System Working Papers

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Jesse Bricker and Geng Li
Chetty et al. (2022a) found that economic connectedness (EC), a social capital measure derived from Facebook friendships, predicted upward income mobility well. Bricker and Li (2017) proposed the average credit score of a community's residents as an indicator of local social trust. We show that the average credit scores are robustly correlated with EC, are negatively correlated with the friending-bias measure introduced in Chetty et al. (2022b), and predict economic mobility to a comparable extent after controlling for EC. The consistency and complementarity between these two indicators underscores trust as a crucial component of social capital.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Sara Goldrick-Rab, Christine Baker-Smith, Travis T. York, Kallie Clark, Douglas Webber, and Christel Perkins
Universities are increasingly allocating “completion grants” to students who are nearing the finish line but facing financial challenges. We assess the impact of completion grants averaging $1,200 that were distributed to more than 14,000 students. We find that only two-thirds of eligible students graduated within the academic year. Receiving a completion grant did not improve that rate. However, nearly all eligible students graduated within three years or were still working on their degrees. We do not find evidence that completion grants exerted positive impacts for marginalized groups.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality
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Kabir Dasgupta and Alexander Plum
During the pandemic, all states were approved to provide Emergency Allotments (EA) to households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). We use the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Surveys to study whether the end of EA is associated with food-related challenges and economic hardships. Our findings indicate that EA termination is followed by a decrease in the likelihood that adult survey respondents had sufficient food for consumption and an increase in the probability of experiencing difficulty in paying usual household expenses.
Topic: Public policy; COVID-19
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Rachel Cummings and María J. Luengo-Prado
We document the characteristics of children and young adults identified as having a learning disability and study whether legislative changes in diagnosis criteria have had a noticeable effect on determining who receives a diagnosis. We further document that individuals identified as having a learning disability experience less desirable outcomes early in life, including trouble with the police, drug use, violent behavior, incarceration, self-reported low levels of well-being, lower educational attainment, and less favorable labor market outcomes. We also find that the mothers of children diagnosed with learning disabilities are less likely than other mothers to participate in the labor market.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Dionissi Aliprantis and Kristen Tauber
Black men who witnessed a shooting before turning 12 have household earnings that are 31 percent lower as adults than those who did not. We present evidence that this gap is causal and is most likely the result of toxic stress; it is not mediated by incarceration and is constant across neighborhood socioeconomic status. We also study exposure to violence and nurturing relationships during adolescence. Item-anchored indexes synthesize variables on these treatments better than summing positive responses, item response theory, or principal components. Providing adolescents with nurturing relationships is almost as beneficial as preventing their exposure to violence.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
July 2023
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Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan, and Douglas Webber
We provide the first evidence on the role of college networks in the re-employment of displaced workers. An extensive literature examines the consequences of layoffs, but the factors that facilitate re-employment are relatively under-studied. Using administrative data and a cross-cohort design, we find that network connections with actively hiring employers increase the re-employment rate. This result is driven by re-employment at contacts’ firms, suggesting that a stronger network does not improve worker quality more broadly. These results suggest that college has the potential to improve employment outcomes beyond improved human capital and signaling.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Economic opportunity
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Kristin F. Butcher, Patrick J. McEwan, and Akila Weerapana
Many observers argue that diversity in economics and STEM fields is critical. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women’s colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94%) more likely to receive an economics degree than non-enrollees. Overall, 3.2 percentage points—or 44% of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees—is explained by college exposure to female instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women’s colleges in increasing female participation in economics.
Topics: Diversity & inclusion; Higher education
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Fumiko Hayashi, Aditi Routh, and Ying Lei Toh
Using multi-year survey data, we conduct a regression model analysis to examine which types of unbanked households are more or least likely to open a bank account, using their prior banking status and interest in having a bank account. Households that are uninterested and didn’t previously have an account are less likely to open one, and tend to be less educated, be of a racial minority, be foreign born, lack access to digital technology, rely heavily on cash, and distrust banks. Advancing financial inclusion for this group will require strategies to increase their trust in the financial services industry.
Topic: Borrowing and lending
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Morris Kleiner and Wenchen Wang
We examine the probability of an occupational licensed worker selecting into the public sector, while also measuring how licensing impacts key labor market outcomes, such as wages, hours worked, and employment. We find that having an occupational license increases the likelihood of working in the public sector, raises wages by about 6%, and increases hours worked, but reduces employment, even when controlling for other labor market institutions. Our estimates suggest that the social welfare effects of licensing in the public sector are like those for the whole sample, and they generally result in a welfare loss in the public sector.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Allen N. Berger, Maryann P. Feldman, W. Scott Langford, and Raluca A. Roman
Specialization in lending based on a central mechanism of shared minority identity can yield an advantage in serving community needs through times of financial and economic crises. To test this proposition, we analyze individual banks in their local market context from 2006 to 2020. Results suggest minority-owned banks improved economic resilience in their communities during the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis through increased small business and household lending. At least 1.9 million more minority jobs would have been maintained post-GFC if all U.S. banks had behaved like minority-owned banks.
Topics: Borrowing and lending; Community & economic development; Recessions
June 2023
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Juan C. Córdoba, Anni T. Isojärvi, and Haoran Li
We endogenize bargaining weights in a life cycle search and matching model by replacing a standard Cobb-Douglas (CD) matching function with a general constant elasticity of substitution (CES) matching function to study the implications for the long-term labor share and bargaining power. The CES model explains 64 percent of the reported decline in the labor share since 1980, while the CD model explains only 28 percent of the decline. We then find that workers' bargaining power declined 11 percent between 1980 and 2007 because of a decline in tightness.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth
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Sarena Goodman, Simona Hannon, Adam Isen, and Alvaro Mezza
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic fallout likely posed financial strain on U.S. households with children, particularly those with a student loan payment. The CARES Act included provisions to curb the impacts of these payments, applied independent of need. We find that (1) families with children benefited more from the relief, but that relief was concentrated among higher-income and White families, and (2) there were larger improvements in overall credit health and an increased use of other credit among families with student loan debt that was eligible for relief relative to those with student loan debt that was not.
Topics: Inequality; COVID-19
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Alex Combs, John Foster, and Erin Troland
This paper explores an under-studied channel for school finance inequality, property assessment. School districts have historically relied on local tax to fund schools, which can generate disparities in funding. States have passed school finance reforms that increase funding to poorer districts, but many have not adequately addressed property assessment inequality. We analyze a state government intervention to address property assessment inequities within and across school districts. Using difference-in-differences and county- and school district-level administrative data, we find the intervention boosted assessments by 32 percent, assessment equity improved substantially, and local property revenues temporarily increased by 17 percent.
Topics: Educational equity
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Hie Joo Ahn, Bart Hobijn, and Ayşegül Şahin
Aggregate U.S. labor market dynamics are well approximated by a dual labor market—supplemented with a third, predominantly home-production segment. We uncover this structure by estimating a Hidden Markov Model. The different market segments are identified through (in)equality constraints on labor market transition probabilities. The combination of the aggregate and individual-level evidence we provide points to dualism in the U.S. labor market being an equilibrium division of labor, under labor market imperfections, that minimizes adjustment costs in response to predictable seasonal and unpredictable business cycle fluctuations.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Sergey Chernenko, Nathan Kaplan, Asani Sarkar, and David Scharfstein
We use the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to study the sources of racial disparities in use of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We find that Black-owned firms are 8.9 percentage points less likely than observably similar White-owned firms to receive PPP loans. We also find that application behavior fully explains why Black-owned firms are less reliant on banks and more reliant on fintech leaders from PPP loans. Sorting by Black-owned firms away from banks and toward fintechs is significantly stronger in more racially biased counties, and the bank approval disparity is also larger in more racially biased counties.
Topics: Inequality; Banks; Payments & FinTech
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Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington
How does remote work affect productivity, and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We study a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers were less productive than on-site workers. After call center closures due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to that of already-remote workers. Negative worker selection into remote work explains the 8 percent productivity gap. We also find indications that remote work degraded call quality and reduced workers’ promotion rates.
Topics: Economic growth & productivity; Workforce
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Facundo Piguillem, Hernán Ruffo, and Nicholas Trachter
This paper analyzes the welfare effects of unemployment insurance in a life cycle model, focusing on partial versus general equilibrium effects. We study an OLG economy with learning-by-doing human capital accumulation. Agents can be employed or unemployed. While unemployed, agents’ search for new jobs is costly. We find that the life cycle model provides two key components crucial for welfare evaluation: it emphasizes workers' insurance needs by accurately reproducing the left tail of the wealth distribution and generates a realistic response of precautionary savings to transfers.
Topics: Insurance; Unemployment
May 2023
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DuckKi Cho, Lyungmae Choi, Michael Hertzel, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang
We show that the social capital embedded in employees’ networks contributes to firm performance. Using novel individual-level network data, we measure a firm’s social capital derived from employees’ connections with external stakeholders. Our directed network data allow for differentiating those connections that know the employee and those that the employee knows. Results show that firms with more employee social capital perform better; the positive effect stems primarily from employees being known by others. We provide causal evidence exploiting the enactment of a government regulation that imparted a negative shock to networking with specific sectors and provide evidence on the mechanisms.
Topics: Inequality; Economic growth & productivity
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Tanya Byker, Elena Patel, and Shanthi Ramnath
We use Current Population Survey data to assess the efficacy of state-mandated paid sick leave policies on leave taking behavior. We find that these policies increase leave taking for care-giving for men by 10 to 20 percent, and this effect is strongest for men with young children in the household. We also find that Hispanic men and men without a bachelor’s degree are 20 to 25 percent more likely to take care-giving leave. We do not find evidence that these policies affect leave taking for own sickness for men or women, nor do we find evidence that these policies affect care-giving leave taking for women.
Topics: Public policy; Workforce
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Jung Sakong and Alexander K. Zentefis
Low-income and Black households are less likely to visit bank branches than high-income and White households are, despite seemingly relying more on branches as means of bank participation. We assess whether unequal branch access can explain that disparity, by proposing a measure of bank branch access based on a gravity model of consumer trips to bank branches, estimated using mobile device geolocation data. We find that low-income communities have bank branch access, but that lower demand for products and services explains their lower branch use. In Black communities, worse access explains their entire drop-off in branch use.
Topics: Inequality; Banks; Low & moderate income
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Dean Corbae, Andrew Glover, and Michael Nattinger
We develop a simple equilibrium model of rental markets for housing in which eviction occurs endogenously. Both landlords and renters lack commitment; a landlord evicts a delinquent tenant if they do not expect total future rent payments to cover costs, while tenants cannot commit to paying more rent than they would be able or willing to pay. Housing externalities widen the gap in housing access and quality between relatively high- and low-earning renters. Finally, government policies that restrict landlords’ ability to evict can improve welfare, though a full moratorium on evictions should be reserved for crises.
Topics: Housing; Public policy
April 2023
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Daniel G. Garrett and Ivan T. Ivanov
We study how regulation limiting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies distorts financial market outcomes. In 2021 Texas enacted laws prohibiting municipalities from contracting with banks with certain ESG policies, leading to the exit of five of the largest municipal bond underwriters from the state. Issuers face higher uncertainty and borrowing costs as a result. Texas issuers will incur $300–$500 million in additional interest on the $31.8 billion borrowed during the first eight months following enactment.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Credit & financial markets; Banks
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Chris de Mena, Suvy Qin, and Jing Zhang
Asian Americans experienced a disproportionately larger surge in unemployment rates than other racial and ethnic groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing literature typically examines labor demand channels to explain this, we instead explore a labor supply channel. Our hypothesis is that Asian Americans are more cautious about COVID-19 infections and thus more selective about job opportunities. Analysis of cellphone data during the pandemic indicates that non-work mobility significantly decreased in areas with larger Asian populations, supporting our hypothesis.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Public health; Unemployment
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Gustavo de Souza
I study the effect of a quota for disabled workers on the labor market and on welfare. Using a task-based model, I show that the effect of a quota will depend on the productivity of disabled workers and their labor supply elasticity. I find that the quota increased the hiring of disabled workers, but it reduced wages and employment of non-disabled workers, suggesting that the quota reduced firms’ productivity. I also find that the quota for disabled workers decreased welfare by 0.33% and forced the government to increase marginal taxes.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Public policy
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Natee Amornsiripanitch
This paper uses data on millions of single-borrower mortgage applications to study the relationship between applicant age and mortgage application outcomes. Mortgage refinance applications submitted by older borrowers are associated with higher rejection probabilities, a pattern that holds within lender and across loan types. Age appears to be an equally important correlate of mortgage application outcomes as race and ethnicity. The results suggest that older individuals systematically face higher barriers to mortgage access.
Topics: Borrowing and lending; Housing; Inequality
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Mark Bils, Marianna Kudlyak, and Paulo Lins
Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate cyclicality in labor’s user cost exploiting the long-run wage in a match to control for match quality. Using NLSY data for 1980 to 2019, we identify three channels by which hiring in a recession affects user cost. We find that labor’s user cost is highly procyclical, increasing by more than 4 percent for a 1 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate.
Topics: Recessions; Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Elin Halvorsen, Joachim Hubmer, Serdar Ozkan, and Sergio Salgado
We use Norwegian administrative panel data on wealth and income between 1993 and 2015 to study life cycle wealth dynamics, focusing on the wealthiest households. We find that on average, the wealthiest start their lives substantially richer than other households in the same cohort, own mostly private equity, earn higher returns, derive most of their income from dividends and capital gains, and save at higher rates. However, there are distinguishable groups among the wealthiest: one-fourth of them start with negative wealth but experience rapid wealth growth early in life, explained by even higher saving rates and higher labor income.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
March 2023
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Lara Loewenstein and Paul S. Willen
We study the evolution of prices and rents of residential property. After constructing rent and price indices for renter- and owner-occupied properties, we decompose the change in the price of occupant-owned property into (1) changes in rent, (2) changes in the relative prices of investor- and occupant-owned properties, and (3) changes in the price–rent ratio. Via a simple model, we link our decomposition to different sources of variation in house prices. We argue that while the 2000s boom was plausibly driven by exuberant expectations, the boom of the 2020s more likely resulted from a preference shock.
Topics: Housing; Credit & financial markets
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Kristen Broady, Darlene Booth-Bell, Anthony Barr, and Ryan Perry
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. This analysis updates earlier findings that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the highest estimated risk of automation and underrepresented in the 30 occupations with the lowest estimated risk of automation. The paper also considers automation’s impact on wage structures, the broader implications of automation for global economics, and the potential interplay of automation with recent developments in artificial intelligence.
Topics: Technology & innovation; Inequality; Employment & labor markets
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Daniel R. Carroll and Sewon Hur
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 tariff increases by the United States and its major trading partners. We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their age, income, wealth, and labor skill. When tariff revenues are used to reduce distortionary taxes on consumption, labor, and capital income, the average welfare loss from the tariff increases is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth households, while only wealthy households experience a welfare gain.
