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The question that prompted Moises Yi’s journey into economics is the same one at the heart of the academic papers he writes today: What shapes the outcomes of workers?
“Looking at people that I knew in the labor market, I was struck by how people who seemed so similar could end up with very different outcomes,” Yi said.
In graduate school, Yi studied why outcomes varied among manufacturing workers in Germany following large declines in employment in their industry. The research drove home two lessons.
First is the value of rich administrative data that provide enough contextual information to tease out what determines how opportunities and outcomes vary across workers. This appreciation led Yi to his job at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he helps improve data infrastructure for the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program, which links workers to their employers over time.
The second lesson: the importance of place. In the case of displaced German manufacturing workers, Yi and his co-authors found that where workers lived mattered. Workers who lived in places with nonmanufacturing jobs that made use of their specific skills were better able to adjust after manufacturing jobs disappeared.
“I try to understand outcomes for workers by looking at particular features of their economic environment. And a lot of times, that’s about place—city, neighborhood, or other geographic context,” Yi said.
The magazine of the opportunity & Inclusive Growth institute
The role of place is nuanced in Yi’s research. In one recent paper, Yi and co-authors David Card and Jesse Rothstein use LEHD data to examine whether proximity to jobs—and in particular to “good” jobs that pay above-average wages—is different for Black and White workers who live in the same city. If so, this could help explain the racial earnings gap. But they find that Black workers’ homes are, if anything, closer to potential workplaces than White workers’ homes are. Where workers live relative to potential employers in a city does not appear to be driving the earnings gap.
However, the economists’ subsequent analysis finds that the neighborhood where children grow up matters quite a lot. Take two children whose parents have similar incomes. The one who grows up with richer neighbors is likely to earn more as an adult, the economists find. “Neighborhoods shape the environments and networks children are exposed to,” Yi said. “For example, growing up around neighbors employed at high-paying firms is associated with a greater likelihood of working at those kinds of firms later in life.”
This article is featured in the Fall 2026 issue of For All, the magazine of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute
More scholar spotlights from this issue
Andrew Glover—Plain language, policy impact
Richard Liu—Finding his path, leaving his mark
Lisa Camner McKay is a senior writer with the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Minneapolis Fed. In this role, she creates content for diverse audiences in support of the Institute’s policy and research work.
