Labor Markets

  • Michael Hout
  • Gregory Acs
  • David Card
  • Jesse Rothstein

Leaders: Gregory Acs, David Card, Michael Hout, Jesse Rothstein

The labor market was of course hit very heavily by the Great Recession, as evidenced by (a) the slow recovery of the unemployment rate, (b) and the even slower recovery of the long-term unemployment rate and the prime-age employment ratio (defined as the ratio of employed 25-54 year-olds to the population of that same age). This “jobs problem,” which is especially prominent among low-skill workers, has led to a sharp rise in the number of poor households without any working adults. It also underlies, in part, the sharp increase in the number of disability insurance claims and awards, which in turn has further reduced the supply of labor among low-skilled individuals.

If the first type of “jobs problem” is that there still are not enough of them, the second is that the jobs that are available do not always provide the requisite hours, wages, or security that are needed for a sure pathway out of poverty. As a result, low-skill individuals are not just working less but, even when they are working, there is no guarantee that their jobs will lift them and their families out of poverty. The Labor Markets RG is tasked with conducting research on these and related problems and exploiting administrative and other data to assess possible policy responses to them. We list below a few examples of the work being carried out in this group.

Long-run effects of work incentives: As nonworking poverty increases, the U.S. might well want to turn to new types of work incentive programs. Have these programs worked elsewhere?

Minimum wages and poverty: Throughout the west coast, there are a host of minimum wage “experiments” underway, experiments that have the potential to reset the low-wage labor market in quite fundamental ways. How are these experiments playing out?

Labor Markets - CPI Research

Title Author Media
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation Alexander M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, John Van Reenen

Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation

Author: Alexander M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, John Van Reenen
Publisher: NBER
Date: 11/2017

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in America by using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records. We establish three sets of results. First, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. There are similarly large gaps by race and gender. Differences in innate ability, as measured by test scores in early childhood, explain relatively little of these gaps. Second, exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to become inventors. Growing up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class leads to a higher probability of patenting in exactly the same technology class. These exposure effects are gender-specific: girls are more likely to become inventors in a particular technology class if they grow up in an area with more female inventors in that technology class. Third, the financial returns to inventions are extremely skewed and highly correlated with their scientific impact, as measured by citations. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects and contrary to standard models of career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as under-represented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. We develop a simple model of inventors' careers that matches these empirical results. The model implies that increasing exposure to innovation in childhood may have larger impacts on innovation than increasing the financial incentives to innovate, for instance by cutting tax rates. In particular, there are many “lost Einsteins” — individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation.

Payroll Taxes, Firm Behavior, and Rent Sharing: Evidence from a Young Workers’ Tax Cut in Sweden Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, David Seim

Payroll Taxes, Firm Behavior, and Rent Sharing: Evidence from a Young Workers’ Tax Cut in Sweden

Author: Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, David Seim
Publisher: NBER
Date: 10/2017

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large and long-lasting employer payroll tax rate cut from 31% down to 15% for young workers (aged 26 or less) in Sweden. We find a zero effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, even in the medium run (after six years). Simple graphical cohort analysis shows compelling positive effects on the employment rate of the treated young workers, of about 2-3 percentage points, which arise primarily from fewer separations (rather than more hiring). These employment effects are larger in places with initially higher youth unemployment rates. We also analyze the firm-level effects of the tax cut. We sort firms by the size of the tax windfall and trace out graphically the time series of firms' outcomes. We proxy a firm's windfall with its share of treated young workers just before the reform. First, heavily treated firms expand after the reform: employment, capital, sales, value added, and profits all increase. These effects appear stronger in credit-constrained firms, consistent with liquidity effects. Second, heavily treated firms increase the wages of all their workers – young as well as old – collectively, perhaps through rent sharing. Wages of low paid workers rise more in percentage terms. Rather than canonical market-level adjustment, we uncover a crucial role of firm-level mechanisms in the transmission of payroll tax cuts.

