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Jel Classification:I31 

Report
World welfare is rising: estimation using nonparametric bounds on welfare measures

I take a new approach to measuring world inequality and welfare over time by constructing robust bounds for these series instead of imposing parametric assumptions to compute point estimates. I derive sharp bounds on the Atkinson inequality index that are valid for any underlying distribution of income conditional on given fractile shares and the Gini coefficient. While the bounds are too wide to reject the hypothesis that world inequality may have risen, I show that world welfare rose unambiguously between 1970 and 2006. This conclusion is valid for alternative methods of dealing with ...
Staff Reports , Paper 662

Working Paper
Termination of SNAP Emergency Allotments, Food Sufficiency, and Economic Hardships

To meet the rising need for food and nutrition assistance during the pandemic in the United States, all states were approved to provide Emergency Allotments (EA) to households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In this analysis, we use the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Surveys and exploit staggered state-level variation in dissolution of the SNAP EA payments 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 ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-046

Working Paper
Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions

This paper studies one of the largest spatially targeted redevelopment efforts implemented in the United States: public housing demolitions sponsored by the HOPE VI program. Focusing on Chicago, we study welfare and racial disparities in the impacts of demolitions using a structural model that features a rich set of equilibrium responses. Our results indicate that demolitions had notably heterogeneous effects where welfare decreased for low-income minority households and increased for White households. Counterfactual simulations explore how housing policy mitigates negative effects of ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-19

Working Paper
Health Shocks, Health Insurance, Human Capital, and the Dynamics of Earnings and Health

We specify and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings incorporating health shocks and medical treatment decisions. Our model features endogenous wage formation via human capital accumulation, employer-sponsored health insurance, and means-tested social insurance. We use the model to study the effects of health shocks on health, labor supply and earnings, and to assess how health shocks contribute to earnings inequality. We also simulate provision of public insurance to agents who lack employer-sponsored insurance. The public insurance program substantially increases medical ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 080

Working Paper
Financial Vulnerability and Personal Finance Outcomes of Natural Disasters

I evaluate the effects of hurricanes of varying intensity on the financial condition of a typical resident in both affected and unaffected census tracts, where the degree of affect is determined by the relative location of a census tract?s boundary with buffers around the tracks of hurricane eyes that occurred in the years 2000-2014. The primary question in the article is whether financial vulnerability, or, alternatively, ?financial preparedness,? affects post-hurricane disaster financial outcomes. {{p}} I find that hurricanes tend to lower credit scores, for the most, but outcomes are far ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 17-9

Journal Article
Risk Aversion at the Country Level

This article estimates the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 75 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. The analysis suggests that the coefficient of relative risk aversion varies closely around 1, which corresponds to a logarithmic utility function. The authors conclude that their results support the use of the log utility function in numerical simulations of economic models.
Review , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , Pages 53-66

Working Paper
Does Access to Free Pre-Kindergarten Increase Maternal Labor Supply?

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on the labor force participation (LFP) of mothers. We use variation in pre-K rules across all US states, including income eligibility requirements in some states. To estimate the causal effects of access to pre-K on labor supply, we exploit the panel aspect of the monthly Current Population Survey between 2002 and 2019. Specifically, we look at the change in labor market behavior of women when their child becomes age-eligible for pre-K, controlling for individual factors. We find that access to free pre-K ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2022-3

Working Paper
The gap between the conditional wage distributions of incumbents and the newly hired employees: decomposition and uniform ordering

We examine the cardinal gap between wage distributions of the incumbents and newly hired workers based on entropic distances that are well-defined welfare theoretic measures. Decomposition of several effects is achieved by identifying several counterfactual distributions of different groups. These go beyond the usual Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at the (linear) conditional means. Much like quantiles, these entropic distances are well defined inferential objects and functions whose statistical properties have recently been developed. Going beyond these strong rankings and distances, we ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2014-22

Working Paper
Decomposing Lifetime-Earnings Differences between White, Black, and Hispanic Families

This paper explores disparities between White, Black, and Hispanic families using a measure of lifetime earnings developed by Jacobs et al. (2022) for the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Lifetime earnings are a particularly important measure of well-being, with relevance for wealth accumulation among other economic and social outcomes, but they are under-studied in the context of racial disparities. We describe how the different components of lifetime earnings— including annual earnings of workers, number of working household members, and number of years of employment during the working ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-14

Working Paper
A Comparison of Living Standards Across the States of America

We use an expected utility framework to examine how living standards vary across the United States and how each state's living standards have evolved over time. Our welfare measure accounts for cross-state variations in mortality, consumption, education, inequality, and cost of living. We find that per capita income is a good indicator of living standards, with a correlation of 0.80 across states. Living standards in most states, however, appear closer to those in the richest states than their difference in per capita income would suggest. Whereas high-income states benefit from higher life ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-041

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