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Working PaperPrivate Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-37
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in which private equity managers alter worker outcomes: (1) exertion of monopsony power in concentrated markets, (2) breach of implicit contracts with targeted groups of workers, including managers and top earners, and (3) efficient reallocation of workers across plants. We do not find any evidence that private equity-backed firms vary wages and employment based on local labor market power proxies. Wage losses are also very similar for managers and top earners. Instead, we find strong evidence that private equity managers downsize less productive plants relative to productive plants while simultaneously reallocating high-wage workers to more productive plants. We conclude that post-buyout employment and wage dynamics are consistent with professional investors providing incentives to increase productivity and monitor the companies in which they invest.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-36
Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings. First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors. The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services. Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years. Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity. Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive. Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home. These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperConsequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-35
Amidst rising and increasingly unaffordable rents, 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year across the United States'and eviction rates are twice as high for renters with children. One important and neglected population who may experience unique levels of housing insecurity is college students, especially given that one in five college students are parents. In this study, we link 11.9 million student records to eviction filings from housing courts, demographic characteristics reported in decennial census and survey data, incomes reported on tax returns by students and their parents, and dates of birth and death from the Social Security Administration. Parenting students are more likely than non-parenting students to identify as female (62.81% vs. 55.94%) and Black (19.66% vs. 14.30%), be over 30 years old (42.73% vs. 20.25%), and have parents with lower household incomes ($100,000 vs. $140,000). Parenting students threatened with eviction (i.e., had an eviction filed against them) are much more likely than non-threatened parenting students to identify as female (81.18% vs. 62.81%) and Black (56.84% vs. 19.66%). In models adjusted for individual and institutional characteristics, we find that being threatened with an eviction was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of degree completion, reduced post-enrollment income, reduced likelihood of being married post-enrollment, and increased post-enrollment mortality. Among parenting students, 38.38% (95% confidence interval (CI): 32.50-44.26%) of non-threatened students completed a bachelor's degree compared to just 15.36% (CI: 11.61-19.11%) of students threatened with eviction. Our findings highlight the long-term economic and health impacts of housing insecurity during college, especially for parenting students. Housing stability for parenting students may have substantial multigenerational benefits for economic mobility and population health.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Effects of Eviction on Children
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-34
Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFirm Heterogeneity, Misallocation, and Trade
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-33
To what extent do domestic distortions influence the gains from trade? Using data from Chinese manufacturing surveys and U.S. census records, I document two novel stylized facts: (1) Larger producers in China exhibit lower revenue productivity, whereas larger producers in the U.S. exhibit higher revenue productivity. (2) Larger exporters in China exhibit lower export intensity, whereas larger exporters in the U.S. exhibit higher export intensity. A model of heterogeneous producers shows that only the U.S. patterns are consistent with an efficient allocation. To reconcile the observed patterns in China, I introduce producer- and destination-specific subsidies and estimate the model without imposing functional form assumptions on the joint distribution of productivity and subsidy rates. Accounting for distortions in China leads to substantially smaller estimated gains from trade.View Full Paper PDF
