This paper integrates the existing literatures on displacement and health by examining the enduring
effects of job dislocations that are induced by firm and individual shocks to employment. A joint estimation of
hourly wage rates and weekly hours illuminates the disparities in these economic outcomes
that exist between those who have reestablished themselves in the workplace subsequent to a layoff and
those who have returned to work following the onset of a disability relative to those with uninterrupted
job histories. As an extension of these ideas, employment transitions and workplace adjustments are
modeled to capture spousal reactions to these shocks. Multiple indicators of health from the Survey of
Income and Program Participation and Social Security Administrative benefits records are incorporated
into the analyses of those with impairments that prompted job loss. These measures allow knowledge
to be gleaned regarding the qualitative di'erences in the lasting impacts of job cessation resulting from
medically diagnosed illnesses as compared to estimates uncovered using survey data sources alone. By
considering time durations following these periods of separation in light of these indicators of well-being,
a more comprehensive understanding of the long-run repercussions of employee-employer separation is
acquired.
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Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-19
The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.
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Trends in Earnings Inequality and Earnings Instability among U.S. Couples: How Important is Assortative Matching?
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-04
We examine changes in inequality and instability of the combined earnings of married couples over the 1980-2009 period using two U.S. panel data sets: Social Security earnings data matched to Survey of Income and Program Participation panels (SIPP-SSA) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Relative to male earnings inequality, the inequality of couples' earnings is both lower in levels and rises by a smaller amount. We also find that couples' earnings instability is lower in levels compared to male earnings instability and actually declines in the SIPP-SSA data. While wives' earnings played an important role in dampening the rise in inequality and year-to-year variation in resources at the family level, we find that marital sorting and coordination of labor supply decisions at the family level played a minor role. Comparing actual couples to randomly paired simulated couples, we find very similar trends in earnings inequality and instability.
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Agent Heterogeneity and Learning: An Application to Labor Markets
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-20
I develop a matching model with heterogeneous workers, rms, and worker-firm
matches, and apply it to longitudinal linked data on employers and employees. Workers
vary in their marginal product when employed and their value of leisure when unemployed.
Firms vary in their marginal product and cost of maintaining a vacancy. The
marginal product of a worker-firm match also depends on a match-specific interaction
between worker and rm that I call match quality. Agents have complete information
about worker and rm heterogeneity, and symmetric but incomplete information about
match quality. They learn its value slowly by observing production outcomes. There
are two key results. First, under a Nash bargain, the equilibrium wage is linear in a
person-specific component, a firm-specific component, and the posterior mean of beliefs
about match quality. Second, in each period the separation decision depends only on
the posterior mean of beliefs and person and rm characteristics. These results have
several implications for an empirical model of earnings with person and rm eects.
The rst implies that residuals within a worker-firm match are a martingale; the second
implies the distribution of earnings is truncated.
I test predictions from the matching model using data from the Longitudinal
Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the US Census Bureau. I present
both xed and mixed model specifications of the equilibrium wage function, taking
account of structural aspects implied by the learning process. In the most general
specification, earnings residuals have a completely unstructured covariance within a
worker-firm match. I estimate and test a variety of more parsimonious error structures,
including the martingale structure implied by the learning process. I nd considerable
support for the matching model in these data.
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Family Formation and the Great Recession
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-42R
This paper studies how exposure to recessions as a young adult impacts long-term family formation in the context of the Great Recession. Using confidential linked survey data from U.S. Census, I document that exposure to a 1 pp larger unemployment shock in the Great Recession in one's early 20s is associated with a 0.8 pp decline in likelihood of marriage by their early 30s. These effects are not explained by substitution toward cohabitation with unmarried partners, are concentrated among whites, and are notably absent for individuals from high-income families. The estimated effects on fertility are also negative but imprecisely estimated. A back-of-the-envelope exercise suggests that these reductions in family formation may have increased the long-run impact of the Recession on consumption relative to its impact on individual earnings by a considerable extent.
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EARNINGS ADJUSTMENT FRICTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SOCIAL SECURITY EARNINGS TEST
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-50
We study frictions in adjusting earnings to changes in the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) using a panel of Social Security Administration microdata on one percent of the U.S. population from 1961 to 2006. Individuals continue to "bunch" at the convex kink the AET creates even when they are no longer subject to the AET, consistent with the existence of earnings adjustment frictions in the U.S. We develop a novel framework for estimating an earnings elasticity and an adjustment cost using information on the amount of bunching at kinks before and after policy changes in earnings incentives around the kinks. We apply this method in settings in which individuals face changes in the AET bene.t reduction rate, and we estimate in a baseline case that the earnings elasticity with respect to the implicit net-of-tax share is 0.23, and the .xed cost of adjustment is $152.08.