Scraping by: Income and Program Participation After the Loss of Extended Unemployment Benefits Jesse Rothstein, Robert G. Valletta

Scraping by: Income and Program Participation After the Loss of Extended Unemployment Benefits

Author: Jesse Rothstein, Robert G. Valletta
Publisher: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
Date: 08/2017

Many Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients do not find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, even when benefits are extended during recessions. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panel data covering the 2001 and 2007 to 2009 recessions and their aftermaths, we identify individuals whose jobless spells outlasted their UI benefits (exhaustees) and examine household income, program participation, and health-related outcomes during the six months following UI exhaustion. For the average exhaustee, the loss of UI benefits is only slightly offset by increased participation in other safety net programs (e.g., food stamps), and family poverty rates rise substantially. Self-reported disability also rises following UI exhaustion. These patterns do not vary dramatically across household demographic groups, broad income level prior to job loss, or the two business cycles. The results highlight the unique, important role of UI in the U.S. social safety net.

The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage and Labor Market Outcomes Mark Duggan, Gopi Shah Goda, Emilie Jackson

The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage and Labor Market Outcomes

Author: Mark Duggan, Gopi Shah Goda, Emilie Jackson
Publisher: NBER
Date: 07/2017

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions designed to expand insurance coverage that also alter the tie between employment and health insurance. In this paper, we exploit variation across geographic areas in the potential impact of the ACA to estimate its effect on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes in the first two years after the implementation of its main features. Our measures of potential ACA impact come from pre-existing population shares of uninsured individuals within income groups that were targeted by Medicaid expansions and federal subsidies for private health insurance, interacted with each state’s Medicaid expansion status. Our findings indicate that the majority of the increase in health insurance coverage since 2013 is due to the ACA and that areas in which the potential Medicaid and exchange enrollments were higher saw substantially larger increases in coverage. While labor market outcomes in the aggregate were not significantly affected, our results indicate that labor force participation reductions in areas with higher potential exchange enrollment were offset by increases in labor force participation in areas with higher potential Medicaid enrollment

State of the Union 2017: Earnings Colin Peterson, C. Matthew Snipp, Sin Yi Cheung

State of the Union 2017: Earnings

Author: Colin Peterson, C. Matthew Snipp, Sin Yi Cheung
Publisher: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
Date: 06/2017

Between 1970 and 2010, the earnings gap between whites and other groups has narrowed, but most of that decline was secured in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Except in the case of Asians, more recent trends are less favorable, with the post-1980 earnings gap either growing larger (e.g., Hispanics) or remaining roughly stable in size (e.g., black men).

labor markets - CPI Affiliates

John Van Reenen's picture John Van Reenen Professor of Applied Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jonas Pontusson's picture Jonas Pontusson Professor of Comparative Politics
University of Geneva
Julie E. Brines Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Washington
Kevin Lang's picture Kevin Lang Professor of Economics; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research
Boston University
Kevin T. Leicht's picture Kevin T. Leicht Sociology Department Head of Sociology; Professor of LAS Global Studies
The University of Iowa

Pages

Labor Markets - Other Research

Title Author Media
U.S. Job Flows and the China Shock Brian J. Asquith, Sanjana Goswami, David Neumark, Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez

U.S. Job Flows and the China Shock

Author: Brian J. Asquith, Sanjana Goswami, David Neumark, Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez
Publisher: NBER
Date: 11/2017

International trade exposure affects job creation and destruction along the intensive margin (job flows due to expansions and contractions of firms' employment) as well as along the extensive margin (job flows due to births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992-2011 employment data from the {universe} of U.S. establishments to construct job flows at both the industry and commuting-zone levels, and then estimates the impact of the `China shock' on each job-flow type. The China shock is accounted for by either the increase in Chinese import penetration in the U.S., or by the U.S. policy change that granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status to China. We find that the China shock affects U.S. employment mainly through deaths of establishments. At the commuting-zone level, we find evidence of large job reallocation from the Chinese-competition exposed sector to the nonexposed sector, and establish that the gross employment effects of the China shock are fundamentally different from those of a more general adverse shock affecting the U.S. demand for domestic labor.

