrant employers were an important input into local economic resiliency during the Great Recession. Using a unique suite of restricted-access data on businesses and their owners from the US Census Bureau, it tests whether and which immigrant-owned businesses performed better than their native-owned counterparts during the Great Recession and whether these differential responses played an important role during the subsequent recovery period