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Wage Dispersion, Compensation Policy and the Role of Firms
November 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-04
Empirical work in economics stresses the importance of unobserved firm- and person-level characteristics
in the determination of wages, finding that these unobserved components account for the overwhelming
majority of variation in wages. However, little is known about the mechanisms sustaining these wage di'er-
entials. This paper attempts to demystify the firm-side of the puzzle by developing a statistical model that
enriches the role that firms play in wage determination, allowing firms to influence both average wages as
well as the returns to observable worker characteristics.
I exploit the hierarchical nature of a unique employer-employee linked dataset for the United States,
estimating a multilevel statistical model of earnings that accounts for firm-specific deviations in average
wages as well as the returns to components of human capital - race, gender, education, and experience -
while also controlling for person-level heterogeneity in earnings. These idiosyncratic prices reflect one aspect
of firm compensation policy; another, and more novel aspect, is the unstructured characterization of the
covariance of these prices across firms.
I estimate the model's variance parameters using Restricted (or Residual) Maximum Likelihood tech-
niques. Results suggest that there is significant variation in the returns to worker characteristics across
firms. First, estimates of the parameters of the covariance matrix of firm-specific returns are statistically
significant. Firms that tend to pay higher average wages also tend to pay higher than average returns to
worker characteristics; firms that tend to reward highly the human capital of men also highly reward the
human capital of women. For instance, the correlation between the firm-specific returns to education for
men and women is 0.57. Second, the firm-specific returns account for roughly 9% of the variation in wages
- approximately 50% of the variation in wages explained by firm-specific intercepts alone. The inclusion of
firm-specific returns ties variation in wages, otherwise attributable to firm-specific intercepts, to observable
components of human capital.
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Payroll Tax Incidence: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-35
Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer-employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of passthrough to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.
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Maternal Labor Dynamics: Participation, Earnings, and Employer Changes
December 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-33
This paper describes the labor dynamics of U.S. women after they have had their first and subsequent children. We build on the child penalty literature by showing the heterogeneity of the size and pattern of labor force participation and earnings losses by demographic characteristics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers. The analysis uses longitudinal administrative earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics database combined with the Survey of Income and Program Participation survey data to identify women, their fertility timing, and employment. We find that women experience a large and persistent decrease in earnings and labor force participation after having their first child. The penalty grows over time, driven by the birth of subsequent children. Non-white mothers, unmarried mothers, and mothers with more education are more likely to return to work following the birth of their first child. Conditional on returning to the labor force, women who change employers earn more after the birth of their first child than women who return to their pre-birth employers. The probability of returning to the pre-birth employer and industry is heterogeneous over both the demographics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers.
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Estimating the Relationship between Employer-Provided Health Insurance, Worker Mobility, and Wages
September 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-23
In this paper, a joint model of wages, hazard of a job ending, and
probability of holding employer-provided health insurance is estimated,
taking account of unobservable person and job characteristics. A unique
data source, the 1990 and 1996 SIPP Panels linked to SSA administrative
job histories, enables the identification of random person and job effects
and the correlation of these effects across the three equations. The explicit
modeling of this correlation produces consistent estimates of the
effect of tenure on wages and the effect of health insurance on mobility.
Substantial levels of job-lock and significant annual returns to seniority
are found. Increasing the job-specific probability of obtaining employerprovided
health insurance from 60% to 63%, or increasing the job-specific
hourly wage rate by $.80, are both associated with an equivalent decrease
in the hazard of the job ending. However, the dollar value of the wage
benefit is substantially higher.
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The Transitional Costs of Sectoral Reallocation: Evidence from the Clean Air Act and the Workforce
January 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-02
New environmental regulations lead to a rearrangement of production away from polluting industries, and workers in those industries are adversely affected. This paper uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy. The focus on workers rather than industries as the unit of analysis allows me to examine previously unobserved economic outcomes such as non-employment and long run earnings losses from job transitions, both of which are critical to understanding the reallocative costs associated with these policies. Using panel variation induced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), I find that the reallocative costs of environmental policy are significant. Workers in newly regulated plants experienced, in aggregate, more than $9 billion inforegone earnings for the years after the change in policy. Most of these costs are driven by non-employment and lower earnings in future employment, while earnings of workers who remain with their firm change little. Relative to the estimated benefits of the 1990 CAAA, these one-time transitional costs are small. However, the estimated costs far exceed the workforce compensation policies designed to mitigate some of these earnings losses.
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