Casino-style gaming is an important economic development strategy for many American Indian tribes throughout the United States. Using confidential Census microdata and a database
of tribal government-owned casinos, I examine the local labor market effects of tribal gaming on different markets, over different time horizons, and for different subgroups. I find that tribal gaming is responsible for sustained improvements in employment and wages on reservations and that American Indians benefit the most. I also find that tribal gaming increases the average rental price of housing but by an amount smaller than the average wage increase, suggesting net local benefits.
-
The Impact of Local Labor Market Conditions on the Demand for Education: Evidence from Indian Casinos
June 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-14
Using restricted-use data from the 1990 and 2000 Census long-form, we analyze the impact of local labor market conditions on the demand for education using the economic shock produced by the opening of a new casino on an Indian reservation as the identifying event. Federal legislation in 1988 allowed Indian tribes to open casinos in many states and since then, over 400 casinos have opened, 240 of which have Las Vegas-style games. We demonstrate that the opening of a casino increased the employment and wages of low-skilled workers. Young adults responded by dropping out of high school and reducing college enrollment rates, even though many tribes have generous college tuition subsidy programs.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Separate but Not Equal: The Uneven Cost of Residential Segregation for Network-Based Hiring
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-56
This paper studies how residential segregation by race and by education affects job search via neighbor networks. Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, I measure segregation for each characteristic at both the individual level and the neighborhood level. My findings are manifold. At the individual level, future coworkership with new neighbors on the same block is less likely among segregated individuals than among integrated workers, irrespective of races and levels of schooling. The impacts are most adverse for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographics: Blacks and those without a high school education. At the block level, however, higher segregation along either dimension raises the likelihood of any future coworkership on the block for all racial or educational groups. My identification strategy, capitalizing on data granularity, allows a causal interpretation of these results. Together, they point to the coexistence of homophily and in-group competition for job opportunities in linking residential segregation to neighbor-based informal hiring. My subtle findings have important implications for policy-making.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Assessing the Incidence and Efficiency of a Prominent Place Based Policy
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-07
This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find that EZ designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living. The results suggest the efficiency costs of first Round EZs were relatively small.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Displaced workers, early leavers, and re-employment wages
November 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-18
In this paper, we lay out a search model that takes explicitly into account the
information flow prior to a mass layoff. Using universal wage data files that allow
us to identify individuals working with healthy and displacing firms both at
the time of displacement as well as any other time period, we test the predictions
of the model on re-employment wage differentials. Workers leaving a "distressed"
firm have higher re-employment wages than workers who stay with the
distressed firm until displacement. This result is robust to the inclusion of controls
for worker quality and unobservable firm characteristics.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Potential for Using Combined Survey and Administrative Data Sources to Study Internal Labor Migration
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-55
This paper introduces a novel data set combining survey data from the American Community Survey (ACS) with administrative data on employment from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, in order to study geographic labor mobility. With its rich set of information about individuals at the time of the migration decision, large sample size, and near-comprehensive ability to detect labor mobility, the new combined ACS-LEHD data offers several advantages over the existing data sets that are typically used in the study of migration, such as the Decennial Census, Current Population Survey, and Internal Revenue Service data. An overview of how these different data sets can be employed, and examples demonstrating the usefulness of the newly proposed data set, are provided.
