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Citizenship Question Effects on Household Survey Response
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-31
Several small-sample studies have predicted that a citizenship question in the 2020 Census would cause a large drop in self-response rates. In contrast, minimal effects were found in Poehler et al.'s (2020) analysis of the 2019 Census Test randomized controlled trial (RCT). We reconcile these findings by analyzing associations between characteristics about the addresses in the 2019 Census Test and their response behavior by linking to independently constructed administrative data. We find significant heterogeneity in sensitivity to the citizenship question among households containing Hispanics, naturalized citizens, and noncitizens. Response drops the most for households containing noncitizens ineligible for a Social Security number (SSN). It falls more for households with Latin American-born immigrants than those with immigrants from other countries. Response drops less for households with U.S.-born Hispanics than households with noncitizens from Latin America. Reductions in responsiveness occur not only through lower unit self-response rates, but also by increased household roster omissions and internet break-offs. The inclusion of a citizenship question increases the undercount of households with noncitizens. Households with noncitizens also have much higher citizenship question item nonresponse rates than those only containing citizens. The use of tract-level characteristics and significant heterogeneity among Hispanics, the foreign-born, and noncitizens help explain why the effects found by Poehler et al. were so small. Linking administrative microdata with the RCT data expands what we can learn from the RCT.
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Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-30
Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class group. We distinguish between two possible explanations: a lack of exposure to other groups versus a preference to marry within group. We develop an instrument for neighborhood exposure to opposite-sex members of other race and class groups using variation in sex ratios among nearby birth cohorts in childhood neighborhoods. We then test whether increased exposure results in more interracial (white-Black) and interclass (top-to-bottom parent income quartile) marriages. Increased exposure to opposite-sex members of other class groups generates a substantial increase in interclass marriage, but increased exposure to other race groups has no detectable effect on interracial marriage. We use these results to estimate a spatial model of the marriage market and quantify the impact of reducing residential segregation in general equilibrium. For small changes in exposure, the model implies effects in line with recent estimates from policy experiments. We then use the model to assess the overall contribution of segregation and find that residential segregation has large effects on interclass, but not interracial, marriage.
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Where to Build Affordable Housing?
Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-62R
How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader societal objectives such as racial integration? Using administrative data on tenants of units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that characteristics such as race and proxies for need vary widely across neighborhoods. Despite fixed eligibility requirements, LIHTC developments in more opportunity-rich neighborhoods house tenants who are higher income, more educated, and far less likely to be Black. To quantify the welfare implications, we build a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter must be rationed. While building affordable housing in higher-opportunity neighborhoods costs more, it also increases household welfare and reduces city-wide segregation. The gains in household welfare, however, accrue to more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households at the expense of other households. This change in the distribution of assistance is primarily due to a 'crowding out' effect: households that only apply for assistance in higher-opportunity neighborhoods crowd out those willing to apply regardless of location. Finally, other policy levers'such as lowering the income limits used for means-testing'have only limited effects relative to the choice of location.
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Antitrust Enforcement Increases Economic Activity
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-50
We hand-collect and standardize information describing all 3,055 antitrust law suits brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) between 1971 and 2018. Using restricted establishment-level microdata from the U.S. Census, we compare the economic outcomes of a non-tradable industry in states targeted by DOJ antitrust lawsuits to outcomes of the same industry in other states that were not targeted. We document that DOJ antitrust enforcement actions permanently increase employment by 5.4% and business formation by 4.1%. Using an event-study design, we find (1) a sharp increase in payroll that exceeds the increase in employment, meaning that DOJ antitrust enforcement increases average wages, (2) an economically smaller increase in sales that is statistically insignificant, and (3) a precise increase in the labor share. While we cannot separately measure the quantity and price of output, the increase in production inputs (employment), together with a proportionally smaller increase in sales, strongly suggests that these DOJ antitrust enforcement actions increase the quantity of output and simultaneously decrease the price of output. Our results show that government antitrust enforcement leads to persistently higher levels of economic activity in targeted industries.