Topics: Trade & globalization; Taxes & tax policy; Inequality
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Gizem Kosar and Wilbert van der Klaauw
In addition to realized earnings and employment shocks, forward-looking individuals are presumed to condition their consumption and labor supply decisions on their subjective beliefs about future labor market risks. This paper analyzes these perceptions of earnings and employment risks using rich monthly panel data. It documents considerable heterogeneity in individual expectations of earnings growth, voluntary job exit, and involuntary job exit. We examine how these expectations evolve over the working life and the business cycle, and how they co-vary with expectations about the macro economy.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth
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James Bailey, Nathan Blascak, and Slava Mikhed
In July 2005, the state of Missouri implemented a series of cuts to its Medicaid program that removed about 100,000 Missourians from the program and reduced the value of the insurance for remaining enrollees. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we show how these cuts increased out-of-pocket medical spending for individuals living in Missouri and led to increases in both credit card borrowing and debt in third-party collections.
Topics: Insurance; Public health; Credit & financial markets
February 2023
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Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter
Using panel tax data, we follow the earnings of individuals over business cycles. Compared with those for prior recessions, the COVID policy response and recovery were far more progressive. Among workers starting in the bottom quintile, median real earnings including fiscal relief increased 66 percent in 2020 and earnings increases offset relief decreases in the 2021 recovery. After the prior two recessions, this measure had decreased by 24 percent.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; COVID-19; Public policy
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Daniel Ringo
Does monetary policy influence who becomes a homeowner? Exploiting the timing of high-frequency observations of mortgage applicants locking in their interest rates around monetary policy shocks, I find that a 1-percentage-point, policy-induced increase in mortgage rates lowers the presence of low-income households in the population of home buyers by 1 percentage point, and of low- and moderate-income households by 2 percentage points. Effects are substantially stronger among first-time home buyers, and they persist for approximately one year.
Topics: Monetary policy; Housing
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Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix
We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. We then exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level to show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
Topics: Credit & financial markets
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Daniel Hartley and Jonathan Rose
In a panel of census tracts across large cities in the postwar United States, we compare tracts subjected to blockbusting activity to similar neighboring tracts not subjected to blockbusting. We find that blockbusting caused substantially lower house values over the next few decades. Our analysis of property-level data in one neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, finds that new residents that purchased their properties through blockbusters were charged higher prices and had higher foreclosure rates than new residents that purchased directly from existing property owners.
Topics: Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth; Housing
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Dean Corbae and Andrew Glover
We develop a framework to understand the effects of pre-employment credit screening in both labor and credit markets. People differ in both their propensity to default on debt and the profits they create for firms that employ them. In our calibrated economy, workers with a low default probability are highly productive and therefore generate more profits for their employers; thus, firms create more jobs for those with good credit. However, using credit reports to screen job applicants creates a poverty trap: an unemployed worker with poor credit has a low job-finding rate and cannot improve their credit without a job. Banning employer credit checks eliminates the poverty trap, but job seekers with good and bad credit now apply to the same jobs, which reduces matching efficiency. As a result, average job-finding rates fall 1.3 percent for high-productivity workers and rise by 1.7 percent for low-productivity workers.
Topics: Credit & financial markets
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Jacob Goss, Daniel Mangrum, and Joelle W. Scally
We quantify the total stock of balances eligible for the 2022 federal student loan forgiveness policy and explore which groups benefit most. The borrowers who benefit most, as measured by the ratio of forgiven balances to balances held, are younger, have lower credit scores, and live in lower-income neighborhoods. Compared to other salient fiscal policies, the forgiveness policy distributes less benefit to lower-income ZIP codes than the Earned Income Tax Credit, but more benefit to lower-income ZIP codes than the 2019 Child Tax Credit and the 2019 education tax credits for higher education.
Topics: Public policy; Higher education; Consumer finance
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Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie Van Dijk
Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and reduces earnings, durable consumption, and access to credit. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants.
Topics: Housing; Public policy; Inequality
January 2023
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Joaquin Garcia-Cabo, Anna Lipinska, and Gaston Navarro
Unemployment insurance and wage subsidies are key tools to support labor markets in recessions. We develop a multi-sector search and matching model with on-the-job human capital accumulation to study labor market policy responses to sector-specific shocks. We find that after a temporary sector-specific shock, unemployment insurance improves both productivity and reallocation toward productive sectors at the cost of initially higher unemployment and, thus, human capital destruction. In the United States, unemployment insurance is preferred to wage subsidies when it does not distort job creation for too long.
Topics: Unemployment; Insurance; Public policy
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Oz Shy and Joanna Stavins
Using detailed data from a 2021 representative diary survey of U.S. consumers, we investigate whether lower-income consumers and Black consumers are more likely to pay bank account or credit card fees. We find that the probability of paying several types of bank account and credit card fees is correlated with consumers’ demographic attributes and payment behavior. We find that lower-income consumers were significantly more likely to pay overdraft fees and Black consumers were significantly more likely to pay any bank account fee when we hold income and account balances constant in the regressions.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Barış Kaymak and Immo Schott
We document a strong empirical connection between corporate taxation and the manufacturing labor share in the United States and other OECD countries. Our estimates associate 30 percent to 60 percent of the observed decline in labor shares with the fall in corporate taxation. Using an equilibrium model of an industry where firms differ in their capital intensities, we show that lower corporate tax rates reduce the labor share by raising the market share of capital-intensive firms. Given the empirical distribution in the U.S. manufacturing sector, our quantitative analysis suggests that corporate tax cuts explain a significant part of the decline in the manufacturing labor share since the 1950s.
Topics: Manufacturing; Taxes & tax policy
December 2022
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Bharadwaj Kannan, Roberto B. Pinheiro, and Harry Turtle
We model an environment with overlapping generations of labor to show that policies restricting labor mobility increase a firm's monopsony power and labor turnover costs. Subsequently, firms increase capital expenditure, altering their optimal capital–labor ratio. We confirm this by exploiting the statewide adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), a law intended to protect trade secrets by restricting labor mobility. After an IDD adoption, local firms increase capital by 3.5 percent. IDD adoptions do not spur investment in either R&D or growth options as intended.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Claire Conzelmann, Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Toan Phan, and Jeremy S. Hoffman
Urban design can amplify the environmental risks of climate change through the well-known urban heat island and rainfall effects. Here, we use a boundary design to estimate the persistent causal effects of redlining on present-day exposure to climate change–exacerbated environmental risks in six large U.S. cities. Properties in areas assigned a lower credit grade by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s have 3 percent higher exposure to flood risk and a 0.07◦F higher air temperature today compared to similar properties in higher-graded areas. We show that these differences are driven by lower tree canopy coverage and ground surface perviousness in lower-graded areas.
Topics: Climate; Inequality
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Cynthia L. Doniger and Desmond Toohey
The design of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) policy—which features benefits assigned as a percentage of past wages up to a cap—allows us to test whether policy changes impact job-search outcomes of workers who are not directly affected. We show that the documented pattern conforms with the predictions of a canonical model of information frictions: wage posting with random search. Our results provide novel evidence of information frictions in this market that are relevant both quantitatively and with respect to policy. Moreover, our estimates suggest that aggregate unemployment of insured individuals would decrease if the replacement rate were increased while holding the cap constant.
Topics: Unemployment; Public policy
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Pinghui Wu, Vincent Fusaro, and H. Luke Shaefer
Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited households with children, buffering them from earnings losses at the pandemic’s start and sustaining spending growth over time. Household essential spending increased proportionally with the delivery of cash transfers, while discretionary spending was influenced more by pandemic-specific factors beyond household income. These findings highlight the efficacy of government transfers in safeguarding household consumption during a period of large-scale job loss.
Topics: COVID-19; Public policy
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Pinghui Wu
This article offers the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rates rise when workers’ relative earnings fall. The model takes into account that a job not only provides economic security but also affirms a worker’s social status, which is tied to their relative position in the labor market. The decline in relative earnings for non-college prime-age men over the last four decades is estimated to have raised their labor force exit propensity by 0.49 percentage points, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in their labor force exit rate during this period.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth
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Patricia Cortès, Gizem Kosar, Jessica Pan, and Basit Zafar
This paper studies how peer beliefs shape individual attitudes toward maternal labor supply, using realistic hypothetical scenarios that elicit recommendations on the labor supply choices of a mother with a young child and an information treatment embedded within representative surveys. Across the scenarios, we find that individuals systematically overestimate the extent of gender conservativeness among the people around them. Exposure to information on peer beliefs leads to a shift in recommendations, driven largely by information-based belief updating.
Topics: Workforce
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James N. Conklin, Kristopher Gerardi, and Lauren Lambie-Hanson
In recent years the amount of “tappable” home equity held by U.S. homeowners has reached historic levels. But more than one-quarter of recent applications for mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW) loan products were denied. For Black and Hispanic homeowners, their denial rates were 44 percent and 32 percent, respectively. Controlling for loan and borrower characteristics commonly used in the underwriting process significantly reduces the MEW disparities. Seemingly race-neutral underwriting criteria in the MEW product space explain large differences in the extent to which minority homeowners can access their home equity.
Topics: Inequality; Borrowing & lending
November 2022
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Neil Bhutta, Aurel Hizmo, and Daniel Ringo
We assess racial discrimination in mortgage approvals, using new data on mortgage applications. Minority applicants tend to have significantly lower credit scores and higher leverage, and they are less likely than White applicants to receive algorithmic approval from race-blind government automated underwriting systems (AUS). Observable applicant risk factors explain most of the racial disparities in lender denials.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Credit & financial markets; Housing
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Gustavo de Souza and André Victor D. Luduvice
In the United States, workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement of a minimum work spell and a monetary requirement of a past minimum earnings. Using discontinuity of UI rules at state borders, we find that the monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and the share of part-time workers, while the tenure requirement has the opposite effect. In a quantitative model, the monetary requirement induces workers to search longer because low paying jobs are not covered by UI.
Topics: Insurance; Unemployment; Public policy
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Bruce Fallick and Christopher L. Foote
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. This paper uses state-level data to examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population. We find that shifts in the age distribution move the unemployment rate in the direction that a mechanical shift-share model would predict. But these effects are larger than the mechanical model would generate, indicating the presence of amplifying indirect effects of the age distribution on unemployment.
Topics: Unemployment; Workforce
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Barış Kaymak, David Leung, and Markus Poschke
We assess the empirical relevance of different macroeconomic modeling approaches to wealth concentration, using the joint distribution of earnings, capital income, and net worth in combination with an overlapping-generations model of household heterogeneity. We find large earnings disparities to be the primary source of wealth concentration in the United States. This reflects the fact that labor income from salaries as well as from entrepreneurship is a major income source for top income and wealth groups in the data. Bequests and differences in rates of return on capital together explain about half the holdings of the wealthiest of households, but much less for the rest.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
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Fatih Guvenen, Gueorgui Kambourov, Burhanettin Kuruscu, Sergio Ocampo, and Daphne Chen
How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? With return heterogeneity, the two tax systems typically have opposite implications for efficiency and inequality. Under capital income taxation, entrepreneurs who are more productive and therefore generate more income pay higher taxes. Under wealth taxation, entrepreneurs who have similar wealth levels pay similar taxes regardless of their productivity, which expands the tax base, shifts the tax burden toward unproductive entrepreneurs, and raises the savings rate of productive ones. In the simulated model parameterized to match U.S. data, replacing the capital income tax with a wealth tax in a revenue-neutral fashion delivers a significantly higher average welfare.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
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Victoria Gregory, Julian Kozlowski, and Hannah Rubinton
We incorporate race into an overlapping-generations spatial-equilibrium model with neighborhood spillovers. Race matters in two ways: (i) the Black-White wage gap and (ii) homophily, the preferences of individuals over the racial composition of their neighborhood. We find that these two forces generate a Black-White college gap of 22 percentage points, explaining about 80 percent of the college gap in the data for the St. Louis metro area. A policy of equalizing school funding across neighborhoods reduces the college gap by almost 10 percentage points and generates large welfare gains.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality; Spatial economics
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Dionissi Aliprantis, Hal Martin, and Kristen Tauber
This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents’ outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific outcomes, and generates bias in ranking neighborhoods’ effects. HMP success is aided by the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and relaxing supply constraints, perhaps by targeting lower-ranked neighborhoods.
Topics: Housing; Public policy; Diversity & inclusion
October 2022
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Amrita Kulka, Aradhya Sood, and Nicholas Chiumenti
An important way to ensure low rents and low house prices is to increase the housing supply, which in land-constrained metropolitan areas involves constructing denser forms of housing. This study looks at how different zoning regulations interact with each other to affect the supply of various types of housing and the prices of single-family homes and rents for multifamily apartments. This paper focuses on three regulations: multifamily zoning, maximum-height restrictions, and density restrictions.
Topics: Housing; Low & moderate income
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Parag Mahajan, Dhiren Patki, and Heiko Stüber
Studies find that if a worker enters the labor market during an economic downturn versus a period of expansion, they likely will have more difficulty finding a high-paying job, because the availability of such jobs is strongly procyclical. The earnings penalty for starting a career during bad times is both substantial and persistent. But to what extent do non-pecuniary characteristics of jobs offset some of those earnings losses? This paper uses population-scale linked employer-employee administrative data from Germany to estimate both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary impact of entering the workforce during a recession.
Topics: Recessions; Employment & labor markets
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Wenhua Di, Carla Fletcher and Jeff Webster
Parents taking out loans for their children’s college educations may face an excessive debt burden that jeopardizes their own financial security. We find that Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) borrowers are more likely to default if their children attend low-resource institutions. Although parent PLUS generally outperforms student loans, PLUS performance is sensitive to program costs during difficult economic times. In contrast, student outcomes depend more on educational outcomes. This study reveals the differing consequences of parent and student borrowing for higher education and the troublesome PLUS program design that poses challenges to certain borrowers.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Higher education
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Phillip Levine and Dubravka Ritter
We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. We show that this treatment of assets provides an implicit subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually to students from families with above-median incomes. White students receive larger subsidies than Black students and Hispanic students with similar family incomes, and this gap in subsidies is associated with disadvantages in educational advancement and student loan levels.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth
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Lutz Hendricks, Tatyana Koreshkova, and Oksana Leukhina
College admissions are highly meritocratic in the U.S. today, but this is not the case in many other countries. What is the tradeoff? On one hand, meritocracy produces more human capital overall if higher-ability students learn more in college and if they learn more in higher-quality colleges. On the other hand, more meritocracy generates a higher degree of earnings inequality. In this paper, we quantify this efficiency-equality tradeoff.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality
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Victoria Gregory
This paper identifies workers who experience a job separation during a recession and tracks their labor force status in the following year, using the Current Population Survey. Workers are classified as exiters if they leave the labor force shortly after their job loss and non-exiters if they do not. The pool of exiters is disproportionately female, less educated, and older. I find that changes in the likelihood of being re-employed as well as the composition of individuals out of work are important for understanding the differences between the labor market in the Great Recession and the pandemic recession.
Topics: Recession; Employment & labor markets
September 2022
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Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu, and Kaushik Vasudevan
We study immigrant founders of venture capital–backed firms. Immigrant founders have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20 percent of all venture capital–backed founders over the past 30 years. Higher education has served as the primary entry channel for immigrant founders. Immigrant founders are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, leading to potentially large local economic benefits associated with attracting foreign students. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Topics: Public policy; Immigration; Higher education
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Nathan Blascak and Vyacheslav Mikhed
We study how health-insurance eligibility affects financial distress for young adults using the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) dependent coverage mandate—the part of the ACA that requires private health-insurance plans to cover individuals up to their 26th birthday. Our estimates show that increasing access to health insurance lowers young adults’ out-of-pocket medical expenditures and debt in third-party collections. However, reductions in financial distress are transitory, as they diminish after an individual loses access to parental insurance when they age out of the mandate at age 26.
