Papers Containing Tag(s): 'American Community Survey'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 273
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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 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
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Working PaperLODES Design and Methodology Report: Methodology Version 7
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-52
The purpose of this report is to document the important features of Version 7 of the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) processing system. This includes data sources, data processing methodology, confidentiality protection methodology, some quality measures, and a high-level description of the published data. The intended audience for this document includes LODES data users, Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership members, U.S. Census Bureau management, program quality auditors, and current and future research and development staff members.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHousing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-55
Housing represents the most important capital asset for most U.S. families. Despite substantial analysis of the intergenerational mobility of income, large gaps in our knowledge of the distribution of housing assets and their transmission over time remain, as housing is generally not reflected by income flows. Using novel linked data that combines survey responses with administrative tax data and information on ownership and valuation from property tax records for over 3.4 million families, we provide new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of housing capital. We find that housing capital is more persistent across generations than labor income. We document important disparities between average housing outcomes for White and Black children. These difference persist even conditional on parent rank in the distribution of housing assets, with the gap growing throughout the parental housing capital distribution. A decomposition shows that average differences in children's labor market outcomes associated with parental assets explain about half of the observed intergenerational persistence (a 'labor income channel'), and that there is also a substantial 'direct channel' ' conditional on children having the same earnings, children of parents with more housing assets have more assets themselves on average. The direct channel is also important for explaining the intergenerational gap in outcomes of Black and White children. Finally, we present quasi-experimental evidence that local housing supply constraints help explain spatial differences in intergenerational persistence across US counties. Our results establish the importance of housing markets, both independently from and jointly with labor markets, in shaping the intergenerational persistence of economic resources.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDifferences in Disability Insurance Allowance Rates
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-54
Allowance rates for disability insurance applications vary by race and ethnicity, but it is unclear to what extent these differences are artifacts of other differing socio-economic and health characteristics, or selection issues in SSA's race and ethnicity data. This paper uses the 2015 American Community Survey linked to 2015-2019 SSA administrative data to investigate DI application allowance rates among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic applicants aged 25-65. The analysis uses regression, propensity score matching, and inverse probability weighting to estimate differences in allowance rates among applicants who are similar on observable characteristics. Relative to raw comparisons, differences by race and ethnicity in multivariate analyses are substantially smaller in magnitude and are generally not statistically significant.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Effect of the Minimum Wage on Childcare Establishments
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-53
Childcare is essential for working families, yet it remains increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible for parents and offers poverty-level wages to many employees. While research suggests minimum wage policies may improve the welfare of low-wage workers, there is also evidence they may increase firm exits, especially among smaller, low-profit firms, which could reduce access and harm consumer well-being. This study is the first to examine these trade-offs in the childcare industry, a labor-intensive, highly regulated sector where capital-labor substitution is limited, and to provide evidence on how minimum wage policies affect a dual-sector labor market in the U.S., where self-employed and waged providers serve overlapping markets. Using variation from state-level minimum wage increases between 1995 and 2019 and unique microdata, I implement a cross-state county border discontinuity design to estimate impacts on the stocks, flows, and composition of childcare establishments. I find that while county-level aggregate establishment stocks and employment remained stable, establishment-level turnover increased, and employment decreased. I reconcile these findings by showing that minimum wage increases prompted reallocation, with larger establishments in the waged-sector more likely to enter and less likely to exit, making this one of the first studies to link null aggregate effects to shifts in establishment composition. Finally, I show that minimum wage increases may negatively affect the self-employed sector, resulting in fewer owners with advanced degrees and more with only high school education. These findings suggest that minimum wage policies reshape who provides care in ways that could affect both quality and access.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCredit Access in the United States
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-45
We construct new population-level linked administrative data to study households' access to credit in the United States. These data reveal large differences in credit access by race, class, and hometown. By age 25, Black individuals, those who grew up in low-income families, and those who grew up in certain areas (including the Southeast and Appalachia) have significantly lower credit scores than other groups. Consistent with lower scores generating credit constraints, these individuals have smaller balances, more credit inquiries, higher credit card utilization rates, and greater use of alternative higher-cost forms of credit. Tests for alternative definitions of algorithmic bias in credit scores yield results in opposite directions. From a calibration perspective, group-level differences in credit scores understate differences in delinquency: conditional on a given credit score, Black individuals and those from low-income families fall delinquent at relatively higher rates. From a balance perspective, these groups receive lower credit scores even when comparing those with the same future repayment behavior. Addressing both of these biases and expanding credit access to groups with lower credit scores requires addressing group-level differences in delinquency rates. These delinquencies emerge soon after individuals access credit in their early twenties, often due to missed payments on credit cards, student loans, and other bills. Comprehensive measures of individuals' income profiles, income volatility, and observed wealth explain only a small portion of these repayment gaps. In contrast, we find that the large variation in repayment across hometowns mostly reflects the causal effect of childhood exposure to these places. Places that promote upward income mobility also promote repayment and expand credit access even conditional on income, suggesting that common place-level factors may drive behaviors in both credit and labor markets. We discuss suggestive evidence for several mechanisms that drive our results, including the role of social and cultural capital. We conclude that gaps in credit access by race, class, and hometown have roots in childhood environments.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUnderstanding Criminal Record Penalties in the Labor Market
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-39
This paper studies the earnings and employment penalties associated with a criminal record. Using a large-scale dataset linking criminal justice and employer-employee wage records, we estimate two-way fixed effects models that decompose earnings into worker's portable earnings potential and firm pay premia, both of which are allowed to shift after a worker acquires a record. We find that firm pay premia explain a small share of earnings gaps between workers with and without a record. There is little evidence of variable within-firm premia gaps either. Instead, components of workers' earnings potential that persist across firms explain the bulk of gaps. Conditional on earnings potential, workers with a record are also substantially less likely to be employed. Difference-in-differences estimates comparing workers' first conviction to workers charged but not convicted or charged later support these findings. The results suggest that criminal record penalties operate primarily by changing whether workers are employed and their earnings potential at every firm rather than increasing sorting into lower-paying jobs, although the bulk of gaps can be attributed to differences that existed prior to acquiring a record.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
