Upjohn Research
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Assessing the Impact of Differential Privacy on Measures of Population and Racial Residential Segregation
No full textFixing Child Care: What Expanded Public Subsidies Could Mean for Children, Families, and Teachers
No full textWhat Do We Know About Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States? A Synthesis of Research Evidence from Household Surveys, and Administrative Data
Get PDFThe Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS), fielded six times between 1995 and 2017, was designed to measure jobs that were temporary in nature as well as work arrangements thought to be associated with less commitment between workers and employers. The latter includes independent contractor and platform work, temporary help and other intermediated contract work arrangements, and on-call work, which captures a certain type of unpredictable work schedule. While the CWS provides consistent measures of the work arrangements covered in the survey over a 22-year time span, it has shortcomings. Data from other household surveys, employer surveys, and administrative records provide important complementary and sometimes conflicting evidence on the alternative work arrangements measured by the CWS. Through a combination of new empirical analysis and a synthesis of existing research findings, we provide insights from these other data sources into the incidence and trends in alternative work arrangements, the characteristics of workers in these arrangements, and the implications of these arrangements for worker outcomes. Our analysis reveals large discrepancies between the CWS and alternate data sources in the size of the independent contractor workforce. In other cases, compared to the CWS, alternate data sources provide considerably broader measures of work arrangements, affecting our understanding of the number and characteristics of workers in them. We discuss lessons from our findings for improving the measurement of alternative work arrangements
The Impact of Subsidized Child Care and Paid Family Leave on Parents’ Work Performance, Career Advancement, and Health
No full textThe number of working parents in the US has dramatically increased over the past few decades (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Yet, federal-level policies to assist working parents remain sparse. The US is the only developed country that does not provide parents paid time off after childbirth (OECD, Social Policy Division, 2017), and high-quality, affordable child care is remarkably difficult to find (Malik et al., 2018; Pew Research Center, 2015).
My proposed study adds to a small but growing research base on the effects of access to affordable child care and paid parental leave on families. Specifically, I consider the effects these policies may have on parents themselves, a largely understudied area (Rossin-Slater & Uniat, 2019). In collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Heissel at the Naval Postgraduate School, I draw on rich data from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to evaluate how the transition to parenthood impacts both mothers’ and fathers’ health and work outcomes. I then explore whether better access to DoD subsidized child care or longer fully paid family leave after a birth effectively improves (or possibly diminishes) parental health and work productivity.
The research expands beyond past research on labor market attachment and wage measures. Instead, I examine actual job performance, career progress, and health as human capital to understand how home life shapes employees’ contributions to an organization, and how policies that support family life impact firms
Job Upgrading and Earnings Growth for Non-College Workers
No full textIn this project, we aim to test this idea by providing the first ever match between linked employer-employee Census data and task data from online job postings. We use this to determine whether job upgrading increases pay for non-college workers, and specifically assess which types of job upgrades do so. By following worker earnings trajectories over time, we distinguish instances of job upgrading that change sorting of workers into jobs, from job upgrading that provides reliable wage premiums for a consistent set of workers. Doing this helps distinguish among different competing theoretical explanations for job-specific pay effects: on-the-job learning (Lynch,1992), activating underutilized human capital (Blairet al., 2020), or increasing worker bargaining power (Osterman, 2006; Wilmers, 2020).
Our new matched data covers all industries and occupations, and therefore also allows us to conduct case studies of job upgrading proposals in specific occupations. We hope to use these case studies to provide actionable results for policy makers and employers. For example, in a preliminary case study of retail clerks, we find that while retail jobs that incorporate communication skills provide a 15% earnings premium, half of this is accounted for by worker selection. In contrast, the pay premium associated with computer literacy is durable and not explained by selection. Results like these can help employers, newly concerned about attracting new workers, to redesign frontline jobs
Promise Program Design for Equity Outcomes: A Landscape Survey
Get PDFUsing the W.E. Upjohn Institute’s Promise Programs Database—a searchable data set covering about 200 place-based scholarship programs—this paper explores how the design of Promise programs can shape their equity impacts. The authors first examine the landscape of place-based programs to understand the impact of program design on equity outcomes. They then use the statistical method of polychoric correlation to combine design features related to the equity potential of community-based Promise programs and develop an index expressing this concept. They conclude with two vignettes of recently announced Promise programs with different design features and implementation strategies to highlight the varied paths to equitable student outcomes. The paper finds that while some Promise programs have more potential than others to close equity gaps, whether they in fact do so will depend on implementation. Ongoing definitional debates, program heterogeneity, and the difficulty of observing implementation all complicate the task of assessing equity impact and underscore the need for more qualitative research focused on questions of equity and effectiveness