Topics: Insurance; Public health
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Robert Rich and Joseph Tracy
This paper focuses on the implications of alternative methods of aggregating individual wage data for the behavior of economy-wide wage growth. The analysis is motivated by evidence of significant heterogeneity in individual wage growth and its cyclicality. Because of this heterogeneity, the choice of aggregation will affect the properties of economy-wide wage growth measures. We find that aggregation effects largely account for average hourly earnings growth being persistently lower and less cyclical than average wage growth over the period 1990–2015, with these effects reflecting a disproportionate weighting of high-earning workers.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
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Axelle Ferriere, Philipp Grübener, Gaston Navarro, and Oliko Vardishvili
We study the optimal design of means-tested transfers and progressive income taxes. In a simple analytical model, we demonstrate an optimally negative relation between transfers and income-tax progressivity due to efficiency and redistribution concerns. Transfers are key to implementing higher progressivity in average tax-and-transfer rates than in marginal ones, achieving redistribution while preserving efficiency. Quantitatively, the left tail of the income distribution determines optimal transfers, whereas the right tail determines income-tax progressivity.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
August 2022
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Kenneth P. Brevoort
Under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), banks can fulfill their affirmative obligation to meet local credit needs by lending in low-to-moderate-income (LMI) communities or by purchasing loans made by others. This paper evaluates whether giving CRA credit for purchases has had its intended effect of increasing LMI credit availability by making LMI loans more liquid. Analyses using a regression discontinuity design show that the CRA increases loan purchases without affecting LMI originations. Instead, banks purchase loans that are temporarily diverted from government sponsored enterprises, which provides little benefit to the communities the CRA is meant to help.
Topics: Community Reinvestment Act (CRA); Borrowing & lending; Low & moderate income
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José Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer, and Emil Mihaylov
The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanism in the wage-setting behavior of U.S. employers, and we develop novel survey data to quantify its force. Our data imply a cumulative wage-growth moderation of 2.0 percentage points over two years. The amenity-values gains associated with the recent rise of remote work also lower labor's share of national income by 1.1 percentage points.
Topics: Wages, income, & wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Kristen Broady, Darlene Booth-Bell, and Taylor Griffin
Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership, education, access to credit, and retirement savings. While none of the economic factors listed fully explains the racial wealth gap, each factor, along with a history of racism and discrimination, has contributed to the extreme wealth inequality in America today.
Topics: Wages, income, & wealth; Inequality
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Leah Brooks, Jonathan Rose, and Stan Veuger
We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC, civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. After establishing that civil disturbance property destruction was quasi-random within blocks, we show that destroyed lots were more likely than other lots on the same block to remain vacant for the next 30 years. We also show that destroyed lots have only recently converged in terms of structure value. Our theoretical framework suggests that the city sought to preclude for-profit land owners from leaving land vacant until demand conditions improved.
Topics: Community & economic development
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Dionissi Aliprantis, Kyle D. Fee, and Mark E. Schweitzer
This paper quantifies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes in the United States between 2006 and 2016. In our preferred specification, a 10-percent-higher local prescription rate is associated with a lower prime-age labor force participation rate of 0.53 percentage points for men and 0.10 percentage points for women.
Topics: Public health; Employment & labor markets
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Erik Hurst, Patrick J. Kehoe, Elena Pastorino, and Thomas Winberry
We develop a framework with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power, and putty-clay technology to study the distributional impact of the minimum wage in the short and long run. We find that in the short run, a large increase in the minimum wage has a small effect on employment and therefore increases the labor income of the workers who were earning less than the new minimum. In the long run, however, the minimum wage has perverse distributional implications in that it reduces the employment, income, and welfare of precisely the low-income workers it is meant to help. Existing transfer programs are more effective at improving long-run outcomes for workers at the low end of the wage distribution.
Topics: Minimum wage; Low & moderate income; Public policy
July 2022
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Donggyu Lee, Sebastian Doerr, and Thomas Drechsel
This paper shows that rising top income shares affect job creation at firms of different sizes. High-income households save relatively more in stocks and bonds and less in bank deposits. Exploiting variation in top incomes across U.S. states, we establish that an increase in the income share of the top 10 percent reduces the job creation rate at small, bank-dependent firms relative to the rate at large firms. Experiments in our model show that growing top incomes account for 16 percent of the decline in the employment share of small firms since 1980, and that ignoring the link between inequality and job creation understates the welfare effects of income redistribution.
Topics: Inequality; Employment & labor markets; Small business
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W. Scott Frame, Ruidi Huang, Erik J. Mayer, and Adi Sunderam
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Disparities in mortgage application rates, approvals, loan take-up, and default rates are significantly reduced when minority borrowers work with minority loan officers. Our results suggest that minority underrepresentation among loan officers has adverse effects on minority borrowers’ access to credit.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Brett R. Barkley and Mark E. Schweitzer
We apply data from the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey from 2016 to 2020 to estimate disparities in access to small business financing through loan denials and discouragement. We find that substantial credit disparities continue to exist despite the growth of fintech lenders, which prior research shows have expanded the set of small businesses receiving credit. PPP loans represented an unprecedented support for small businesses, support that was not dependent on the creditworthiness of businesses, but minority-owned businesses are estimated to have received a smaller fraction of the funds they applied for from the program.
Topics: Credit & financial markets; Payments & FinTech; Inequality
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Lauren Sartain, Riley Lewers, and Lisa Barrow
Urban school districts nationwide have increased within-district choice for families. In response, district policymakers are overhauling the systems for applying to and enrolling in schools, with the goal of making it easier and more equitable for students to enroll in schools that are a good fit for them. Using the implementation of such a system in Chicago Public Schools, we examine how applications to, offers from, and enrollment in different types of high schools (e.g., high-performing vs. low-performing schools, charter vs. neighborhood schools) changed. The largest gains appear to be from streamlining applications and offers, with students receiving a single-best offer and schools having more certainty around their incoming ninth-grade class.
Topics: K-12 education; Inequality
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Marco Migueis, Michael Suher, and Jessie Xu
We assess whether minimum account balances to avoid fees, account maintenance fees, and non-sufficient funds charges are systematically different in low- and moderate-income communities (LMI) and in majority-minority communities. We find that they are generally higher. Differences in bank fees between LMI, majority-minority, and other communities result from various factors, including bank lending income, bank operating costs, and bank size.
Topics: Banks; Inequality; Low & moderate income
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Byeongchan An, Robert Bushman, Anya Kleymenova, and Rimmy E. Tomy
This paper studies the role banking supervision plays in improving access to credit for minority groups by investigating how enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) affect the bank borrower base. We find that after the resolution of an EDO, banks significantly increase residential mortgage lending to minority borrowers relative to lending to White borrowers, even when the enforcement order is not issued for violations of fair lending laws. Our findings highlight the indirect social benefits of bank enforcement and supervision.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Banks; Inequality
June 2022
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David Ratner and Jae Sim
Conventional wisdom has it that sound monetary policy since the 1980s not only conquered the Great Inflation but also buried the Phillips curve. This paper provides an alternative explanation: labor market policies that have eroded worker bargaining power might have been the source of the demise of the Phillips curve. We show that a nearly 90 percent reduction in inflation volatility is possible even without any changes in monetary policy when the economy transitions from equal shares of power between workers and firms to a new balance in which firms dominate.
Topics: Monetary policy; trade unions
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Samuel Dodini, Jeff Larrimore, and Anna Tranfaglia
This paper considers the credit response of individuals after the implementation of new work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, using a large nationally representative sample of credit records. We find that the new requirements lead more people to seek out new credit. New work requirements also result in an increase in total outstanding balances on bank and retail card accounts and increase the number of borrowers that are past due on these accounts. These findings suggest that some individuals are turning to credit and debt products to cover expenses after losing eligibility for SNAP benefits.
Topics: Public policy; Borrowing & lending
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Daniel A. Dias and Joao B. Duarte
We show that monetary policy affects homeownership decisions and argue that this effect is an important and overlooked channel of monetary policy transmission. We first document that monetary policy shocks are a substantial driver of fluctuations in the U.S. homeownership rate and that monetary policy affects households' housing tenure choices. We show that the homeownership decision channel amplifies the redistributive effects of monetary policy, with contractionary shocks benefiting more outright homeowners and disadvantaging more renters and homeowners with a mortgage.
Topics: Monetary policy; housing
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Juan Herreno and Mathieu Pedemonte
We study the differential regional effects of monetary policy, exploiting geographical heterogeneity in income across cities in the United States. We find that prices and employment in poorer cities react more to monetary policy shocks. The results for prices hold for a wide range of narrow consumer expenditure categories. We show that an increase in heterogeneity across cities amplifies the effect of monetary policy on prices and employment.
Topics: Monetary policy; Spatial economics
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Victor Hernandez Martinez and Kaixin Liu
This paper argues that the value of unemployment insurance (UI) can be decomposed into a liquidity component and an insurance component. Using Spanish administrative data, we find that the liquidity component represents half of the value of UI, while the insurance component captures the remaining half. However, the relevance of each component is highly heterogeneous across different groups of workers. Both poorer and wealthier workers are similarly liquidity-constrained, but poorer workers place a higher value on UI because the insurance component is significantly more important for them.
Topics: Unemployment; public policy
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Takushi Kurozumi and Willem Van Zandweghe
Should monetary policy offset the effects of labor supply shocks on inflation and the output gap? Motivated by weak labor force participation during the pandemic, we reexamine the question by introducing labor force entry and exit in an otherwise canonical model with sticky prices and wages. The entry decision generates an employment channel of monetary policy, and a labor supply shock to the value of nonparticipation in the labor market induces a policy trade-off between stabilization of the employment gap and wage growth.
Topics: Monetary policy; Employment & labor markets
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Brad Hershbein and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies how U.S. local labor markets respond to employment losses after recessions. We find that following each recession between 1973 and 2009, areas that lose more jobs during the recession experience persistent relative declines in employment and population. These local labor markets also experience persistent decreases in the employment–population ratio and per capita earnings. Our results imply that limited population responses result in longer-lasting consequences for local labor markets than previously thought and that recessions are followed by persistent reallocation of employment across space.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Recessions; Spatial economics
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John Mondragon and Johannes Wieland
What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas, we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. Our results imply a fundamentals-based explanation for the recent increases in housing costs over speculation or financial factors and that the evolution of remote work is likely to have large effects on the future path of house prices and inflation.
Topics: Housing
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Alexander Bick and Adam Blandin
Economists have recently begun using independent online surveys to collect national labor market data. Questions remain over the quality of such data. This paper provides an approach to address these concerns. Our case study is the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS), a novel online survey built around the Current Population Survey (CPS). Our discussion contains practical suggestions for the design of novel labor market surveys and highlights other promising applications of our methodology.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; COVID-19
May 2022
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Paweł Doligalski, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Nicolas Werquin
Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
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Daniel Aaronson, Bhashkar Mazumder, Daniel Hartley, and Martha Stinson
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long-form 2000 Census. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived during adulthood in neighborhoods characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.
Topics: Inequality
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Gustavo de Souza and André Victor D. Luduvice
In the United States, unemployed workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement that stipulates the minimum qualifying work spell and a monetary requirement that determines a past minimum wage. This paper develops a heterogeneous-agents model with history-dependent UI benefits in order to quantitatively obtain an optimal UI program design. We show that, because it mitigates moral hazard, the monetary requirement can generate higher welfare levels than an increase in the length of the tenure requirement.
Topics: Unemployment; Public policy
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devin michelle bunten, Ellen Fu, Lyndsey Rolheiser, and Christopher Severen
How have the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Black commuters spent 50.3 more minutes commuting per week in 1980 than White commuters; this difference declined to 22.4 minutes per week in 2019. Two factors account for the majority of the difference: Black workers are more likely to commute by transit, and Black workers make up a larger share of the population in cities with long average commutes.
Topics: Inequality
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Giulio Cornelli, Jon Frost, Leonardo Gambacorta, and Julapa Jagtiani
Recently, nonbank lenders have gained market share in the small-business lending market in the United States. Among nonbanks, fintech lenders have become particularly active, leveraging alternative data for their own internal credit scoring. Our results show that fintech SBL platforms lent more in zip codes with higher business bankruptcy filings and higher unemployment rates. Overall, fintech lenders have the potential to create a more inclusive financial system, allowing small businesses that were less likely to receive credit through traditional lenders to access credit and to do so at lower cost.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Credit & financial markets; Payments & FinTech
April 2022
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Kimberly Bayard, Tomaz Cajner, Vivi Gregorich, and Maria D. Tito
This paper explores the factors behind differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker—has disappeared in recent years. A decomposition of the premium by union membership status reveals that declines have been substantially larger across union members. Our findings suggest that the erosion of “good” manufacturing jobs has contributed to the increase in overall wage inequality and could accelerate the decline of the manufacturing sector.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Manufacturing; Inequality
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Elior Cohen
Housing First programs provide housing assistance without preconditions for homeless individuals as a platform for rehabilitation, but limited evidence exists on their effects on socioeconomic outcomes. Using a novel data set combining administrative records from multiple public agencies in Los Angeles County and a random case manager assignment design, I estimate that Housing First assistance reduces homelessness and crime, increases income and employment, and does not have a detectable effect on health care utilization. Cost-benefit analysis implies that these potential savings offset program costs within 18 months.
Topics: Public policy
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Brad Hershbein and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in per capita earnings. However, these areas also experience persistent increases in per capita transfers, which offset 16 percent of the earnings loss on average. The increase in transfers is driven by unemployment insurance in the short run and medical, retirement, and disability transfers in the long run. Our results show that nominally place-neutral transfer programs redistribute considerable sums of money to places with depressed economic conditions.
Topics: Recessions; Public policy; Employment & labor markets
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Elira Kuka and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies differences in receipt and take-up of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits among White and Black individuals. We combine state-level UI regulations with data containing detailed information on individuals’ work history and UI receipt. Black individuals who separate from a job are 24 percent less likely than White individuals to receive UI. The UI receipt gap stems primarily from lower take-up of UI benefits among likely eligible individuals rather than differences in benefit eligibility.
Topics: Unemployment; Inequality; Insurance
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Xudong (Sean) An, Stuart A. Gabriel, and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan
We investigate the impact of 2020 COVID-19 rental eviction moratoria on household well-being. Analysis indicates that eviction moratoria reduced eviction filings and resulted in redirection of scarce household financial resources to immediate consumption needs, notably including food and grocery spending. We also find that eviction moratoria reduced household food insecurity and mental stress, with larger effects evidenced among African American households.
Topics: Public policy; COVID-19
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The Labor Market Effects of Place-Based Policies: Evidence from England’s Neighbourhood Renewal Fund
Robert Calvert Jump and Adam Scavette
We examine the labor market effects of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which targeted 88 of the most deprived areas in England during the early 2000s. The fund disbursed almost £3 billion for community safety, education, health care and worklessness, with supply-side interventions making up the bulk of the program's spending on worklessness. We find statistically significant impacts on local employment and out-of-work benefit claimants. Our results suggest that policy interventions to improve local labor supply can be a successful strategy for neighborhood renewal.
