Research

Penalized or Protected? Gender and the Consequences of Nonstandard and Mismatched Employment Histories

Millions of workers are employed in positions that deviate from the full-time, standard employment relationship or work in jobs that are mismatched with their skills, education, or experience. Yet, little is known about how employers evaluate workers who have experienced these employment arrangements, limiting our knowledge about how part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization affect workers’ labor market opportunities.

Incarceration, Prisoner Reentry, and Communities

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has experienced an enormous rise in incarceration and accompanying increases in returning prisoners and in postrelease community correctional supervision. Poor urban communities are disproportionately impacted by these phenomena.

Homelessness and Housing Insecurity Among Former Prisoners

The United States has experienced dramatic increases in both incarceration rates and the population of insecurely housed or homeless persons since the 1980s. These marginalized populations have strong overlaps, with many people being poor, minority, and from an urban area. That a relationship between homelessness, housing insecurity, and incarceration exists is clear, but the extent and nature of this relationship is not yet adequately understood.

Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period

Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family’s economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels.

The Effect of Unemployment Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment Insurance Receipt: New Evidence from a Regression Kink Design in Missouri, 2003-2013

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more responsive to benefit levels during the recession and its aftermath, with an elasticity between 0.65 and 0.9 as compared to about 0.35 pre-recession.

Inference on Causal Effects in a Generalized Regression Kink Design

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly unemployment benefits) is determined by an observed but potentially endogenous assignment variable (like previous earnings).

Firms and Labor Market Inequality: Evidence and Some Theory

We review the literature on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. There is strong evidence from a variety of fields that standard measures of productivity – like output per worker or total factor productivity – vary substantially across firms, even within narrowly-defined industries. Several recent studies note that rising trends in the dispersion of productivity across firms mirror the trends in the wage inequality across workers. Two distinct literatures have searched for a more direct link between these two phenomena.

Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation

This paper studies how in utero exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures affects later mental health. We find that prenatal exposure to the death of a maternal relative increases take-up of ADHD medications during childhood and anti-anxiety and depression medications in adulthood. Further, family ruptures during pregnancy depress birth outcomes and raise the risk of perinatal complications necessitating hospitalization.

Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs

This article documents a new macro-segregation, where the locus of racial differentiation resides increasingly in socio-spatial processes at the community or place level. The goal is to broaden the spatial lens for studying segregation, using decennial Census data on 222 metropolitan areas. Unlike previous neighborhood studies of racial change, we decompose metropolitan segregation into its within- and between-place components from 1990 to 2010. This is accomplished with the Theil index (H).

Whom Do Immigrants Marry? Emerging Patterns of Intermarriage and Integration in the United States

We document patterns of intermarriage between immigrants and natives during a period of unprecedented growth in the size and diversity of America’s foreign-born population. Roughly one in six U.S. marriages today involve immigrants and a large share includes U.S.-born partners. Ethno-racial background clearly shapes trajectories of immigrant social integration. White immigrants are far more likely than other groups to marry U.S.-born natives, mostly other whites. Black immigrants are much less likely to marry black natives or out-marry with other groups.

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