Search Results
Journal Article
Surveying Mobility
A new survey provides unique insights into economic mobility in the Third District
Journal Article
Inequality Research Review Local Labor Markets
Aggregate statistics don’t capture the local conditions that directly affect families and communities.
Journal Article
Inequality Research Review: Intergenerational Economic Mobility
America is known as the land of opportunity, but our children are not destined to do better than us.
Journal Article
Inequality Research Review: Gender Gaps in the Labor Market
The gap in earnings between men and women has narrowed, but why haven’t we closed it entirely?
Working Paper
A Unified Framework for Transparent Quasi-Experimental Research
This paper develops a framework that allows researchers to describe a wide class of quasi-experimental treatment effect estimates using direct analogs of the features that make a randomized controlled trial transparent. The outcome weight measures how much each observation’s outcome contributes to an estimate, and its sign defines effective treatment and control groups. We show that estimates take a Wald form, equal to the weighted outcome difference between these groups divided by an effective first stage that quantifies the identifying treatment contrast. Our framework also allows ...
Working Paper
The Welfare Impacts of Urban Renewal and Forced Relocation: Evidence from Chicago’s HOPE VI Demolitions
This paper studies one of the largest spatial redevelopment efforts in the United States: HOPE VI public housing demolitions. Focusing on Chicago, we estimate a neighborhood choice model combining administrative records tracking displaced public-housing residents with Census Bureau data capturing citywide sorting and prices. Demolitions generate large welfare losses driven by displacement costs, partially offset by housing vouchers. Demolitions also raise housing prices and reshape neighborhood composition, with gains concentrated among higher-income homeowners. Counterfactuals show that more ...
Working Paper
Social Insurance with Imperfect Eligibility Screening: Theory and Evidence from Pandemic UI
This paper studies social insurance with imperfect eligibility screening, focusing on unemployment insurance (UI) during its expansion in 2020 and 2021. We study the extent of imperfect screening by identifying anomalous payments using administrative tax data and UI policies, finding $214 billion in potentially-improper payments—concentrated in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program—with approximately half detectable ex-ante through improved federal-state data sharing. There is substantial geographic variation, and a border design shows this is partly due to policy decisions ...
Working Paper
Dynamic Individuals, Static Neighborhoods: Migration and Earnings Changes in Poor Neighborhoods
Why do poor neighborhoods stay poor? Using administrative data linking residential histories to longitudinal earnings, we show that while many residents of poor neighborhoods have persistently low earnings and remain in concentrated poverty for extended periods, a large number also experience sizable earnings growth and move to richer areas. Estimates based on idiosyncratic, firm-specific pay changes show that part of this sorting is causal — earnings increases induce upward moves. On net, selective migration depresses the growth of poor neighborhoods’ average earnings by roughly 60 ...
Working Paper
The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity
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 ...
Working Paper
Place-Based Consequences of Person-Based Transfer: Evidence from Recessions
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 ...