Topics: Community & economic development; Employment & labor markets; Public policy
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You Suk Kim, Donghoon Lee, Tess Scharlemann, and James Vickery
We study the role of mortgage servicers in implementing the CARES Act mortgage forbearance program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite universal eligibility, around one-third of the nonperforming federally backed loans in our sample fail to enter into forbearance. The relative frequency of these "missing" forbearances varies significantly across servicers for observably similar loans, with small servicers and nonbanks having a lower propensity to provide forbearance. The incidence of forbearance-related complaints by borrowers is also higher for these servicers. We also use servicer-level variation to estimate the causal effect of forbearance on borrower outcomes.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Public policy; COVID-19
March 2022
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Ning Jia, Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak
We review developments in research on within-country migration, focusing on internal migration in the U.S. We begin by describing approaches to modelling individuals' migration decisions and equilibrium outcomes across local areas. Next, we summarize evidence regarding the impact of migration on individuals' outcomes, implications of migration for local labor market adjustment, and interactions between migration and housing markets. Finally, we discuss evidence on the efficacy of policies aimed at encouraging migration and conclude by highlighting important unanswered questions that are critical for informing migration-related policy.
Topics: Migration; Employment & labor markets
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Elias Ilin, Samantha Shampine, and Ellyn Terry
We evaluate the effects of free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on the labor force participation of mothers, using variation in pre-K rules across U.S. states. We find that access to free pre-K programs increases overall maternal labor force participation by 2.3 percentage points. Mothers with the following demographic characteristics significantly increase their labor supply as a result of access to free pre-K: those who are married, those who are college educated, residents of metropolitan areas, and those with income either below 200 percent or above 400 percent of the federal poverty level.
Topics: Early childhood education; Employment & labor markets
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John Sabelhaus and Jeffrey P. Thompson
We present updated measures of racial disparities in wealth, using the most recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances augmented by household-level estimates of defined benefit pension wealth. We find that racial wealth disparities are smaller than the numbers typically discussed in other research, but the disparities remain substantial. Differences in lifetime earnings, pension generosity, and a handful of other human capital and work-related variables explain three-quarters of the White-Black wealth gap and 80 to 90 percent of the White-Hispanic gap.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
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Jung Sakong
Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms—when expected returns are low—and sell after a bust—when expected returns are high. The estimated dispersion in expected returns from this “buy high, sell low” channel is large: the interquartile-range difference is 60 basis points per year.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality; Recessions
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Daniel R. Carroll and Sewon Hur
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the U.S. and its major trading partners. We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their age, income, wealth, and labor skill. When tariff revenues are used to reduce labor and capital income taxes and increase transfers, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth and low-income workers, while only wealthy households experience a welfare gain.
Topics: Trade & globalization; Inequality; Taxes & tax policy
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Stephan D. Whitaker
Using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor markets. There are not clear advantages or disadvantages for migrants to strong or weak labor market regions as measured by credit scores, consumption, bankruptcy, or foreclosure.
Topics: Migration; Employment & labor markets
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Cavit Baran, Eric Chyn, and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies the impact of the first Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to the North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime.
Topics: Migration; K-12 Education
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Tristan Potter, Bart Hobijn, and Andre Kurmann
We study the efficiency of non-compete agreements (NCAs) in an equilibrium model of labor turnover. The model is consistent with empirical studies showing that NCAs reduce turnover, average wages, and wage dispersion for low-wage workers. But the model also predicts that NCAs, by reducing turnover, raise recruitment and employment. We show that optimal NCA policy (i) is characterized by a Hosios-like condition that balances the benefits of higher employment against the costs of inefficient congestion and poaching, and (ii) depends critically on the minimum wage, so that enforcing NCAs can be efficient with a sufficiently high minimum wage.
Topics: Minimum wage; Employment & labor markets
February 2022
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Bin Wei and Feng Zhao
This paper examines racial disparities in mortgage processing times prior to the Global Financial Crisis. We find that in the case of mortgages securitized by government-sponsored enterprises, Black borrowers are underrepresented and experience a longer processing time than White borrowers. At the same time, Black borrowers are overrepresented and face a similar processing time among privately securitized mortgages. Additionally, Black borrowers are strongly associated with the faster segments of mortgage markets, faster lenders within each segment, and the types of loan products that are processed faster, all of which subsequently experienced higher defaults.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, Ken Snowden, and Thomas Storrs
We show that from its inception in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) did not insure mortgages in low-income urban neighborhoods, where the vast majority of urban Black Americans lived. The FHA’s exclusionary practice predates the advent of the infamous maps later made by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and shows little change after the drafting of those maps. In contrast, the HOLC itself broadly loaned to such neighborhoods and to Black homeowners. We conclude that the HOLC’s redlining maps had little effect on the geographic distribution of either program’s mortgage market activity.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality; Housing
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Daniel Carroll and Sewon Hur
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the U.S. and its major trading partners. When tariff revenues are used to reduce labor and capital income taxes and increase transfers, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth and low-income workers; only wealthy households experience a welfare gain.
Topics: Trade & globalization; Taxes & tax policy; Inequality
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Natee Amornsiripanitch
Among single-family homes that enjoy the same set of property tax–funded amenities and pay the same statutory property tax rate, owners of inexpensive houses pay almost 50 percent higher effective tax rates than owners of expensive houses because inexpensive houses are over-assessed relative to expensive houses. This pattern is attributed to measurement error in sale prices, tax assessors’ ignoring variation in priced house and neighborhood characteristics, and infrequent reappraisal.
Topics: Housing; Taxes & tax policy; Inequality
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Fatih Karahan, Serdar Ozkan, and Jae Song
We study the determinants of lifetime earnings inequality in the U.S. by focusing on job ladder dynamics and on-the-job learning as sources of wage growth. We find that the vast differences across worker types in job ladder risk—job loss, job finding, and contact rates—account for 80 percent of wage growth differences among workers with below median lifetime earnings. We conclude that different economic forces are driving the inequality in different parts of the lifetime earnings distribution.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets; Inequality
January 2022
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Joaquin Garcia-Cabo, Anna Lipinska, and Gaston Navarro
Unemployment insurance and wage subsidies are key tools to support labor markets in recessions. We develop a multi-sector search and matching model with on-the-job human capital accumulation to study labor market policy responses to sector-specific shocks. We find that after a temporary sector-specific shock, unemployment insurance improves both productivity and reallocation toward productive sectors at the cost of initially higher unemployment and, thus, human capital destruction. In the United States, unemployment insurance is preferred to wage subsidies when it does not distort job creation for too long.
Topics: Unemployment; Insurance; Public policy
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Oz Shy and Joanna Stavins
Using detailed data from a 2021 representative diary survey of U.S. consumers, we investigate whether lower-income consumers and Black consumers are more likely to pay bank account or credit card fees. We find that the probability of paying several types of bank account and credit card fees is correlated with consumers’ demographic attributes and payment behavior. We find that lower-income consumers were significantly more likely to pay overdraft fees and Black consumers were significantly more likely to pay any bank account fee when we hold income and account balances constant in the regressions.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Barış Kaymak and Immo Schott
We document a strong empirical connection between corporate taxation and the manufacturing labor share in the United States and other OECD countries. Our estimates associate 30 percent to 60 percent of the observed decline in labor shares with the fall in corporate taxation. Using an equilibrium model of an industry where firms differ in their capital intensities, we show that lower corporate tax rates reduce the labor share by raising the market share of capital-intensive firms. Given the empirical distribution in the U.S. manufacturing sector, our quantitative analysis suggests that corporate tax cuts explain a significant part of the decline in the manufacturing labor share since the 1950s.
Topics: Manufacturing; Taxes & tax policy
December 2022
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Bharadwaj Kannan, Roberto B. Pinheiro, and Harry Turtle
We model an environment with overlapping generations of labor to show that policies restricting labor mobility increase a firm's monopsony power and labor turnover costs. Subsequently, firms increase capital expenditure, altering their optimal capital–labor ratio. We confirm this by exploiting the statewide adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), a law intended to protect trade secrets by restricting labor mobility. After an IDD adoption, local firms increase capital by 3.5 percent. IDD adoptions do not spur investment in either R&D or growth options as intended.
Topics: Employment & labor markets
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Claire Conzelmann, Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Toan Phan, and Jeremy S. Hoffman
Urban design can amplify the environmental risks of climate change through the well-known urban heat island and rainfall effects. Here, we use a boundary design to estimate the persistent causal effects of redlining on present-day exposure to climate change–exacerbated environmental risks in six large U.S. cities. Properties in areas assigned a lower credit grade by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s have 3 percent higher exposure to flood risk and a 0.07◦F higher air temperature today compared to similar properties in higher-graded areas. We show that these differences are driven by lower tree canopy coverage and ground surface perviousness in lower-graded areas.
Topics: Climate; Inequality
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Cynthia L. Doniger and Desmond Toohey
The design of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) policy—which features benefits assigned as a percentage of past wages up to a cap—allows us to test whether policy changes impact job-search outcomes of workers who are not directly affected. We show that the documented pattern conforms with the predictions of a canonical model of information frictions: wage posting with random search. Our results provide novel evidence of information frictions in this market that are relevant both quantitatively and with respect to policy. Moreover, our estimates suggest that aggregate unemployment of insured individuals would decrease if the replacement rate were increased while holding the cap constant.
Topics: Unemployment; Public policy
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Pinghui Wu, Vincent Fusaro, and H. Luke Shaefer
Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited households with children, buffering them from earnings losses at the pandemic’s start and sustaining spending growth over time. Household essential spending increased proportionally with the delivery of cash transfers, while discretionary spending was influenced more by pandemic-specific factors beyond household income. These findings highlight the efficacy of government transfers in safeguarding household consumption during a period of large-scale job loss.
Topics: COVID-19; Public policy
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Pinghui Wu
This article offers the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rates rise when workers’ relative earnings fall. The model takes into account that a job not only provides economic security but also affirms a worker’s social status, which is tied to their relative position in the labor market. The decline in relative earnings for non-college prime-age men over the last four decades is estimated to have raised their labor force exit propensity by 0.49 percentage points, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in their labor force exit rate during this period.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth
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Patricia Cortès, Gizem Kosar, Jessica Pan, and Basit Zafar
This paper studies how peer beliefs shape individual attitudes toward maternal labor supply, using realistic hypothetical scenarios that elicit recommendations on the labor supply choices of a mother with a young child and an information treatment embedded within representative surveys. Across the scenarios, we find that individuals systematically overestimate the extent of gender conservativeness among the people around them. Exposure to information on peer beliefs leads to a shift in recommendations, driven largely by information-based belief updating.
Topics: Workforce
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James N. Conklin, Kristopher Gerardi, and Lauren Lambie-Hanson
In recent years the amount of “tappable” home equity held by U.S. homeowners has reached historic levels. But more than one-quarter of recent applications for mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW) loan products were denied. For Black and Hispanic homeowners, their denial rates were 44 percent and 32 percent, respectively. Controlling for loan and borrower characteristics commonly used in the underwriting process significantly reduces the MEW disparities. Seemingly race-neutral underwriting criteria in the MEW product space explain large differences in the extent to which minority homeowners can access their home equity.
Topics: Inequality; Borrowing & lending
November 2022
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Neil Bhutta, Aurel Hizmo, and Daniel Ringo
We assess racial discrimination in mortgage approvals, using new data on mortgage applications. Minority applicants tend to have significantly lower credit scores and higher leverage, and they are less likely than White applicants to receive algorithmic approval from race-blind government automated underwriting systems (AUS). Observable applicant risk factors explain most of the racial disparities in lender denials.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Credit & financial markets; Housing
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Gustavo de Souza and André Victor D. Luduvice
In the United States, workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement of a minimum work spell and a monetary requirement of a past minimum earnings. Using discontinuity of UI rules at state borders, we find that the monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and the share of part-time workers, while the tenure requirement has the opposite effect. In a quantitative model, the monetary requirement induces workers to search longer because low paying jobs are not covered by UI.
Topics: Insurance; Unemployment; Public policy
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Bruce Fallick and Christopher L. Foote
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. This paper uses state-level data to examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population. We find that shifts in the age distribution move the unemployment rate in the direction that a mechanical shift-share model would predict. But these effects are larger than the mechanical model would generate, indicating the presence of amplifying indirect effects of the age distribution on unemployment.
Topics: Unemployment; Workforce
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Barış Kaymak, David Leung, and Markus Poschke
We assess the empirical relevance of different macroeconomic modeling approaches to wealth concentration, using the joint distribution of earnings, capital income, and net worth in combination with an overlapping-generations model of household heterogeneity. We find large earnings disparities to be the primary source of wealth concentration in the United States. This reflects the fact that labor income from salaries as well as from entrepreneurship is a major income source for top income and wealth groups in the data. Bequests and differences in rates of return on capital together explain about half the holdings of the wealthiest of households, but much less for the rest.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
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Fatih Guvenen, Gueorgui Kambourov, Burhanettin Kuruscu, Sergio Ocampo, and Daphne Chen
How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? With return heterogeneity, the two tax systems typically have opposite implications for efficiency and inequality. Under capital income taxation, entrepreneurs who are more productive and therefore generate more income pay higher taxes. Under wealth taxation, entrepreneurs who have similar wealth levels pay similar taxes regardless of their productivity, which expands the tax base, shifts the tax burden toward unproductive entrepreneurs, and raises the savings rate of productive ones. In the simulated model parameterized to match U.S. data, replacing the capital income tax with a wealth tax in a revenue-neutral fashion delivers a significantly higher average welfare.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
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Victoria Gregory, Julian Kozlowski, and Hannah Rubinton
We incorporate race into an overlapping-generations spatial-equilibrium model with neighborhood spillovers. Race matters in two ways: (i) the Black-White wage gap and (ii) homophily, the preferences of individuals over the racial composition of their neighborhood. We find that these two forces generate a Black-White college gap of 22 percentage points, explaining about 80 percent of the college gap in the data for the St. Louis metro area. A policy of equalizing school funding across neighborhoods reduces the college gap by almost 10 percentage points and generates large welfare gains.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality; Spatial economics
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Dionissi Aliprantis, Hal Martin, and Kristen Tauber
This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents’ outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific outcomes, and generates bias in ranking neighborhoods’ effects. HMP success is aided by the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and relaxing supply constraints, perhaps by targeting lower-ranked neighborhoods.
Topics: Housing; Public policy; Diversity & inclusion
October 2022
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Amrita Kulka, Aradhya Sood, and Nicholas Chiumenti
An important way to ensure low rents and low house prices is to increase the housing supply, which in land-constrained metropolitan areas involves constructing denser forms of housing. This study looks at how different zoning regulations interact with each other to affect the supply of various types of housing and the prices of single-family homes and rents for multifamily apartments. This paper focuses on three regulations: multifamily zoning, maximum-height restrictions, and density restrictions.
