1,721,162 research outputs found
Replication Data for: The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post Great Recession Entrants
No full textAbstract: I study cohort patterns in the labor market outcomes of recent college graduates, examining changes surrounding the Great Recession. Recession entrants have lower wages and employment than those of earlier cohorts; more recent cohorts’ employment is even lower, but the newest entrants’ wages have risen. I relate these changes to “scarring” effects of initial conditions. I demonstrate that adverse early conditions permanently reduce new entrants’ employment probabilities. I also replicate earlier results of medium-term scarring effects on wages that fade out by the early 30s. But scarring cannot account for the employment collapse for recent cohorts. There was a dramatic negative structural break in college graduates’ employment rates, beginning around the 2005 entry cohort, that shows no sign of abating
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Essays in Health and Labor Economics
Get PDFIn the United States, health insurance is often necessary for access to regular, affordable health care. With only eight of every hundred Americans buying private insurance plans on the individual market, the main sources for health insurance traditionally have been employers and the government. As new laws are being debated and introduced to reform an expensive health care industry in which nearly one-sixth of the population is uninsured, research is needed in order to evaluate the costs and benefits of these policy changes and to predict their success. To this end, in addition to understanding how likely individuals are to adopt new health insurance policies, we also should be interested in knowing how the demand for health insurance and changes in its accessibility will affect non-medical decisions. Specifically, labor market choices have been theorized to be directly related to decisions involving insurance coverage. If the availability of health insurance distorts a workers' job-related decisions, then the changing the landscape for how to access insurance may reverberate in employment outcomes. My dissertation focuses on understanding the factors that influence the demand for health insurance and the role that health insurance plays in an individual's decision to work, where to work, and how much to work. Specifically, I focus on the following three related questions: how does the demand for insurance affect labor market decisions such as when to exit unemployment? what drives insurance demand, and in particular, what motivators work best to increase demand for health coverage among the uninsured? and lastly, what are the supply-side employment responses to the provision of free or reduced-cost public health insurance? My first chapter explores how the demand for health insurance can change re-employment decisions among the unemployed, as well as the speed at which individuals return to work. Past research on this issue focuses on job-to-job switches and "job lock" but has yet to focus on individuals looking for work. This chapter uses data on laid-off individuals from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to compare the job search behavior and outcomes of individuals who differ in their demand for health insurance. I use three proxies for demand, based on spousal health and past insurance offer take-up decisions. Although each is potentially confounded by unobserved determinants of job search, I use a difference-in-differences and propensity score designs to isolate plausibly causal effects. I find consistent patterns across all three proxies (despite different potential omitted variables biases). Overall unemployment durations do not vary with demand for insurance, but this masks variation in the types of jobs taken. Individuals with higher demand for insurance have higher hazards for exiting unemployment into a job with insurance, but lower hazards for exiting to a job without insurance. This points to effects of insurance demand on both search effort and reservation wages, and to potentially important distorting effects of employer-linked health insurance. Whereas the first chapter takes variation in demand for insurance as a given, my second chapter digs deeper into the basis for this variation and whether it can be affected. In this chapter, I investigate the reasons the uninsured choose to forego insurance coverage and the impact of different messages on their insurance demand. Working with Enroll America, a large non-profit dedicated to decreasing the number of uninsured Americans, I conducted a stratified experiment to determine the best communication strategies to encourage participation in the healthcare exchanges. We test a combination of the following behavioral and information treatments: a risk treatment that emphasizes the average financial risk for someone without health insurance; a norms treatment that alerts our participants that staying uninsured will be against the law; a savings treatment that highlights the average savings available at the exchanges; a wording treatment where we refer to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as "Obamacare"; and lastly, a cost-calculator treatment that allows individuals to explore the likely cost of insurance based on their own characteristics. Among the uninsured, we find that the cost-calculator treatment, the risk treatment, and the mandate are most effective in increasing intention to purchase insurance. The cost-calculator and the risk treatment increase informedness among this population, but the cost-calculator (when paired with the savings treatment) is the only treatment that increases willingness to pay for insurance. We use the information on willingness to pay to construct sub-group price elasticities of demand to compare to previous work interested in the demand for health insurance. Overall, the results of this chapter highlight the importance of informational campaigns to increase awareness of the costs and benefits of health coverage, particularly after large changes such as those implemented by the ACA.My third chapter continues by looking at the changes that have been introduced as a result of the ACA. Specifically, it explores whether expanding access to government-provided insurance affects individuals' decisions regarding employment and overall hours of work. Recent findings have suggested that increasing access to health insurance outside of employment has a sizable, negative impact on labor force participation. Along these lines, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance will cause a 1.5 to 2% reduction in hours worked in the first ten years. Comparing states by whether they chose to expand Medicaid under reforms introduced by the ACA, I look at changes in the probability a childless adult receives Medicaid, as well as changes in this group's employment likelihood and hours of work. Using household survey data from the CPS monthly survey and ASEC Supplement, I confirm a marked increase in the percent of childless adults insured by Medicaid but find no statistically significant changes in employment outcomes. I compare these results to other estimates of "employment lock" in recent literature. These results, though imprecise, align with the findings in Chapter 1 which suggest that overall employment is not drastically affected by insurance demand
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Essays on the Economics of College Access and Completion