Aggregate statistics and stylized facts are generated from the ACS-LEHD data which reveal many of the same features as the existing data sets, including the decline of aggregate mobility throughout the past decade, as well as many of the known demographic differences in migration propensity.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Effect of Housing Assistance Program on Labor Supply and Family Formation
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-35
This paper studies the effect of U.S. Housing Choice Voucher Program Section 8 on low-income people' labor supply and family formation. I analyse this effect using data from the 2014 Panel and 2018 Panel of the restricted-use Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). My economic approach is to explore the policy which assigns housing vouchers based on an income cutoff as an instrument to study the effect of housing vouchers on low-income people's employment and family formation. The assignment policy states that households with income lower than 50% of the median income for the MSA area are eligible for housing vouchers. With household eligibility status, I compare the households whose income is slightly below the income cutoff (eligible households) with the households whose income is slightly above the income cutoff (ineligible household) to identify the effect of housing vouchers on employment and family formation. I find that housing vouchers have a negative impact on individual labor supply through both extensive and intensive margins. In addition, housing vouchers also negatively impact family formation by decreasing marriage and increasing divorce rates. This project will contribute to understanding the effect of Section 8 Housing Vouchers on low-income households' labor supply and family formation.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
A METHOD OF CORRECTING FOR MISREPORTING APPLIED TO THE FOOD STAMP PROGRAM
May 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-28
Survey misreporting is known to be pervasive and bias common statistical analyses. In this paper, I first use administrative data on SNAP receipt and amounts linked to American Community Survey data from New York State to show that survey data can misrepresent the program in important ways. For example, more than 1.4 billion dollars received are not reported in New York State alone. 46 percent of dollars received by house- holds with annual income above the poverty line are not reported in the survey data, while only 19 percent are missing below the poverty line. Standard corrections for measurement error cannot remove these biases. I then develop a method to obtain consistent estimates by combining parameter estimates from the linked data with publicly available data. This conditional density method recovers the correct estimates using public use data only, which solves the problem that access to linked administrative data is usually restricted. I examine the degree to which this approach can be used to extrapolate across time and geography, in order to solve the problem that validation data is often based on a convenience sample. I present evidence from within New York State that the extent of heterogeneity is small enough to make extrapolation work well across both time and geography. Extrapolation to the entire U.S. yields substantive differences to survey data and reduces deviations from official aggregates by a factor of 4 to 9 compared to survey aggregates.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-28
Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented immigrants. Using a novel dataset that links California birth records to Census surveys, we identify siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy. Implementing a mothers' fixed effects design, we find that the policy increased coverage for and use of prenatal care among pregnant immigrant women, and increased average gestation length and birth weight among their children.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Effect of Power Plants on Local Housing Values and Rents: Evidence from Restricted Census Microdata
July 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-19
Current trends in electricity consumption imply that hundreds of new fossil-fuel power plants will be built in the United States over the next several decades. Power plant siting has become increasingly contentious, in part because power plants are a source of numerous negative local externalities including elevated levels of air pollution, haze, noise and traffic. Policymakers attempt to take these local disamenities into account when siting facilities, but little reliable evidence is available about their quantitative importance. This paper examines neighborhoods in the United States where power plants were opened during the 1990s using household-level data from a restricted version of the U.S. decennial census. Compared to neighborhoods farther away, housing values and rents decreased by 3-5% between 1990 and 2000 in neighborhoods near sites. Estimates of household marginal willingness-to-pay to avoid power plants are reported separately for natural gas and other types of plants, large plants and small plants, base load plants and peaker plants, and upwind and downwind households.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
UNEMPLOYMENT DURATION AND GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY: DO MOVERS FARE BETTER THAN STAYERS?
October 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-41
This study uses a sample of unemployed workers constructed from the American
Community Survey and the LEHD database, to compare the unemployment durations of those who find subsequent employment by relocating to a metropolitan area outside of their originally observed residence, versus those who find employment in their original location. Results from a hazard analysis confirm the importance of many of the determinants of migration posited in the literature, such as age, education, and local labor market conditions. While simple averages and OLS estimates indicate that migrating for a new job reduces the probability of re-employment within a given time frame and lengthens the spell of unemployment in the aggregate, after controlling for selection into migration using an IV approach based on local house price changes, the results suggest that out-migrating for employment actually has a large and significant beneficial effect of shortening the time to re-employment. This implies that those who migrate for jobs in the data may be particularly disadvantaged in their ability to find employment and thus have a strong short-term incentive to relocate.
View Full
Paper PDF