Topics: Housing; Low & moderate income
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Parag Mahajan, Dhiren Patki, and Heiko Stüber
Studies find that if a worker enters the labor market during an economic downturn versus a period of expansion, they likely will have more difficulty finding a high-paying job, because the availability of such jobs is strongly procyclical. The earnings penalty for starting a career during bad times is both substantial and persistent. But to what extent do non-pecuniary characteristics of jobs offset some of those earnings losses? This paper uses population-scale linked employer-employee administrative data from Germany to estimate both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary impact of entering the workforce during a recession.
Topics: Recessions; Employment & labor markets
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Wenhua Di, Carla Fletcher and Jeff Webster
Parents taking out loans for their children’s college educations may face an excessive debt burden that jeopardizes their own financial security. We find that Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) borrowers are more likely to default if their children attend low-resource institutions. Although parent PLUS generally outperforms student loans, PLUS performance is sensitive to program costs during difficult economic times. In contrast, student outcomes depend more on educational outcomes. This study reveals the differing consequences of parent and student borrowing for higher education and the troublesome PLUS program design that poses challenges to certain borrowers.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Higher education
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Phillip Levine and Dubravka Ritter
We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. We show that this treatment of assets provides an implicit subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually to students from families with above-median incomes. White students receive larger subsidies than Black students and Hispanic students with similar family incomes, and this gap in subsidies is associated with disadvantages in educational advancement and student loan levels.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth
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Lutz Hendricks, Tatyana Koreshkova, and Oksana Leukhina
College admissions are highly meritocratic in the U.S. today, but this is not the case in many other countries. What is the tradeoff? On one hand, meritocracy produces more human capital overall if higher-ability students learn more in college and if they learn more in higher-quality colleges. On the other hand, more meritocracy generates a higher degree of earnings inequality. In this paper, we quantify this efficiency-equality tradeoff.
Topics: Higher education; Inequality
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Victoria Gregory
This paper identifies workers who experience a job separation during a recession and tracks their labor force status in the following year, using the Current Population Survey. Workers are classified as exiters if they leave the labor force shortly after their job loss and non-exiters if they do not. The pool of exiters is disproportionately female, less educated, and older. I find that changes in the likelihood of being re-employed as well as the composition of individuals out of work are important for understanding the differences between the labor market in the Great Recession and the pandemic recession.
Topics: Recession; Employment & labor markets
September 2022
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Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu, and Kaushik Vasudevan
We study immigrant founders of venture capital–backed firms. Immigrant founders have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20 percent of all venture capital–backed founders over the past 30 years. Higher education has served as the primary entry channel for immigrant founders. Immigrant founders are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, leading to potentially large local economic benefits associated with attracting foreign students. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Topics: Public policy; Immigration; Higher education
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Nathan Blascak and Vyacheslav Mikhed
We study how health-insurance eligibility affects financial distress for young adults using the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) dependent coverage mandate—the part of the ACA that requires private health-insurance plans to cover individuals up to their 26th birthday. Our estimates show that increasing access to health insurance lowers young adults’ out-of-pocket medical expenditures and debt in third-party collections. However, reductions in financial distress are transitory, as they diminish after an individual loses access to parental insurance when they age out of the mandate at age 26.
Topics: Insurance; Public health
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Robert Rich and Joseph Tracy
This paper focuses on the implications of alternative methods of aggregating individual wage data for the behavior of economy-wide wage growth. The analysis is motivated by evidence of significant heterogeneity in individual wage growth and its cyclicality. Because of this heterogeneity, the choice of aggregation will affect the properties of economy-wide wage growth measures. We find that aggregation effects largely account for average hourly earnings growth being persistently lower and less cyclical than average wage growth over the period 1990–2015, with these effects reflecting a disproportionate weighting of high-earning workers.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
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Axelle Ferriere, Philipp Grübener, Gaston Navarro, and Oliko Vardishvili
We study the optimal design of means-tested transfers and progressive income taxes. In a simple analytical model, we demonstrate an optimally negative relation between transfers and income-tax progressivity due to efficiency and redistribution concerns. Transfers are key to implementing higher progressivity in average tax-and-transfer rates than in marginal ones, achieving redistribution while preserving efficiency. Quantitatively, the left tail of the income distribution determines optimal transfers, whereas the right tail determines income-tax progressivity.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
August 2022
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Kenneth P. Brevoort
Under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), banks can fulfill their affirmative obligation to meet local credit needs by lending in low-to-moderate-income (LMI) communities or by purchasing loans made by others. This paper evaluates whether giving CRA credit for purchases has had its intended effect of increasing LMI credit availability by making LMI loans more liquid. Analyses using a regression discontinuity design show that the CRA increases loan purchases without affecting LMI originations. Instead, banks purchase loans that are temporarily diverted from government sponsored enterprises, which provides little benefit to the communities the CRA is meant to help.
Topics: Community Reinvestment Act (CRA); Borrowing & lending; Low & moderate income
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José Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer, and Emil Mihaylov
The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanism in the wage-setting behavior of U.S. employers, and we develop novel survey data to quantify its force. Our data imply a cumulative wage-growth moderation of 2.0 percentage points over two years. The amenity-values gains associated with the recent rise of remote work also lower labor's share of national income by 1.1 percentage points.
Topics: Wages, income, & wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Kristen Broady, Darlene Booth-Bell, and Taylor Griffin
Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership, education, access to credit, and retirement savings. While none of the economic factors listed fully explains the racial wealth gap, each factor, along with a history of racism and discrimination, has contributed to the extreme wealth inequality in America today.
Topics: Wages, income, & wealth; Inequality
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Leah Brooks, Jonathan Rose, and Stan Veuger
We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC, civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. After establishing that civil disturbance property destruction was quasi-random within blocks, we show that destroyed lots were more likely than other lots on the same block to remain vacant for the next 30 years. We also show that destroyed lots have only recently converged in terms of structure value. Our theoretical framework suggests that the city sought to preclude for-profit land owners from leaving land vacant until demand conditions improved.
Topics: Community & economic development
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Dionissi Aliprantis, Kyle D. Fee, and Mark E. Schweitzer
This paper quantifies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes in the United States between 2006 and 2016. In our preferred specification, a 10-percent-higher local prescription rate is associated with a lower prime-age labor force participation rate of 0.53 percentage points for men and 0.10 percentage points for women.
Topics: Public health; Employment & labor markets
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Erik Hurst, Patrick J. Kehoe, Elena Pastorino, and Thomas Winberry
We develop a framework with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power, and putty-clay technology to study the distributional impact of the minimum wage in the short and long run. We find that in the short run, a large increase in the minimum wage has a small effect on employment and therefore increases the labor income of the workers who were earning less than the new minimum. In the long run, however, the minimum wage has perverse distributional implications in that it reduces the employment, income, and welfare of precisely the low-income workers it is meant to help. Existing transfer programs are more effective at improving long-run outcomes for workers at the low end of the wage distribution.
Topics: Minimum wage; Low & moderate income; Public policy
July 2022
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Donggyu Lee, Sebastian Doerr, and Thomas Drechsel
This paper shows that rising top income shares affect job creation at firms of different sizes. High-income households save relatively more in stocks and bonds and less in bank deposits. Exploiting variation in top incomes across U.S. states, we establish that an increase in the income share of the top 10 percent reduces the job creation rate at small, bank-dependent firms relative to the rate at large firms. Experiments in our model show that growing top incomes account for 16 percent of the decline in the employment share of small firms since 1980, and that ignoring the link between inequality and job creation understates the welfare effects of income redistribution.
Topics: Inequality; Employment & labor markets; Small business
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W. Scott Frame, Ruidi Huang, Erik J. Mayer, and Adi Sunderam
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Disparities in mortgage application rates, approvals, loan take-up, and default rates are significantly reduced when minority borrowers work with minority loan officers. Our results suggest that minority underrepresentation among loan officers has adverse effects on minority borrowers’ access to credit.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Brett R. Barkley and Mark E. Schweitzer
We apply data from the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey from 2016 to 2020 to estimate disparities in access to small business financing through loan denials and discouragement. We find that substantial credit disparities continue to exist despite the growth of fintech lenders, which prior research shows have expanded the set of small businesses receiving credit. PPP loans represented an unprecedented support for small businesses, support that was not dependent on the creditworthiness of businesses, but minority-owned businesses are estimated to have received a smaller fraction of the funds they applied for from the program.
Topics: Credit & financial markets; Payments & FinTech; Inequality
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Lauren Sartain, Riley Lewers, and Lisa Barrow
Urban school districts nationwide have increased within-district choice for families. In response, district policymakers are overhauling the systems for applying to and enrolling in schools, with the goal of making it easier and more equitable for students to enroll in schools that are a good fit for them. Using the implementation of such a system in Chicago Public Schools, we examine how applications to, offers from, and enrollment in different types of high schools (e.g., high-performing vs. low-performing schools, charter vs. neighborhood schools) changed. The largest gains appear to be from streamlining applications and offers, with students receiving a single-best offer and schools having more certainty around their incoming ninth-grade class.
Topics: K-12 education; Inequality
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Marco Migueis, Michael Suher, and Jessie Xu
We assess whether minimum account balances to avoid fees, account maintenance fees, and non-sufficient funds charges are systematically different in low- and moderate-income communities (LMI) and in majority-minority communities. We find that they are generally higher. Differences in bank fees between LMI, majority-minority, and other communities result from various factors, including bank lending income, bank operating costs, and bank size.
Topics: Banks; Inequality; Low & moderate income
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Byeongchan An, Robert Bushman, Anya Kleymenova, and Rimmy E. Tomy
This paper studies the role banking supervision plays in improving access to credit for minority groups by investigating how enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) affect the bank borrower base. We find that after the resolution of an EDO, banks significantly increase residential mortgage lending to minority borrowers relative to lending to White borrowers, even when the enforcement order is not issued for violations of fair lending laws. Our findings highlight the indirect social benefits of bank enforcement and supervision.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Banks; Inequality
June 2022
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David Ratner and Jae Sim
Conventional wisdom has it that sound monetary policy since the 1980s not only conquered the Great Inflation but also buried the Phillips curve. This paper provides an alternative explanation: labor market policies that have eroded worker bargaining power might have been the source of the demise of the Phillips curve. We show that a nearly 90 percent reduction in inflation volatility is possible even without any changes in monetary policy when the economy transitions from equal shares of power between workers and firms to a new balance in which firms dominate.
Topics: Monetary policy; trade unions
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Samuel Dodini, Jeff Larrimore, and Anna Tranfaglia
This paper considers the credit response of individuals after the implementation of new work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, using a large nationally representative sample of credit records. We find that the new requirements lead more people to seek out new credit. New work requirements also result in an increase in total outstanding balances on bank and retail card accounts and increase the number of borrowers that are past due on these accounts. These findings suggest that some individuals are turning to credit and debt products to cover expenses after losing eligibility for SNAP benefits.
Topics: Public policy; Borrowing & lending
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Daniel A. Dias and Joao B. Duarte
We show that monetary policy affects homeownership decisions and argue that this effect is an important and overlooked channel of monetary policy transmission. We first document that monetary policy shocks are a substantial driver of fluctuations in the U.S. homeownership rate and that monetary policy affects households' housing tenure choices. We show that the homeownership decision channel amplifies the redistributive effects of monetary policy, with contractionary shocks benefiting more outright homeowners and disadvantaging more renters and homeowners with a mortgage.
Topics: Monetary policy; housing
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Juan Herreno and Mathieu Pedemonte
We study the differential regional effects of monetary policy, exploiting geographical heterogeneity in income across cities in the United States. We find that prices and employment in poorer cities react more to monetary policy shocks. The results for prices hold for a wide range of narrow consumer expenditure categories. We show that an increase in heterogeneity across cities amplifies the effect of monetary policy on prices and employment.
Topics: Monetary policy; Spatial economics
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Victor Hernandez Martinez and Kaixin Liu
This paper argues that the value of unemployment insurance (UI) can be decomposed into a liquidity component and an insurance component. Using Spanish administrative data, we find that the liquidity component represents half of the value of UI, while the insurance component captures the remaining half. However, the relevance of each component is highly heterogeneous across different groups of workers. Both poorer and wealthier workers are similarly liquidity-constrained, but poorer workers place a higher value on UI because the insurance component is significantly more important for them.
Topics: Unemployment; public policy
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Takushi Kurozumi and Willem Van Zandweghe
Should monetary policy offset the effects of labor supply shocks on inflation and the output gap? Motivated by weak labor force participation during the pandemic, we reexamine the question by introducing labor force entry and exit in an otherwise canonical model with sticky prices and wages. The entry decision generates an employment channel of monetary policy, and a labor supply shock to the value of nonparticipation in the labor market induces a policy trade-off between stabilization of the employment gap and wage growth.
Topics: Monetary policy; Employment & labor markets
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Brad Hershbein and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies how U.S. local labor markets respond to employment losses after recessions. We find that following each recession between 1973 and 2009, areas that lose more jobs during the recession experience persistent relative declines in employment and population. These local labor markets also experience persistent decreases in the employment–population ratio and per capita earnings. Our results imply that limited population responses result in longer-lasting consequences for local labor markets than previously thought and that recessions are followed by persistent reallocation of employment across space.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Recessions; Spatial economics
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John Mondragon and Johannes Wieland
What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas, we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. Our results imply a fundamentals-based explanation for the recent increases in housing costs over speculation or financial factors and that the evolution of remote work is likely to have large effects on the future path of house prices and inflation.
Topics: Housing
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Alexander Bick and Adam Blandin
Economists have recently begun using independent online surveys to collect national labor market data. Questions remain over the quality of such data. This paper provides an approach to address these concerns. Our case study is the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS), a novel online survey built around the Current Population Survey (CPS). Our discussion contains practical suggestions for the design of novel labor market surveys and highlights other promising applications of our methodology.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; COVID-19
May 2022
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Paweł Doligalski, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Nicolas Werquin
Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy
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Daniel Aaronson, Bhashkar Mazumder, Daniel Hartley, and Martha Stinson
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long-form 2000 Census. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived during adulthood in neighborhoods characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.
Topics: Inequality
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Gustavo de Souza and André Victor D. Luduvice
In the United States, unemployed workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement that stipulates the minimum qualifying work spell and a monetary requirement that determines a past minimum wage. This paper develops a heterogeneous-agents model with history-dependent UI benefits in order to quantitatively obtain an optimal UI program design. We show that, because it mitigates moral hazard, the monetary requirement can generate higher welfare levels than an increase in the length of the tenure requirement.
Topics: Unemployment; Public policy
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devin michelle bunten, Ellen Fu, Lyndsey Rolheiser, and Christopher Severen
How have the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Black commuters spent 50.3 more minutes commuting per week in 1980 than White commuters; this difference declined to 22.4 minutes per week in 2019. Two factors account for the majority of the difference: Black workers are more likely to commute by transit, and Black workers make up a larger share of the population in cities with long average commutes.
