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Are Retirement Planning Tools Substitutes or Complements to Financial Capability?
Get PDFWe conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers’ retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers’ retirement income goals. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on defined-contribution savings, prominently displays the gap between projected goal and actual retirement income, and allows users to interactively explore how alternative, future contribution choices would affect the gap. The treatment increased average annual retirement contributions by $174 (2.3 percent). However, effects were larger for those with greater financial knowledge, suggesting this type of tool complements, rather than substitutes for, underlying financial capability
Centering Work: Integration and Diffusion of Workforce Development within the U.S. Manufacturing Extension Network
Get PDFAs the U.S. economy rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic, strategies that promote long-term transformation toward high-quality jobs will be critical. This includes workplace-improving interventions that enable employers to upgrade existing jobs, often while enhancing their own competitive position. This paper focuses on the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a national network of federally funded centers that support small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. We document the range of workforce- and workplace-enhancing strategies that MEP centers have adopted since the network’s inception in the mid-1990s. While workforce development is unevenly implemented across today’s MEP network, leading centers within the network are devising transformative strategies that shape underlying business practices in ways that can improve the quality of front-line manufacturing jobs. The pandemic recovery, along with federal commitment to reenergize domestic supply chains, presents an opportunity to establish NIST-MEP as a national workforce-development leader while also strengthening localized institutional partnerships to center that effort on inclusive economic development and recovery
Firms and Unemployment Insurance Take-Up
Get PDFWe use administrative data to quantify the firm role in unemployment insurance (UI) take-up. First, there are firm effects in both claiming and appeals, and, consistent with deterrence effects, these are negatively correlated. Second, low-wage workers are less likely to claim and more likely to have their claims appealed than median-wage workers, and firm effects explain a large share of these income gradients. Third, high-claiming and low-appealing firms are desirable firms: they are higher-paying and have lower separation rates. Finally, the dominant source of targeting error in the UI system is that eligible workers do not apply. Our findings emphasize a novel dimension of the role of firms in the labor market, and have implications for the financing of UI
Common Ownership in Labor Markets
Get PDFIn this paper, we study common ownership in U.S. labor markets, and document that common ownership more than doubled over the period 1999–2017. To identify the causal effects of common ownership on labor market outcomes, we use a firm’s addition to the S&P 500 index as a shock to the common ownership of its competitors in local labor markets. Using a matched difference-in-differences analysis, we find that, after a firm enters the S&P 500 index, the average annual earnings per employee of its local competitors decrease relative to the counterfactual. The effect of S&P 500 index additions on employee earnings is stronger in local labor markets where the employment shares of S&P 500 firms were higher or union coverage rates were lower ex ante. The effect is not driven by changes in workforce characteristics. We also find that an increase in common ownership leads to higher separation rates in treated local labor markets. Perhaps surprisingly, it increases their hiring rates even more, resulting in an overall positive effect on total employment. While together these facts are inconsistent with the canonical oligopsony model, we show that they can be rationalized in a generalized model of oligopsony with a recruitment intensity decision by firms
Seize the Time: Needed Research on Local Economic Development in an Era of Increased Attention to Problems of Place
Get PDFWith the increased attention to place-based policies comes an increased need for policy-relevant research on local economic development. Within the policy area of local economic development, this paper identifies five types of research needs: 1) better definitions of local labor markets; 2) policy know-how on how local economic development’s benefits can be better spread to distressed neighborhoods; 3) evidence on what types of jobs have both good growth prospects in the U.S. economy yet also provide good long-run job opportunities in local labor markets for the majority of U.S. workers who lack a bachelor’s degree; 4) estimates of how local worker education or skill-upgrading programs, or worker attraction programs, affect local labor market outcomes for different groups of workers; and 5) more-rigorous evaluation both of customized business services provided to individual firms and of more-comprehensive regional economic development strategies