Get PDFThis thesis examines two uncommon topics in the economic literature regarding college access and completion: the role of college proximity in recent high school graduates’ enrollment decisions, and how structural changes to the student experience at a postsecondary institution can affect college completion.The first chapter is a review of the current economic literature on college access and completion. I start by reviewing what we know about the factors and policies that influence college access, focusing on the literature on family resources, financial aid, and behavioral interventions. I follow this with a detailed discussion on the relationship of college proximity on both enroll- ment and educational attainment, first explaining how a nearby college can both lower potential students’ cost constraints of attendance in the local community and influence these students’ goals and expectations. I also review the empirical evidence, both the use of college proximity as a instrumental variable in estimating the returns to education and the direct effects of nearby colleges on application and enrollment behavior. I then transition toward college completion with reviewing what we know about college supply and how access and completion vary across institutional types. I close this review by looking at how financial aid programs can affect college completion as well as access, the effectiveness of various behavioral interventions on course grades and later performance in college, and institutional-level experiments and reforms to improve completion rates.The second chapter concerns the role of distance in college access, by focusing on the opening of four new public universities in California from 1995 to 2005. I exploit these openings to test whether distance is a binding constraint on four-year college enrollment among new high school graduates. I show that distance is highly influential: Although California has dozens of public four-year colleges, 40 percent of enrollment from new graduates is at schools within 25 miles of home. Using event study and difference-in-difference models, I find that the opening of a new university nearby raises the four-year enrollment rate among recent high school graduates from local high schools by 1.6 percentage point (an 8 percent increase), with no effect on the share of local graduates who attend farther-away campuses. The extensive margin effect and lack of displacement show up across a range of subgroups, including under-represented minority students. My findings support the view that cost-of-living constraints are binding for many prospective college students.The third chapter concerns the evaluation of college programs for causal impacts on graduation and other student outcomes, focusing on UC Berkeley Extension’s Fall Program for Freshmen (FPF), a first-year learning community for Spring-admit students to UC Berkeley. Participants choose from a subset of introductory courses and receive advising at facilities near UC Berkeley, while living and participating in activities with other Berkeley students. FPF participants then matriculate to the main campus in the Spring semester. I assess the treatment effect of FPF on college outcomes, using regression and propensity score methods to control for students’ backgrounds at admission and adjusting for differences between FPF participants and regular Fall enrollees at Berkeley. FPF participants are similar to Fall students in their admission characteristics and predicted graduation rates. I find that FPF participants are more likely to graduate and graduate on time from UC Berkeley compared to regular Fall admits in the College of Letters and Science, but do not have major differences in their college grade-point averages (GPAs) at graduation. Students with weaker academic backgrounds have larger program impacts. These findings are robust across a variety of model specifications
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Labor Market Four Years into the Crisis: Assessing Structural Explanations
Get PDFFour years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that structural impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. The author reviews such structural explanations, but after analyzing U.S. data on unemployment and productivity, he finds there is little evidence supporting these hypotheses. He finds that the bulk of the evidence is more consistent with the hypothesis that continued poor performance is primarily attributable to shortfalls in the aggregate demand for labor
The Impact of Choice: A Study of Charter Schools' Effect on America's Disadvantaged Students
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Essays on the Earned Income Tax Credit
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates three questions related to the Earned Income Tax Credit, the largest cash-based, means-tested program in the United States. I study whether the EITC changes how much (as opposed to whether) workers choose to earn, whether increasing awareness of the program can increase participation, and to what extent eligible households take up the California supplement to the federal credit. In Chapter 1, I propose a new strategy for identifying workers’ intensive-margin labor supply elasticity using within-year variation in anticipated year-end tax rates. I modify the standard non-linear budget set approach to include uncertainty about future employment. With uncertainty, households must forecast their annual income in order to anticipate the average and marginal tax rates that apply to their earnings. Using survey and administrative data, I find that low-income households’ labor supply responds more to expected tax rates at the end of the year, when certainty about annual income is greatest. I use the excess sensitivity to tax incentives near the end of the year, relative to other periods, to estimate an intensive margin labor supply elasticity between .08 and .18. This response is identified largely from non-linearity in the EITC schedule and implies a larger intensive margin response to this program than previous estimates.In Chapter 2, my co-authors and I summarize six pre-registered, large-scale field experiments involving over one million subjects testing whether “nudges” could increase take-up of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Despite varying the content, design, messenger, and mode of our messages, we find no evidence that they affected households’ likelihood of filing a tax return or claiming the credit. We conclude that even the most behaviorally informed low-touch outreach efforts cannot overcome the barriers faced by low-income households who do not file returns.In Chapter 3, my co-authors and I use administrative data from California on the population of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients, linked to state tax records, to estimate the number of households who are eligible for California’s supplement to the federal EITC but do not claim it. We find that nearly half a million households who receive SNAP benefits and who were eligible for the state EITC in 2017 did not receive the credit. This includes approximately 42,000 eligible households who claimed the federal EITC but not the state credit; 110,000 eligible households who filed a state tax return but did not claim the state credit; and 290,000 eligible households who did not file a state tax return. The corresponding take-up rate for the CalEITC among eligible SNAP-enrolled households was 53%. Altogether, these households left on the table a total of $75 million in state EITC funds. If received, these credits would have increased incomes among these households by 2.6% and increased total state EITC outlays by 38.8%
Estimating the Charter School Effect: A Comparison of the Performance of Charter and Regular Public School in Arizona, California, and North Carolina
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