Topics: Inequality
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Giulio Cornelli, Jon Frost, Leonardo Gambacorta, and Julapa Jagtiani
Recently, nonbank lenders have gained market share in the small-business lending market in the United States. Among nonbanks, fintech lenders have become particularly active, leveraging alternative data for their own internal credit scoring. Our results show that fintech SBL platforms lent more in zip codes with higher business bankruptcy filings and higher unemployment rates. Overall, fintech lenders have the potential to create a more inclusive financial system, allowing small businesses that were less likely to receive credit through traditional lenders to access credit and to do so at lower cost.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Credit & financial markets; Payments & FinTech
April 2022
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Kimberly Bayard, Tomaz Cajner, Vivi Gregorich, and Maria D. Tito
This paper explores the factors behind differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker—has disappeared in recent years. A decomposition of the premium by union membership status reveals that declines have been substantially larger across union members. Our findings suggest that the erosion of “good” manufacturing jobs has contributed to the increase in overall wage inequality and could accelerate the decline of the manufacturing sector.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Manufacturing; Inequality
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Elior Cohen
Housing First programs provide housing assistance without preconditions for homeless individuals as a platform for rehabilitation, but limited evidence exists on their effects on socioeconomic outcomes. Using a novel data set combining administrative records from multiple public agencies in Los Angeles County and a random case manager assignment design, I estimate that Housing First assistance reduces homelessness and crime, increases income and employment, and does not have a detectable effect on health care utilization. Cost-benefit analysis implies that these potential savings offset program costs within 18 months.
Topics: Public policy
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Brad Hershbein and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies how government transfers respond to changes in local economic activity that emerge during recessions. Local labor markets that experience greater employment losses during recessions face persistent relative decreases in per capita earnings. However, these areas also experience persistent increases in per capita transfers, which offset 16 percent of the earnings loss on average. The increase in transfers is driven by unemployment insurance in the short run and medical, retirement, and disability transfers in the long run. Our results show that nominally place-neutral transfer programs redistribute considerable sums of money to places with depressed economic conditions.
Topics: Recessions; Public policy; Employment & labor markets
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Elira Kuka and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies differences in receipt and take-up of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits among White and Black individuals. We combine state-level UI regulations with data containing detailed information on individuals’ work history and UI receipt. Black individuals who separate from a job are 24 percent less likely than White individuals to receive UI. The UI receipt gap stems primarily from lower take-up of UI benefits among likely eligible individuals rather than differences in benefit eligibility.
Topics: Unemployment; Inequality; Insurance
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Xudong (Sean) An, Stuart A. Gabriel, and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan
We investigate the impact of 2020 COVID-19 rental eviction moratoria on household well-being. Analysis indicates that eviction moratoria reduced eviction filings and resulted in redirection of scarce household financial resources to immediate consumption needs, notably including food and grocery spending. We also find that eviction moratoria reduced household food insecurity and mental stress, with larger effects evidenced among African American households.
Topics: Public policy; COVID-19
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The Labor Market Effects of Place-Based Policies: Evidence from England’s Neighbourhood Renewal Fund
Robert Calvert Jump and Adam Scavette
We examine the labor market effects of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which targeted 88 of the most deprived areas in England during the early 2000s. The fund disbursed almost £3 billion for community safety, education, health care and worklessness, with supply-side interventions making up the bulk of the program's spending on worklessness. We find statistically significant impacts on local employment and out-of-work benefit claimants. Our results suggest that policy interventions to improve local labor supply can be a successful strategy for neighborhood renewal.
Topics: Community & economic development; Employment & labor markets; Public policy
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You Suk Kim, Donghoon Lee, Tess Scharlemann, and James Vickery
We study the role of mortgage servicers in implementing the CARES Act mortgage forbearance program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite universal eligibility, around one-third of the nonperforming federally backed loans in our sample fail to enter into forbearance. The relative frequency of these "missing" forbearances varies significantly across servicers for observably similar loans, with small servicers and nonbanks having a lower propensity to provide forbearance. The incidence of forbearance-related complaints by borrowers is also higher for these servicers. We also use servicer-level variation to estimate the causal effect of forbearance on borrower outcomes.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Public policy; COVID-19
March 2022
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Ning Jia, Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak
We review developments in research on within-country migration, focusing on internal migration in the U.S. We begin by describing approaches to modelling individuals' migration decisions and equilibrium outcomes across local areas. Next, we summarize evidence regarding the impact of migration on individuals' outcomes, implications of migration for local labor market adjustment, and interactions between migration and housing markets. Finally, we discuss evidence on the efficacy of policies aimed at encouraging migration and conclude by highlighting important unanswered questions that are critical for informing migration-related policy.
Topics: Migration; Employment & labor markets
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Elias Ilin, Samantha Shampine, and Ellyn Terry
We evaluate the effects of free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on the labor force participation of mothers, using variation in pre-K rules across U.S. states. We find that access to free pre-K programs increases overall maternal labor force participation by 2.3 percentage points. Mothers with the following demographic characteristics significantly increase their labor supply as a result of access to free pre-K: those who are married, those who are college educated, residents of metropolitan areas, and those with income either below 200 percent or above 400 percent of the federal poverty level.
Topics: Early childhood education; Employment & labor markets
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John Sabelhaus and Jeffrey P. Thompson
We present updated measures of racial disparities in wealth, using the most recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances augmented by household-level estimates of defined benefit pension wealth. We find that racial wealth disparities are smaller than the numbers typically discussed in other research, but the disparities remain substantial. Differences in lifetime earnings, pension generosity, and a handful of other human capital and work-related variables explain three-quarters of the White-Black wealth gap and 80 to 90 percent of the White-Hispanic gap.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
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Jung Sakong
Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms—when expected returns are low—and sell after a bust—when expected returns are high. The estimated dispersion in expected returns from this “buy high, sell low” channel is large: the interquartile-range difference is 60 basis points per year.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality; Recessions
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Daniel R. Carroll and Sewon Hur
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the U.S. and its major trading partners. We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their age, income, wealth, and labor skill. When tariff revenues are used to reduce labor and capital income taxes and increase transfers, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth and low-income workers, while only wealthy households experience a welfare gain.
Topics: Trade & globalization; Inequality; Taxes & tax policy
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Stephan D. Whitaker
Using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor markets. There are not clear advantages or disadvantages for migrants to strong or weak labor market regions as measured by credit scores, consumption, bankruptcy, or foreclosure.
Topics: Migration; Employment & labor markets
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Cavit Baran, Eric Chyn, and Bryan Stuart
This paper studies the impact of the first Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to the North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime.
Topics: Migration; K-12 Education
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Tristan Potter, Bart Hobijn, and Andre Kurmann
We study the efficiency of non-compete agreements (NCAs) in an equilibrium model of labor turnover. The model is consistent with empirical studies showing that NCAs reduce turnover, average wages, and wage dispersion for low-wage workers. But the model also predicts that NCAs, by reducing turnover, raise recruitment and employment. We show that optimal NCA policy (i) is characterized by a Hosios-like condition that balances the benefits of higher employment against the costs of inefficient congestion and poaching, and (ii) depends critically on the minimum wage, so that enforcing NCAs can be efficient with a sufficiently high minimum wage.
Topics: Minimum wage; Employment & labor markets
February 2022
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Bin Wei and Feng Zhao
This paper examines racial disparities in mortgage processing times prior to the Global Financial Crisis. We find that in the case of mortgages securitized by government-sponsored enterprises, Black borrowers are underrepresented and experience a longer processing time than White borrowers. At the same time, Black borrowers are overrepresented and face a similar processing time among privately securitized mortgages. Additionally, Black borrowers are strongly associated with the faster segments of mortgage markets, faster lenders within each segment, and the types of loan products that are processed faster, all of which subsequently experienced higher defaults.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality
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Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, Ken Snowden, and Thomas Storrs
We show that from its inception in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) did not insure mortgages in low-income urban neighborhoods, where the vast majority of urban Black Americans lived. The FHA’s exclusionary practice predates the advent of the infamous maps later made by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and shows little change after the drafting of those maps. In contrast, the HOLC itself broadly loaned to such neighborhoods and to Black homeowners. We conclude that the HOLC’s redlining maps had little effect on the geographic distribution of either program’s mortgage market activity.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality; Housing
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Daniel Carroll and Sewon Hur
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the U.S. and its major trading partners. When tariff revenues are used to reduce labor and capital income taxes and increase transfers, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth and low-income workers; only wealthy households experience a welfare gain.
Topics: Trade & globalization; Taxes & tax policy; Inequality
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Natee Amornsiripanitch
Among single-family homes that enjoy the same set of property tax–funded amenities and pay the same statutory property tax rate, owners of inexpensive houses pay almost 50 percent higher effective tax rates than owners of expensive houses because inexpensive houses are over-assessed relative to expensive houses. This pattern is attributed to measurement error in sale prices, tax assessors’ ignoring variation in priced house and neighborhood characteristics, and infrequent reappraisal.
Topics: Housing; Taxes & tax policy; Inequality
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Fatih Karahan, Serdar Ozkan, and Jae Song
We study the determinants of lifetime earnings inequality in the U.S. by focusing on job ladder dynamics and on-the-job learning as sources of wage growth. We find that the vast differences across worker types in job ladder risk—job loss, job finding, and contact rates—account for 80 percent of wage growth differences among workers with below median lifetime earnings. We conclude that different economic forces are driving the inequality in different parts of the lifetime earnings distribution.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets; Inequality
January 2022
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Christine L. Dobridge, Paul Landefeld, and Jacob Mortenson
This paper investigates how corporate tax changes affect workers’ earnings. We use a data set of U.S. worker-level W-2 filings matched with corporate tax returns and study the implementation of the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD). We find the DPAD tax rate reduction has a substantial effect on the distribution of annual wage earnings within a firm. We see no change in overall employment effects, but the number of employees rises at small firms and declines at large firms. Our paper has significant implications for assessing the progressivity of the U.S. tax code and for analyzing the effect of corporate tax policy changes on the U.S. income distribution.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy; Wages, income, and wealth
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Osborne Jackson
This paper combines two components of the Current Population Survey to characterize the relationship between job displacement and sectoral mobility for long-tenured workers over the 1996–2019 period. While displacement negatively correlates with mobility over time, such job loss has a positive causal impact on mobility for displaced workers, compared with its effect on similar non-displaced workers. Education and industry structure facilitate post-displacement industry switching, and several factors, including business cycles, affect whether the alternative to sectoral mobility is likely to be same-industry employment or nonemployment.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Sectoral mobility
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Elin Halvorsen, Serdar Ozkan, and Sergio Salgado
Using administrative data from Norway, we investigate parents' role in childrens’ income dynamics. We find that children of high-income, high-wealth fathers enjoy steeper income growth over their life cycle and face more volatile but more positively skewed income changes, suggesting that they are more likely to pursue high-return, high-risk careers. Furthermore, the income dynamics of fathers and those of children are strongly correlated. In particular, children of fathers with steeper life cycle income growth, more volatile incomes, or higher downside risk also have income streams with similar properties.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality; Intergenerational mobility
December 2021
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Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner
In this study, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent from 1992 to 2016. Over time, state-level mortality has become increasingly correlated with state-level income; in 1992 income explained only 3 percent of mortality inequality, but by 2016, state-level income explained 58 percent. These mortality patterns are consistent with the view that high-income states in 1992 were better able to enact public health strategies and adopt behaviors that, over the next quarter century, resulted in pronounced relative declines in mortality.
Topics: Public health; Inequality
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Nathan Blascak and Anna Tranfaglia
In this paper, we examine if there are gender differences in total bankcard limits by utilizing a data set that links mortgage applicant information with individual-level credit bureau data from 2006 to 2016. We document that after controlling for credit score, income, and demographic characteristics, male borrowers on average have higher total bankcard limits than female borrowers. We find that 87 percent of the gap is explained by differences in the effect of observed characteristics between male and female borrowers, while approximately 10 percent of the difference can be explained by differences in the levels of observed characteristics.
Topics: Credit & financial markets; Inequality
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Aditya Aladangady, Etienne Gagnon, Benjamin K. Johannsen, and William B. Peterman
We explore the long-run relationship between income risk, inequality, and the macroeconomy in an overlapping-generations model in which households face uncertain streams of labor income and returns on their savings. We find that greater polarization in households’ labor income and returns on their savings generally accentuates households’ demand for risk-free assets and the compensation they require for bearing risk, leading to higher measured income and wealth inequality, a lower risk-free real interest rate, and higher risk premiums.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Interest rates; Inequality
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Katya Kartashova and Xiaoqing Zhou
Wealth inequality in the U.S., measured by the wealth share of the top 1 percent, experienced dramatic changes in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that portfolio heterogeneity and asset price movements are the main determinants of wealth returns and inequality, whereas saving-rate heterogeneity and within-class return differences played a minor role. Our analysis suggests that return heterogeneity, together with large asset price movements, is also key to understanding short-run dynamics in wealth inequality.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality; Covid-19
November 2021
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Katherine Lim and Mike Zabek
In this paper, we study declines in women’s labor force participation by race and ethnicity as well as the presence of children. We find that increases in labor force exits were larger for Black women, Latinas, and women living with children. In particular, after controlling for detailed job and demographic characteristics, we find larger increases in pandemic-era labor force exits among women living with children under age 6 and among lower-earning women living with school-age children.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; COVID-19
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Benjamin Lester, David A. Rivers, and Giorgio Topa
We document a new set of facts regarding the impact of referrals on labor market outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of referrals—those from family and friends and those from business contacts—and different occupations. Then we develop an on-the-job search model that incorporates referrals, and we calibrate the model. The calibrated model provides quantitative estimates of the effects of referrals on employment, earnings, output, and inequality.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Inequality
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Limor Golan, Rong Hai, and Hayley Wabiszewski
This article documents the long-term relationship among juvenile conviction, occupation choices, employment, wages, and recidivism. Using data from a National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY97), we document that youths who are convicted at or before age 17 have a lower full-time employment rate and lower wage growth rate, even after 10 years in the labor market. Our results highlight the important role of occupation choices as a human capital investment vehicle through which juvenile crimes have a long-term impact on wages and recidivism.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth
October 2021
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Soumitra Shukla
Despite widespread caste disparities, compensatory hiring policies remain absent from the Indian private sector. This paper employs novel administrative data on the job search from an elite college and evaluates policies to promote hiring diversity. Disparities arise primarily between the final round (nontechnical personal interviews) and job offers; the emergence closely parallels caste revelation. For promoting diversity, hiring is twice as cost-effective as improving pre-college achievement.
Topics: Inequality; Public policy; Higher education
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John Kandrac
Modern central bankers confront a challenge of providing economic stimulus even when the policy rate is constrained by a lower bound. In this paper, I offer evidence on the efficacy of a new tool known as funding for lending, which provides banks with subsidized funding to make additional loans. I show that the cheap funding succeeded in generating more lending by countering banks' excessive liquidity preference. The additional credit benefited the real economy. Local areas enjoyed higher rates of small business formation and more rapid employment growth.
Topics: Economic growth; Borrowing & lending; Public policy
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André Victor D. Luduvice
What are the consequences of a nationwide reform of a transfer system based on means-testing toward one of unconditional transfers? I answer this question with a quantitative model to assess the general equilibrium, inequality, and welfare effects of substituting the current U.S. income security system with a universal basic income (UBI) policy. I find that an expenditure-neutral reform has moderate impacts on agents’ labor supply response but induces aggregate capital and output to grow due to larger precautionary savings.