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Patents, Innovation, and Market Entry
September 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-45
Do patents facilitate market entry and job creation? Using a 2014 Supreme Court decision that limited patent eligibility and natural language processing methods to identify invalid patents, I find that large treated firms reduce job creation and create fewer new establishments in response, with no effect on new firm entry. Moreover, companies shift toward innovation aimed at improving existing products consistent with the view that patents incentivize creative destruction.
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More than Chance: The Local Labor Market Effects of Tribal Gaming
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-22
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.
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The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation
April 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-11
Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census samples that are linked to Social Security records containing county of birth, we implement event studies that estimate the long run effects of exposure to desegregation orders on human capital and labor market outcomes. We find that African Americans who were relatively young when a desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth, and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools, experienced large improvements in adult human capital and labor market outcomes relative to Blacks who were older when a court order was locally implemented. There are no comparable changes in outcomes among whites in counties undergoing an order, or among Blacks who were beyond school ages when a local order was implemented. These effects are strongly concentrated in the South, with largely null findings in other regions. Our data and methodology provide the most comprehensive national assessment to date on the impacts of court ordered desegregation, and strongly indicate that these policies were in fact highly effective at improving the long run socioeconomic outcomes of many Black students.
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Determination of the 2020 U.S. Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) Using Administrative Records and Statistical Methodology Technical Report
October 2020
Authors:
John M. Abowd,
J. David Brown,
Lawrence Warren,
Moises Yi,
Misty L. Heggeness,
William R. Bell,
Michael B. Hawes,
Andrew Keller,
Vincent T. Mule Jr.,
Joseph L. Schafer,
Matthew Spence
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-33
This report documents the efforts of the Census Bureau's Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Internal Expert Panel (IEP) and Technical Working Group (TWG) toward the use of multiple data sources to produce block-level statistics on the citizen voting-age population for use in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. It describes the administrative, survey, and census data sources used, and the four approaches developed for combining these data to produce CVAP estimates. It also discusses other aspects of the estimation process, including how records were linked across the multiple data sources, and the measures taken to protect the confidentiality of the data.
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The effect of child support on selection into marriage and fertility
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-04
Child support policies in the United States have expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s and now cover 1 in 5 children. This paper studies the consequences of child support for marriage and fertility decisions. I first introduce a model showing that child support enforces ex ante commitment from men to provide financial support in the event of a child, which (1) increases premarital sex among couples unlikely to marry, and (2) reduces the abortion rate, by lessening the cost of raising a child as a single mom. Using variation in the timing and geography of the rollout of U.S. child support laws relative to the timing of pregnancy, from 1977 to 1992, I find that marriages following an unplanned pregnancy are less likely to occur under strengthened child support laws, accounting for about a 7-8 percentage point reduction relative to a base of 38 percent. I find that the child support rollout reduced the abortion rate by 1-2 per 1000 women aged 15-44, off a base of 28, representing about 50 percent of the total decline in the abortion rate over this period.
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Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Evidence from a Tax Notch
July 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-07
States that declined to raise their Medicaid income eligibility cutoffs to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created a "coverage gap'' between their existing, often much lower Medicaid eligibility cutoffs and the FPL, the lowest level of income at which the ACA provides refundable, advanceable "premium tax credits'' to subsidize the purchase of private insurance. Lacking access to any form of subsidized health insurance, residents of those states with income in that range face a strong incentive, in the form of a large, discrete increase in post-tax income (i.e. an upward notch) at the FPL, to increase their earnings and obtain the premium tax credit. We investigate the extent to which they respond to that incentive. Using the universe of tax returns, we document excess mass, or bunching, in the income distribution surrounding this notch. Consistent with Saez (2010), we find that bunching occurs only among filers with self-employment income. Specifically, filers without children and married filers with three or fewer children exhibit significant bunching. Analysis of tax data linked to labor supply measures from the American Community Survey, however, suggests that this bunching likely reflects a change in reported income rather than a change in true labor supply. We find no evidence that wage and salary workers adjust their labor supply in response to increased availability of directly purchased health insurance.
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