Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Internal Revenue Service'
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John Voorheis - 20
Maggie R. Jones - 16
John Haltiwanger - 15
Martha Stinson - 14
Javier Miranda - 13
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 321
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Working PaperA Shock by Any Other Name? Reconsidering the Impacts of Local Demand Shocks
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-10
Over the last decade, research on labor market adjustment following local demand shocks has expanded to explore a wide variety of measured shocks. However, the worker adjustments observed in response to these shocks are not always consistent across studies. We create a harmonized set of annual commuting-zone-level shocks following the major approaches in the literature to investigate these differences. As one might expect, shocks of different types exhibit different geographic and temporal patterns and are generally weakly correlated with each other. We find they also generate different employment and migration responses, with trade-related shocks showing little response on either margin, while more general Bartik-style shocks are associated with economically meaningful changes in both employment and migration.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperExpectations versus Reality in Business Formation
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-11
Using administrative data on 17 million U.S. business applications linked to outcomes, we compare potential entrants' expectations about employer entry and first-year employment with realizations. On average, applicants overestimate employment, mainly because many expect to enter but do not. Among those who expect and achieve entry, employment is typically underestimated. Expected employment predicts entry and realized employment, but conditional on entry realized employment rises less than one-for-one with expectations. Expectation errors are highly heterogeneous and systematically related to application characteristics and local economic conditions, and they predict near-term employment outcomes. A parsimonious model with heterogeneous priors, learning, and pre-entry selection rationalizes these patterns.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLife-Cycle Effects of Women's Education on their Careers and Children
January 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-09
We study the causal effect of women's education on their wages, non-wage job amenities, and spillovers to children. Using a regression discontinuity at the school entry birthdate cutoff, we find that women born just before the cutoff are more likely to complete some college, and experience multi-dimensional career gains that grow over the life cycle: greater employment and earnings, as well as more professional and higher-status jobs, more socially meaningful work, and better working conditions. Children's early-life health and prenatal inputs improve in tandem with career improvements, consistent with professional advances spurring'not hindering'infant investments. Career gains are concentrated in jobs that require exactly some college, the same schooling margin shifted by the cutoff, which indicates that increased post-secondary education is the primary channel for these effects. Together, the results show that women's college attendance generates large career returns'from both wages and amenities'that strengthen over time and produce meaningful benefits for children.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperNon-Random Assignment of Individual Identifiers and Selection into Linked Data: Implications for Research
January 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-06
The U.S. Census Bureau's Person Identification Validation System facilitates anonymous linkages between survey and administrative records by assigning Protected Identification Keys (PIKs) to person records. While PIK assignment is generally accurate, some person records are not successfully assigned a PIK, which can lead to sample selection bias in analyses of linked data. Using the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) between 2005 and 2022, we corroborate and extend existing findings on the drivers of PIK assignment, showing that the rate of PIK assignment varies widely across socio-demographic subgroups. Using earnings as a test case, we then show that limiting a survey sample of wage earners to person records with PIKs or successful linkages to W-2 wage records tends to overestimate self-reported wage earnings, on average, indicative of linkage-induced selection bias. In a validation exercise, we demonstrate that reweighting methods, such as inverse probability weighting or entropy balancing, can mitigate this bias.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFresh Start or Fresh Water: The impact of Environmental Lender Liability
January 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-05
I study the impact of lenders' environmental responsibility. The empirical setting exploits the U.S. Lender Liability Act of 1996, which reduced lenders' exposure to the environmental clean-up costs attached to some of their debtors' collateral, and employs difference-indifferences specifications estimated using EPA and U.S. Census microdata. Firms whose lenders face lower environmental liability risks increase pollution, reduce investment in abatement technologies by 14.7%, while experiencing small production and employment distortions. Lenders facing higher liability risks offer loans with less favorable pricing, thus financially incentivizing firms to become more environmentally responsible, and potentially monitor borrowers via shorter debt maturity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTechnology-Driven Market Concentration through Idea Allocation
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-78
Using a newly-created measure of technology novelty, this paper identifies periods with and without technology breakthroughs from the 1980s to the 2020s in the US. It is found that market concentration decreases at the advent of revolutionary technologies. We establish a theory addressing inventors' decisions to establish new firms or join incumbents of selected sizes, yielding two key predictions: (1) A higher share of inventors opt for new firms during periods of heightened technology novelty. (2). There is positive assortative matching between idea quality and firm size if inventors join incumbents. Both predictions align with empirical findings and collectively contribute to a reduction in market concentration when groundbreaking technologies occur. Quantitative analysis shows the overall slowdown in technological breakthroughs can capture 95.9% of the rising trend in market concentration and the correlation between the model-generated and the actual detrended market concentration is 0.910.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSchool-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-74
Currently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets identified as having a disability, yet limited large-scale evidence examines how disability identification varies for students from different income backgrounds. Using unique data linking information on Oregon students and their family income, we document pronounced income-based differences in how students are categorized for two school-based disability supports: special education services and Section 504 plans. We find that a quarter of students in the lowest income percentile receive supports through special education, compared with less than seven percent of students in the top income percentile. This pattern may partially reflect differences in underlying disability-related needs caused by poverty. However, we find the opposite pattern for 504 plans, where students in the top income percentiles are two times more likely to receive 504 plan supports. We further document substantial variation in these income-based differences by disability category, by race/ethnicity, and by grade level. Together, these patterns suggest that disability-related needs alone cannot account for the income-based differences that we observe and highlight the complex ways that income shapes the school and family processes that lead to variability in disability classification and services.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperGifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-73
Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education. Using education and IRS data that provide information on students and their family income, we show pronounced differences in who schools identify as gifted across the distribution of family income. Under 4 percent of students in the lowest income percentile are identified as gifted, compared with 20 percent of those in the top income percentile. Income-based differences persist after accounting for student test scores and exist across students of different sexes and racial/ethnic groups, underscoring the importance of family resources for gifted identification in schools.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMeasurement Matters: Financial Reporting and Productivity
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-72
We examine how differences in financial reporting practices shape firm productivity. Leveraging new audit questions in the U.S. Census Bureau's 2021 Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), and complementary tax return data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and detailed financial records from Sageworks, we find that (i) variation in reporting quality explains 10-20 percent of intra-industry total factor productivity dispersion, and (ii) evidence of complementarity between the effects of financial audits and management practices driving firm productivity. We then examine the underlying mechanisms. First, audits function as a managerial technology, improving the precision of internal information and raising efficiency, with stronger effects in competitive, low-margin industries and among younger firms. Second, exploiting cross-state variation in tax incentives, we show that audits constrain underreporting and mitigate the downward bias in measured productivity. Together, these results highlight the underrated importance of financial reporting quality driving firm productivity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperParental Death, Inheritance, and Labor Supply in the United States
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-71
We are the first to study how inheritances affect labor supply in the U.S. using large-scale administrative data. Leveraging federal tax and Social Security records, we estimate event studies around parental death to investigate impacts on adult children. Our results indicate that the death of a last parent causes sizable gains in investment income'our main proxy for inheritances'and proportionate reductions in labor supply. On average, annual per-adult investment income at the tax unit level increases by about $300 (45 percent) and annual per-adult wage earnings decrease by $600 (2 percent). These earnings responses are large relative to the implied wealth transfer. Income effects are the dominant channel through which parental death reduces earnings, with children of wealthier parents exhibiting larger earnings reductions. Over six years, inheritances slightly equalize the distribution of investment income.View Full Paper PDF
