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The Effects of an Ellis Act Eviction on Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status
Get PDFRent-control advocates argue that its strongest feature is offering tenants strong protections from economic displacement. Nonetheless, rent control may have negative effects on tenants, as previous research has shown that these tenants have longer commutes and higher unemployment rates because they are incentivized to stay in place even after their location is no longer optimal. I study what happens to tenants when they are displaced from their rent-controlled apartments by exploiting a California law called the Ellis Act that allows landlords in Los Angeles and San Francisco to evict tenants even if they are lease-compliant, under the condition that all the tenants in the building must be evicted at once and are compensated by the landlord with substantial relocation payments. In large apartment buildings (five units or more), these Ellis Act evictions act as an exogenous shock because these landlords are unlikely to be evicting all their tenants just to target an individual household. Using Infutor data, I identify over 900,000 people who lived in a five-plus unit rent-controlled apartment in either San Francisco or Los Angeles in 1999, 11,470 of whom were evicted between 2000 and 2007. I find that evicted tenants were less likely to stay in their original city and more likely to live in lower-income and lower-intergenerational-mobility neighborhoods than control tenants. The negative effects of these evictions appear to be highly persistent: neighborhood socioeconomic status is lower for the evicted group than the control group at least 12 years ex post. These findings support that the Ellis Act imposes steep costs on tenants and may be partially undermining California’s recent attempts to improve housing affordability and stability
Contingent and Alternative Employment: Lessons From the Contingent Worker Supplement, 1995–2017
Get PDFThe Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey—administered six times between 1995 and 2017—is uniquely valuable in providing detailed information on a consistent set of work arrangements in a large, nationally representative survey. Drawing on data from all six CWS waves, we provide an in-depth picture of the nature of contingent and alternative work and whether and how employment arrangements are changing in the United States. We exploit questions in the CWS to distinguish between three types of self-employment, including two types of independent contractors. We also link data on individuals in the CWS to their data in the CPS from the prior and the subsequent month to better understand transitions into and out of contingent and alternative work arrangements. Our analyses reveal considerable heterogeneity in the characteristics of workers in various work arrangements and indicators of the quality of those jobs, including across types of self-employment. Although the CWS shows no overall trend increase in any contingent or alternative work arrangement, our detailed analyses reveal some interesting subgroup trends within certain arrangements. Additionally, we show that individuals who have lost their jobs, are unemployed, or are out of the workforce but want employment commonly end up in contingent and alternative work arrangements. We find, however, that dissatisfaction with alternative work arrangements is relatively high and subsequent employment rates are relatively low, particularly among those who had transitioned to contingent, temporary help, day laborer, and on-call jobs. This descriptive evidence raises concerns about their use as stepping stones to regular employment, and the issue warrants further study
Mismatch in Local Labor Markets: How Demand Shocks to Different Occupations Affect Less- or More-Educated Workers in Diverse Local Labor Markets
Get PDFThis paper estimates the effects on local labor market outcomes (employment rates, real wages, real earnings) of local labor demand shocks to different types of occupations. Occupations are divided into three groups, “high, middle, and low,” with occupations differing in wages paid and education credentials required. Effects are considered on both workers with less than a four-year college degree and workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The strongest benefits for labor market outcomes come from demand shocks to “mid jobs.” Mid-job demand shocks particularly benefit less-educated workers. High-job demand shocks often hurt labor market outcomes for less-educated workers, in part because such shocks push up local prices. Low-job demand shocks sometimes improve labor market outcomes for less-educated workers, and sometimes damage labor market outcomes for more-educated workers. Estimated labor demand effects also vary in different types of local labor markets. For example, when baseline local labor market conditions are tight (high baseline employment rate), less-educated workers gain more in real earnings from low-demand shocks, and lose more in real earnings from high-demand shocks