Topics: Public policy; Employment & labor markets; Macroeconomics
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Ran Abramitzky, Philipp Ager, Leah Boustan, Elior Cohen, and Casper W. Hansen
In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigration by imposing country-specific entry quotas. We compare local labor markets differentially exposed to the quotas due to variation in the national origin mix of their immigrant populations. U.S.-born workers in areas losing immigrants did not gain in income score relative to workers in less exposed areas. Instead, in urban areas, European immigrants were replaced with internal migrants and immigrants from Mexico and Canada. By contrast, farmers shifted toward capital-intensive agriculture, and the immigrant-intensive mining industry contracted.
Topics: Immigration; Public policy; Wages, income, and wealth
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Andrew Hertzberg, Marieke Bos, and Andres Liberman
Almost two in 10 adults in the U.S. and Europe are, at any moment in time, diagnosed with a mental illness. This paper asks whether mental illness is over- (or under-) diagnosed by looking at its causal effect on individuals at the margin of diagnosis. We follow all Swedish men born between 1971 and 1983 matched to administrative panel data on health, labor market, wealth, and family outcomes to estimate the impact of a mental illness diagnosis on subsequent outcomes.
Topics: Public health
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Ranie Lin, Lala Ma, and Toan Phan
We use survey data to document a strong heterogeneity in stated degrees of worry about environmental problems across racial groups. Minorities are significantly more worried about air and water pollution than their White counterparts, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and pollution exposure. Our finding implies that residential sorting based on heterogeneous financial resources and heterogeneous levels of environmental concern is unlikely to be the only driver of uneven exposure to pollution across racial groups.
Topics: Climate; Inequality
September 2021
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Bart Hobijn and Ayşegül Şahin
We investigate the source, magnitude, and unevenness of the procyclical forces that shape labor force participation, i.e., the participation cycle, which are important for the implementation of the maximum employment mandate. We show that these forces can be analyzed in real time using a flow decomposition of the changes in the labor force participation rate. The decomposition reveals that the source of the participation cycle is fluctuations in job-loss and job-finding rates, rather than cyclical movements in labor force entry and exit rates.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Unemployment
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Alvaro Mezza, Daniel Ringo, and Kamila Sommer
This paper provides novel evidence that increased student loan debts increase borrowers' demand for additional consumer debt while simultaneously restricting their ability to access it. The net effect of student loan debt on consumer borrowing varies by market, depending on whether the supply or demand channel dominates.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Higher education
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Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter
This paper documents the magnitude and distribution of U.S. earnings changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and how fiscal relief offset lost earnings. We build panels from administrative tax data to measure annual earnings changes. The frequency of earnings declines during the pandemic was similar to frequency during the Great Recession, but the distribution was very different. After incorporating unemployment insurance, the likelihood of large earnings declines among low-earning workers was not only smaller than during the Great Recession, but also smaller than in 2019.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Unemployment; COVID-19
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Jesse Bricker, Sarena Goodman, Kevin B. Moore, and Alice Henriques Volz
We use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to advance U.S. wealth analysis along several dimensions. We develop a comprehensive framework that modifies the SCF to recover the wealth distribution over families, tax units, and individuals from 1989 to 2019. We show that, by ignoring unequal holdings within families, existing estimates considerably understate U.S. inequality across individuals.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
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Carlos F. Avenancio-Leon and Leslie Sheng Shen
We propose an "asset channel of inequality" that contributes to gender inequities. We establish that industries with low (high) gender pay gaps have high (low) shares of tangible assets. Because asset tangibility determines firms' ability to collateralize assets and borrow, credit conditions affect industries differently. We show that credit expansions further reduce the pay gap in low-pay-gap industries while leaving it unaffected in high-pay-gap industries, making low-pay-gap industries more appealing for women. Consequently, gender sorting across industries increases, which then cements gender roles and accentuates workplace gender bias. Ultimately, credit expansions help women "swim upstream" but also reinforce glass ceilings.
Topics: Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth; Credit & financial markets
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Bruce Fallick, John Haltiwanger, Erika McEntarfer, and Matthew Staiger
Who is harmed by and who benefits from worker reallocation? We investigate the earnings consequences of changing jobs and find a wide dispersion in outcomes. This dispersion is driven not by whether the worker was displaced, but by the duration of joblessness between job spells. Job movers who experience joblessness suffer a persistent reduction in earnings and tend to move to lower-paying firms, suggesting that job ladder models offer a useful lens through which to understand the negative consequences of job separations.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth
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Enghin Atalay, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum
We study the sources of geographic inequality and present new facts about the geography of work using online job ads. We show that the (i) intensity of interactive and analytic tasks, (ii) technological requirements, and (iii) task specialization all increase with city size. We document that our new measures help account for a substantial portion of the urban wage premium, both in aggregate and across occupation groups.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth; Technology & innovation
August 2021
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Sumit Agarwal, Thomas Kigabo, Camelia Minoiu, Andrea F. Presbitero, and André F Silva
A large-scale microcredit expansion program—together with a credit bureau accessible to all lenders—can enable unbanked borrowers to build a credit history, facilitating their transition to commercial banks. Loan-level data from Rwanda show that the program improved access to credit and reduced poverty.
Topics: Banks; Borrowing & lending; Low & moderate income
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Grey Gordon, John Bailey Jones, Urvi Neelakantan, and Kartik B. Athreya
We study the implications of incarceration for the earnings and employment of different groups, characterized by their race, gender, and education using a hidden Markov model. The consequences are enormous: For Black (White) men with a high school degree, first-time incarceration reduces expected lifetime earnings by 39 percent (59 percent) and employment by eight (13) years. Conversely, adverse earnings shocks and nonemployment increase expected years in jail.
Topics: Incarceration; Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Lindsay Jacobs, Elizabeth Llanes, Kevin Moore, Jeffrey P. Thompson, and Alice Henriques Volz
Defined benefit pensions and Social Security are two important resources for financing retirement that are often excluded from data, resulting in incomplete measures of wealth and representations of household wealth concentration. In this paper, we estimate an expanded measure of wealth that includes these resources and show how that inclusion affects estimates of wealth inequality in the United States as well as trends over time.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth
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Robert E. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak
Potential workers are classified as unemployed if they seek work but are not working. The unemployed population contains two groups, those with jobs and those without jobs. Those with jobs are on furlough or temporary layoff. We show that the resulting temporary-layoff unemployment dissipates quickly following a spike. Potential workers without jobs constitute what we call jobless unemployment. Shocks that elevate jobless unemployment have much more persistent effects.
Topics: Unemployment; Recessions
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Brent Bundick and Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau
The Federal Open Market Committee recently revised its interpretation of its maximum employment mandate. In this paper, we analyze the possible effects of this policy change using a theoretical model with frictional labor markets and nominal rigidities. A monetary policy that stabilizes employment “shortfalls” rather than “deviations” of employment from its maximum level leads to higher inflation and more hiring at all times due to firms’ expectations of more accommodative future policy.
Topics: Monetary policy; Employment & labor markets; Interest rates
July 2021
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Nathan Deutscher and Bhashkar Mazumder
The literature on intergenerational income mobility uses a diverse set of measures, and knowledge is limited about whether these measures provide similar information and yield similar conclusions. We provide a framework to highlight the key concepts and properties of the different estimators. We then show how these measures relate to one another empirically.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Intergenerational mobility
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Giuseppe Fiori and Filippo Scoccianti
This paper uses over two decades of Italian survey data on business managers' expectations to measure subjective firm-level uncertainty and quantify its economic effects. We document that firm-level uncertainty persists for a few years and varies across firms' demographic characteristics. Uncertainty induces long-lasting economic effects over a broad array of real and financial variables. The source of uncertainty matters with firms responding only to downside uncertainty, that is, uncertainty about future adverse outcomes.
Topics: Recessions; Economic growth
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Elias Ilin and Ellyn Terry
In this paper, we develop a novel method to project location-specific life-cycle wages for all occupations listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we use individual-level data from the Current Population Survey to estimate the average number of years of potential labor market experience that is associated with each percentile of the education-level-specific wage distribution. Second, we map this estimated average years of experience to the wage-level percentiles reported in the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data for each occupation and area.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Julie L. Hotchkiss, Robert E. Moore, and Fernando Rios-Avila
This paper calculates the change in optimal labor supply and total family welfare resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). We find that optimal hours are lower post-TCJA relative to before. However, there are differences across family members and family types. Overall, families' welfare increased post-TCJA, with the gains in welfare disproportionately benefiting the wealthy, families with any self-employment income, families with children, and families that rent their home.
Topics: Taxes & tax policy; Employment & labor markets
June 2021
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Lee Ohanian, Musa Orak, and Shihan Shen
This paper revisits capital-skill complementarity and inequality, as in Krusell, Ohanian, Ríos-Rull, and Violante (KORV 2000). Using their methodology, we study how well the KORV model accounts for more recent data, including the large changes in the labor’s share of income that were not present in KORV. We study both labor share of gross income (as in KORV) and income net of depreciation.
Topics: Inequality; Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth
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Patrick Coate and Kyle Mangum
Declining internal migration in the United States is driven by increasing home attachment in locations with previously high rates of population turnover. These “fast locations” were the population growth destinations of the 20th century, where home attachments were once low but have increased as regional population growth has converged. The paper uses a stylized island economy model featuring endogenous home attachments to show that after a shock, gross migration returns to steady state much more slowly than net population change.
Topics: Migration; Housing; Employment & labor markets
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Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and Robert G. Valletta
To assess the impact of the UI supplement under the U.S. CARES Act of 2020, we analyze the job acceptance decision in a dynamic framework in which job seekers weigh the value of a job against remaining unemployed, accounting for the perceived state of the labor market and expected weeks of UI benefits. We supplement this quantitative assessment of reservation benefits with direct empirical analysis of labor force transitions, finding moderate disincentive effects of the $600 supplemental payments on job finding rates and by extension small effects of the $300 weekly supplement available during 2021.
Topics: Unemployment; Insurance; COVID-19
May 2021
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Gregory Gilpin, Ezra Karger, and Peter Nencka
Local governments spend over $12 billion annually funding the operation of 15,000 public libraries in the United States. We use a dynamic difference-in-difference approach to show that library capital investment increases children’s attendance at library events by 18 percent, children’s checkouts of items by 21 percent, and total library visits by 21 percent. Increases in library use translate into improved children’s test scores in nearby school districts.
Topics: K-12 Education; Community & economic development
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Shelby R. Buckman, Laura Y. Choi, Mary C. Daly, and Lily M. Seitelman
How much is inequity costing us? Using a simple growth accounting framework, we apply standard shift-share techniques to data from the Current Population Survey (1990-2019) to compute the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by gender and race. Our findings suggest that differences in employment opportunities and educational attainment make the largest contributions by race. Differences by gender are primarily driven by gaps in employment and hours.
Topics: Inequality; Economic growth; Educational equity; Employment & labor markets
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Yavuz Arslan, Ahmet Degerli, and Gazi Kabaş
We use disaggregated U.S. data and a border discontinuity design to show that more generous unemployment insurance (UI) policies lower bank deposits. We test several channels that could explain this decline and find evidence consistent with households lowering their precautionary savings. Banks that raise deposits in states with generous UI policies squeeze their small business lending. Furthermore, counties that are served by these banks experience a higher unemployment rate and lower wage growth.
Topics: Banks; Unemployment; Borrowing & lending
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Erik Dolson and Julapa Jagtiani
We explore the supply side of fintech credit, focusing on unsecured personal loans and mortgage loans. We investigate whether fintech firms are more likely than other lenders to reach out to “underserved consumers,” such as minorities; those with low income, low credit scores, or thin credit histories; or those who have a history of being denied credit. For both personal loans and mortgage loans, fintech firms are more likely than other lenders to reach out and offer credit to nonprime consumers.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Payments & FinTech; Low & moderate income
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David Cho, Daniel I. Garcia, Joshua Montes, and Alison Weingarden
We estimate the causal effects of heroin use on labor market outcomes by using prior exposure to oxycodone as a proxy for heroin use. We find increases in heroin use led to declines in employment and labor force participation rates, particularly for white, young, and less-educated groups, consistent with the profile of oxycodone misusers. The results show the importance of extending beyond prescriptions when accounting for the labor market effects of the opioid crisis.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Public health
April 2021
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Rajashri Chakrabarti, Lindsay Meyerson, William Nober, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. We find that health insurance changes discontinuously at the frontier; COVID-19 cases do not change discontinuously at the frontier, but the precision of this estimate is low; and COVID-19-related doctor visits discontinuously increase in Medicaid expansion areas.
Topics: Public health; Insurance; COVID-19
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Saroj Bhattarai, Jae Won Lee, and Choongryul Yang
We show that the effectiveness of redistribution policy in stimulating the economy and improving welfare is directly tied to how much inflation it generates, which in turn hinges on monetary-fiscal adjustments that ultimately finance the transfers. We compare two distinct types of monetary-fiscal adjustments. In the monetary regime, the government eventually raises taxes to finance transfers, while in the fiscal regime, inflation rises, effectively imposing inflation taxes on public debt holders.
Topics: Monetary policy; Inequality; Taxes & tax policy
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James A. Schmitz Jr.
There is a force in market economies that have extensive amounts of monopoly, like the United States, which leads income inequality to understate economic inequality. Monopolies, of course, raise prices. This reduces the purchasing power of households. But monopolies reduce the purchasing power of low-income households much more than high-income households because in many markets, as monopolies raise the prices for their goods, they simultaneously destroy low-cost substitutes that are purchased by low-income households, which shuts low-income households out of markets for goods and services that are important for their economic well-being.
Topics: Inequality; Low & moderate income; Economic growth
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Job Boerma and Loukas Karabarbounis
We revisit the causes, welfare consequences, and policy implications of the dispersion in households’ labor market outcomes using a model with uninsurable risk, incomplete asset markets, and home production. Allowing households to be heterogeneous in both their disutility of home work and their home production efficiency, we find that home production amplifies welfare-based differences, meaning that inequality in standards of living is larger than we thought.
Topics: Inequality; Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets
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Jose A. Lopez and Mark M. Spiegel
We examine the effects of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the PPP Liquidity Facility (PPPLF) on small business and farm lending by individual commercial banks in the United States. We find that while both programs had significant positive effects on small business lending, they did not influence small loans to farms over the period studied, which is likely due to a structural feature of the PPP. Participation in both programs increased bank balance sheets, but risk-adjusted bank capital ratios actually improved with PPP and PPPLF participation.
Topics: Small business; Public policy; Agriculture & farming
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Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny
One significant headwind to progress among Latinos is recessions. Economic outcomes of Latinos are far more sensitive to the business cycle than are outcomes for non-Hispanic Whites. Latinos also have higher poverty rates than Whites, although the gap had been falling prior to the pandemic. Policies that would help working-class and poor Latinos include immigration reform and education reform and broader access to affordable health care.