Social Capital and Labor Market Networks Brian J. Asquith, Judith K. Hellerstein, Mark J. Kutzbach, David Neumark

Social Capital and Labor Market Networks

Author: Brian J. Asquith, Judith K. Hellerstein, Mark J. Kutzbach, David Neumark
Publisher: NBER
Date: 11/2017

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that have previously been tied to social capital, and new data – not previously used in the study of social capital – on the number and location of non-profits at the neighborhood level. We use a machine learning algorithm to identify potential social capital measures that best predict neighborhood-level variation in labor market networks. We find evidence suggesting that smaller and less centralized schools, and schools with fewer poor students, foster social capital that builds labor market networks, as does a larger Republican vote share. The presence of establishments in a number of non-profit oriented industries are identified as predictive of strong labor market networks, likely because they either provide public goods or facilitate social contacts. These industries include, for example, churches and other religious institutions, schools, country clubs, and amateur or recreational sports teams or clubs.

Reference-Dependent Job Search: Evidence from Hungary Stefano DellaVigna, Attila Lindner, Balázs Reizer, Johannes F. Schmieder

Reference-Dependent Job Search: Evidence from Hungary

Author: Stefano DellaVigna, Attila Lindner, Balázs Reizer, Johannes F. Schmieder
Publisher: Quarterly Journal of Economics
Date: 11/2017

We propose a model of job search with reference-dependent preferences, with loss aversion relative to recent income (the reference point). In this model, newly unemployed individuals search hard since consumption is below their reference point. Over time, though, they get used to lower income and thus reduce their search effort. In anticipation of a benefit cut, their search effort rises again, then declines once they get accustomed to the lower postcut benefit level. The model fits the typical pattern of exit from unemployment, even with no unobserved heterogeneity. To distinguish between this and other models, we use a unique reform in the unemployment insurance (UI) benefit path. In 2005, Hungary switched from a single-step UI system to a two-step system, with overall generosity unchanged. The system generated increased hazard rates in anticipation of, and especially following, benefit cuts in ways the standard model has a hard time explaining. We estimate a model with optimal consumption, endogenous search effort, and unobserved heterogeneity. The reference-dependent model fits the hazard rates substantially better than plausible versions of the standard model, including habit formation. Our estimates indicate a slow-adjusting reference point and substantial impatience, likely reflecting present-bias. 

Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008 Neil Fligstein, Jonah Stuart Brundage, Michael Schultz

Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008

Author: Neil Fligstein, Jonah Stuart Brundage, Michael Schultz
Publisher: American Sociological Review
Date: 09/2017

One of the puzzles about the financial crisis of 2008 is why regulators, particularly the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), were so slow to recognize the impending collapse of the financial system and its broader consequences for the economy. We use theory from the literature on culture, cognition, and framing to explain this puzzle. Consistent with recent work on “positive asymmetry,” we show how the FOMC generally interpreted discomforting facts in a positive light, marginalizing and normalizing anomalous information. We argue that all frames limit what can be understood, but the content of frames matters for how facts are identified and explained. We provide evidence that the Federal Reserve’s primary frame for making sense of the economy was macroeconomic theory. The content of macroeconomics made it difficult for the FOMC to connect events into a narrative reflecting the links between foreclosures in the housing market, the financial instruments used to package the mortgages into securities, and the threats to the larger economy. We conclude with implications for the sociological literatures on framing and cognition and for decision-making in future crises.

Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016 Jessica L. Semega, Kayla R. Fontenot, Melissa A. Kollar

Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016

Author: Jessica L. Semega, Kayla R. Fontenot, Melissa A. Kollar
Publisher: U.S. Census Bureau
Date: 09/2017

Summary of findings:

Real median household income increased 3.2 percent between 2015 and 2016.2 This is the second consecutive annual increase in median household income.

The number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 2.2 million in 2016.

The 2016 female-to-male earnings ratio was 0.805, a 1.1 percent increase from the 2015 ratio. This is the first time the female-to-male earnings ratio has experienced an annual increase since 2007.

The official poverty rate decreased by 0.8 percentage points between 2015 and 2016. At 12.7 percent, the 2016 poverty rate is not statistically different from 2007 (12.5 percent), the year before the most recent recession.

The number of people in poverty fell by 2.5 m