CREAT is a data tool that explores connections between research published in the Center for Economic Studies (CES) working paper series. You can search working papers by automatically generated tags and keywords, or try searching for an author or a specific word/phrase.
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Working PaperKids to School and Moms to Work: New York City's Universal Pre-K Expansion and Mother's Employment
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-62
Using the restricted data from American Community Survey from 2011 to 2017, this paper examines the impact of New York City's (NYC) expansion of universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) on labor force participation of mothers with the youngest child of 4 years of age. Starting in Fall of 2014, any child who is 4 years old and residing in NYC for the past year is eligible for UPK for the academic year, for example all children born in 2010 would qualify for the academic year 2014-15. It uses a triple-difference approach - first compare mothers in NYC with the youngest child of 4-year-olds (treated mothers) to mothers with the youngest child of 5 and 6-year-olds (control mothers) before and after the program. Next, it compares this difference with mothers living in adjacent counties in the New York Metropolitan Area (NMA) in New York to NYC. I find that the program increased mothers' labor force participation by 5 percentage points (a 7.5 percent impact) in NYC. The results are robust to various robustness checks like comparing with mothers living in all of NMA and mothers in Philadelphia.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEstimating the Graduate Coverage of Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-61
This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating the coverage rate of the Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes data product (PSEO), both as a share of new graduates and as a share of total working-age degree holders in the United States. This paper also assesses how representative PSEO is of the broader population of college graduates across an array of institutional and individual characteristics.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperBusiness Owners and the Self-Employed: 33 Million (and Counting!)
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-60
Entrepreneurs are known to be key drivers of economic growth, and the rise of online platforms and the broader 'gig economy' has led self-employment to surge in recent decades. Yet the young and small businesses associated with this activity are often absent from economic data. In this paper, we explore a novel longitudinal dataset that covers the owners of tens of millions of the smallest businesses: those without employees. We produce three new sets of statistics on the rapidly growing set of nonemployer businesses. First, we measure transitions between self-employment and wage and salary jobs. Second, we describe nonemployer business entry and exit, as well as transitions between legal form (e.g., sole proprietorship to S corporation). Finally, we link owners to their nonemployer businesses and examine the dynamics of business ownership.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUnemployment Insurance, Wage Pass-Through, and Endogenous Take-Up
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-59
This paper studies how unemployment insurance (UI) generosity affects reservation wages, re-employment wages, and benefit take-up. Using Benefit Accuracy Measurement (BAM) data, we estimate a cross-sectional elasticity of reservation wages with respect to weekly UI benefits of 0.014. Exploiting state variation in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) intensity and the timing of federal supplements, we find that expanded benefits during COVID-19 increased reservation wages by 8'12 percent. Using CPS rotation data, we also document a 9 percent rise in re-employment wages for UI-eligible workers relative to ineligible workers. Over the same period, the UI take-up rate rose from roughly 30 to 40 percent; Probit estimates indicate that higher benefit levels, rather than changes in observables, account for this increase. A directed search model with an endogenous filing decision replicates these facts: generosity primarily operates through the extensive margin of take-up, which mutes the pass-through from benefits to wages.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRevisiting the Unintended Consequences of Ban the Box
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-58
Ban-the-Box (BTB) policies intend to help formerly incarcerated individuals find employment by delaying when employers can ask about criminal records. We revisit the finding in Doleac and Hansen (2020) that BTB causes statistical discrimination against minority men. We correct miscoded BTB laws and show that estimates from the Current Population Survey (CPS) remain quantitatively similar, while those from the American Community Survey (ACS) now fail to reject the null hypothesis of no effect of BTB on employment. In contrast to the published estimates, these ACS results are statistically significantly different from the CPS results, indicating a lack of robustness across datasets. We do not find evidence that these differences are due to sample composition or survey weights. There is limited evidence that these divergent results are explained by the different frequencies of these surveys. Differences in sample sizes may also lead to different estimates; the ACS has a much larger sample and more statistical power to detect effects near the corrected CPS estimates.View Full Paper PDF