Topics: Recessions; Low & moderate income; Public policy
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Leila Bengali, Mary C. Daly, Olivia Lofton, and Robert G. Valletta
We assess how people with disabilities and their families fared during the long economic expansion that followed the Great Recession of 2007-09. We find that the expansion bolstered the well-being of people with disabilities and in particular their relative labor market engagement. We also find that applications and awards for federal disability benefits fell during the expansion.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Employment & labor markets; Public policy
March 2021
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Dionissi Aliprantis and Hal Martin
Landlords in high-opportunity neighborhoods screen out tenants using vouchers. In our correspondence experiment, signaling voucher status cuts landlord responses in half. This voucher penalty increases with posted rent and varies little with signals of tenant quality and race. Our results suggest a successful, systematic policy of moving to opportunity would require more direct engagement with landlords.
Topics: Housing; Public policy; Economic opportunity
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Bo Zhao
This paper shows how to design a state education aid formula that can effectively address funding inequity and inadequacy while taking political feasibility into account. It first develops a measure of the gap between education cost and revenue capacity, both of which are estimated using school district characteristics that are outside the direct control of local officials at any given point in time. The paper then proposes, as a potential solution, a gap-based formula that allocates state aid to close the cost-capacity gaps.
Topics: K-12 education; Inequality; Public policy
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Enrique G. Mendoza, Eugenio Rojas, Linda L. Tesar, and Jing Zhang
Empirical evidence shows that lockdowns and health care saturation help explain the cross-country variation in GDP declines even after controlling for COVID-19 cases and mortality. We explain this output-pandemia tradeoff as resulting from a shock to subsistence health demand that is larger at higher capital utilization in a model with entrepreneurs and workers. Quantitatively, strict lockdowns and large transfer hikes can be optimal and yield sizable welfare gains because they prevent a sharp rise in inequality.
Topics: COVID-19; Public health; Macroeconomics
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Katharine Bradbury
This study uses information from metropolitan areas and from school districts to understand which factors are strongly related to the size of racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps. One key factor is the degree to which state aid to school districts is distributed progressively to districts with high fractions of students living in poverty. Second, test-score gaps are larger in areas where poverty segregation is greater, that is, where, compared with white children or higher-income children, minority children or low-income children are in school districts with more students from low-income families.
Topics: K-12 education; Inequality; Public policy
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Ying Shi, Daniel Hartley, Bhashkar Mazumder, and Aastha Rajan
The Great Migration significantly increased the number of African Americans moving to northern and western cities beginning in the first half of the 20th century. We show that their arrival shaped slum clearance and urban redevelopment efforts in receiving cities. We find that local governments responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects that aimed to redevelop and rehabilitate “blighted” areas.
Topics: Urban economics; Community & economic development; Housing
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Marco Giacoletti, Rawley Z. Heimer, and Edison G. Yu
We develop empirical tests for discrimination that use high-frequency evaluations to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in a conventional benchmarking test. We bring our approach to the residential mortgage market. Owing to within-month variation in loan officers’ subjectivity, we estimate that Black mortgage applicants have 3.5 percent to 5 percent lower approval rates. When we use this approach to evaluate policies, we find that shadow banking has reduced discrimination, presumably by having a larger presence in under-served communities.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality; Payments & FinTech
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Brent W. Ambrose, Xudong An, and Luis A. Lopez
We show, using a stylized model, how the financing choice of landlords can impact eviction decisions in rental markets. Since multifamily loans rely on timely cash flows from tenants, strict underwriting factors can increase the chances that landlords are able to weather income shocks. Lender-provided relief may create further leeway for landlords to work out a deal with tenants who default on rental payments. We also quantify the eviction risks induced by the COVID-19 pandemic for 12 U.S. cities using our empirical model.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Housing; COVID-19
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Xudong An, Larry Cordell, Liang Geng, and Keyoung Lee
Using a novel database that combines mortgage servicing records, credit-bureau data, and loan application information, we show that lower-income and minority borrowers have significantly higher nonpayment rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after controlling for conventional risk factors. We then find that government and private-sector forbearance programs have mitigated these inequalities in the near term, as lower-income and minority borrowers have taken up the short-term debt relief at higher rates.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Inequality; Low & moderate income; COVID-19
February 2021
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Roozbeh Hosseini, Karen Kopecky, and Kai Zhao
Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated in less-educated individuals and those with poor health. We build a dynamic, general equilibrium, life cycle model that is consistent with these findings.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Insurance; Public policy
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David Hao Zhang and Paul Willen
This paper uses a new methodology to assess mortgage pricing discrimination faced by minority borrowers. We identify a “menu problem” that comes from the multidimensional nature of mortgage pricing. Empirically, we find that mortgage pricing differentials by race still exist, particularly among more creditworthy conforming borrowers.
Topics: Borrowing & lending; Housing; Inequality
January 2021
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Lauren Sartain and Lisa Barrow
In 2017, Chicago Public Schools adopted an online universal application system for all high schools with the hope of providing more equitable access to high-performance schools. Despite the new system, Black students and students living in low-socioeconomic-status neighborhoods remained less likely than their peers to enroll in a high-performance high school. We characterize constraints that students and families may face in enrolling in a high-performance high school, including eligibility based on prior academic achievement, distance from high-performance options, and neighborhood and elementary school resources.
Topics: K-12 education; Public policy; Diversity & inclusion
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Daniel Aaronson, Jacob Faber, Daniel Hartley, Bhashkar Mazumder, and Patrick Sharkey
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps on census tract–level measures of socioeconomic status and economic opportunity from the Opportunity Atlas (Chetty et al. 2018). We find that the maps had large and statistically significant causal effects on a wide variety of outcomes measured at the census tract level for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Topics: Housing; Inequality; Economic opportunity
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Dionissi Aliprantis and Hal Martin
The Opportunity Atlas (OA) is an innovative data set that ranks neighborhoods according to children’s adult outcomes in several domains, including income. This paper shows that neighborhood sorting contributes to OA estimates. We document cases in which small sample sizes and changes over time can explain disagreements between OA rankings and those based on contemporaneous variables.
Topics: Economic opportunity; Public policy
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Fumiko Hayashi, Marie-Hélène Felt, Joanna Stavins, and Angelika Welte
Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. We find that consumers in the lowest-income cohort pay the highest net pecuniary cost as a percentage of transaction value, while consumers in the highest-income cohort pay the lowest net cost.
Topics: Consumer economics; Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
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Marianna Kudlyak, Murat Tasci, and Didem Tuzemen
This paper estimates the impact of minimum wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded as measured by firms’ vacancy postings. We find that minimum wage increases during the 2005–18 period led to substantial declines in vacancy postings in occupations with a larger share of employment around the prevailing minimum wage. Our estimate implies that a 10 percent increase in the binding minimum wage level reduces vacancies by 2.4 percent in this group.
Topics: Minimum wage; Unemployment
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Brooke Helppie-McFall and Joanne W. Hsu
Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we describe the financial profiles of U.S. families whose workers were most vulnerable to coronavirus-related earnings losses in the spring of 2020, based on whether a particular worker was deemed "essential" and whether a worker's job could be conducted remotely. We find that families with workers not able to work remotely who were most vulnerable to layoff also had both demographic and financial profiles that are associated with greater vulnerability to income shocks: These families were more likely to be people of color and single wage earners and to have less savings.
Topics: COVID-19; Unemployment; Wages, income, and wealth
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James Bailey, Nathan Blascak, and Slava Mikhed
In July 2005, a set of cuts to Medicaid eligibility and coverage went into effect in the state of Missouri. We show that the Medicaid reform led to increases in both credit card borrowing and debt in third-party collections. Our results suggest that there are important asymmetries in the financial effects of shrinking a public health insurance program compared with a public health insurance expansion.
Topics: Public health; Public policy; Insurance
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Maria Marta Ferreyra, Carlos Garriga, Juan David Martin, and Angelica Maria Sanchez Diaz
To evaluate the potential effects of free college policies, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of college enrollment, performance, and graduation. Universal free college expands enrollment the most, but it does not affect graduation rates and has the highest per-graduate cost. Performance-based free college, in contrast, delivers a slightly lower enrollment expansion, yet a greater graduation rate at a lower per-graduate cost. Additional, complementary policies might be required to elicit the large effort increase needed to raise graduation rates.
Topics: Higher education; Public policy
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Sitian Liu and Yichen Su
Prior studies have shown that women are more willing to trade off wages for short commutes than men. Our model shows that differential commuting choices account for about 16-21 percent of the gender wage gap on average, but the contribution varies widely across residential locations. The model also shows that policies that increase commute speed or density in the central city neighborhoods could moderately lower the gender wage gap.
Topics: Wages, income, and wealth; Inequality
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John Coglianese and Brendan M. Price
Joblessness is highly seasonal. We show that an excess share of prime-age U.S. workers experience recurrent separations spaced exactly 12 months apart. We find that these workers incur large earnings losses during the off-season. Lost earnings are (1) driven mainly by repeated separations from the same employer; (2) not recouped at other firms; (3) partly offset by unemployment benefits; and (4) amplified by concurrent drops in partners' earnings.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Unemployment; Insurance
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Leland D. Crane, Ryan A. Decker, Aaron Flaaen, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz
We review official data on business exit in recent decades. Business exit is common in the U.S. and is countercyclical. We explore a range of alternative measures and indicators of business exit, including novel measures based on payroll events and phone-tracking data, and find tentative evidence that exit has been elevated during 2020. Evidence is somewhat mixed, however, and exiting businesses do not appear to represent a large share of U.S. employment.
Topics: Small business; COVID-19; Recessions
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Kristopher Gerardi, Paul Willen, and David Hao Zhang
Black and Hispanic White borrowers pay more than 50 basis points higher interest rates than White borrowers in a large, representative sample of loans insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The authors show that this disparity is primarily driven by the fact that White borrowers are more likely to exploit periods of falling interest rates by refinancing their mortgages or moving.
Topics: Inequality; Monetary policy; Borrowing & lending
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Diego Comin, Ana Danieli, and Martí Mestieri
We propose a mechanism for labor-market polarization based on the nonhomotheticity of demand that we call the income-driven channel. Our mechanism builds on a novel empirical fact: Expenditure elasticities and production intensities in low- and high-skill occupations are positively correlated across sectors. Thus, as income grows, demand shifts toward expenditure-elastic sectors, and the relative demand for low- and high-skill occupations increases, causing labor-market polarization.
Topics: Employment & labor markets; Wages, income, and wealth; Low & moderate income
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Alexander Ludwig, Alexander Monge-Naranjo, Ctirad Slavik, and Faisal Sohail
We estimate the effects that various financial deregulations in the U.S. have had on the country's income distribution. We find that the various reforms have moved inequality in drastically different directions.
Topics: Inequality; Low & moderate income; Financial regulation
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Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau
Job acceptance decisions weigh the value of a job against remaining unemployed. A reservation level of benefit payments exists in this dynamic decision problem at which an individual is indifferent between accepting and refusing an offer. Estimating the reservation benefit for a wide range of U.S. workers suggests that few would turn down an offer to return to work at the previous wage under the CARES Act expanded unemployment insurance payments.
Topics: Insurance; Unemployment; COVID-19
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
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Lindsay Jacobs, Elizabeth Llanes, Kevin Moore, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques Volz
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Hannah Rubinton
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Michele Battisti, Ryan Michaels, and Choonsung Park
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J. Ignacio García-Pérez and Sílvio Rendon
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François Gourio and Charles Fries
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Pia Orrenius, Madeline Zavodny, and Stephanie Gullo
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Brett Barkley and Mark E. Schweitzer
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Robert E. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak
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Rajashri Chakrabarti, Vyacheslav Fos, Andres Liberman, and Constantine Yannelis
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Didem Tüzemen
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Daniel Cooper, Karen Dynan, and Hannah Rhodenhiser
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Sanghoon Lee, Seung Hoon Lee, and Jeffrey Lin
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Bo Zhao
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Rajashri Chakrabarti and Maxim Pinkovskiy
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Katharine Bradbury
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Eric Nielsen
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Davide Melcangi
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Matthew Jaremski and David C. Wheelock
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Andrew M. Dumont
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Didem Tüzemen and Willem Van Zandweghe
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Donna Feir, Rob Gillezeau, and Maggie E.C. Jones
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Samuel Antill and Asani Sarkar
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Diego Daruich
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Enrique Martínez-García and Valerie Grossman
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Kimberly Bayard, Emin Dinlersoz, Timothy Dunne, John Haltiwanger, Javier Miranda, and John J. Stevens
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Andreas Fuster, Greg Kaplan, and Basit Zafar
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Jonathan Fisher, David Johnson, Timothy Smeeding, and Jeffrey Thompson
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Jeffrey Thompson, Michael Parisi, and Jesse Bricker
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Jack DeWaard, Janna E. Johnson, and Stephan D. Whitaker
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Bill Dupor, Marios Karabarbounis, Marianna Kudlyak, and M. Saif Mehkari
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Daniel Aaronson, Jonathan Davis, and Karl Schulze
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Michael Sposi
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Bruce Fallick and Pawel Krolikowski
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Tomaz Cajner, Tyler Radler, David Ratner, and Ivan Vidangos
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Ina Ganguli, Jeffrey Lin, and Nicholas Reynolds
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Sarena F. Goodman, Alice Henriques Volz, and Alvaro Mezza
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Brandyn Bok, Daniele Caratelli, Domenico Giannone, Argia Sbordone, and Andrea Tambalotti
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Leonard Nakamura, Jon Samuels, and Rachel Soloveichik
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M.M. Croce, A.G. Karantounias, S. Raymond, and L. Schmid
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Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow, and Huiyu Li
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Kartik Athreya, José Mustre-del-Río, and Juan M. Sánchez
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Patrick Coate, Pawel Krolikowski, and Mike Zabek
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Marco Bassetto and Wei Cui
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Chi-Young Choi and Alexander Chudik
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Keith Barnatchez, Leland D. Crane, and Ryan A. Decker
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Arthur Acolin, Paul Calem, Julapa Jagtiani, and Susan Wachter
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Amanda Bayer and David W. Wilcox
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Daniel Aaronson, Rajeev Dehejia, Andrew Jordan, Cristian Pop-Eleches, Cyrus Samii, and Karl Schulze
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Daniel Cooper, María José Luengo-Prado, and Jonathan A. Parker
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Lei Ding and Leonard Nakamura
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Randall Akee, Elton Mykerezi, and Richard M. Todd
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R. Anton Braun, Karen A. Kopecky, and Tatyana Koreshkova
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Jonathan Davis and Bhashkar Mazumder
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Kelly D. Edmiston
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Randal J. Verbrugge and Joshua Gallin
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Anat Bracha and Mary A. Burke
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Kristle Cortés, Andrew Glover, and Murat Tasci
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Pedro Amaral
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Dionissi Aliprantis
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Andrew Hanson, Zackary Hawley, and Hal Martin
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Pia Orrenius
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William R. Emmons and Lowell R. Ricketts
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Roberto Pinheiro and Murat Tasci
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Daniel Aaronson and Brian J. Phelan
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Economic Research Department
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Jenny Schuetz, Arturo Gonzalez, Jeff Larrimore, Ellen A. Merry, and Barbara J. Robles
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Sarena F. Goodman and Adam M. Isen
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Katharine Bradbury
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Jonathan Heathcote and Hitoshi Tsujiyama
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Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Marianna Kudlyak, and John Mondragon
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Daniel Cooper and María José Luengo-Prado
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Lisa Barrow, Lauren Sartain, and Marisa de la Torre
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Steven Laufer and Andrew Paciorek