Federal and State Governments Can Help Solve the Employment Problems of People in Distressed Places to Spur Equitable Growth

Places in the United States differ greatly in their residents’ access to jobs, especially good jobs. Although the federal and state governments provide about $80 billion annually to create jobs through multiple programs, these job-creation initiatives are rarely targeted to economically distressed places, where the job-creation benefits for local residents are greatest. Moreover, many of these programs take the form of business tax incentives, which are less effective at job creation than customized services for businesses and workers. I argue that the prime-age employment rate of places should be used to target job-creation programs and review which such programs are most successful in terms of having low expenditures per created job. I also discuss how these programs can be scaled and adapted to each place’s needs

Housing Assistance and Labor Supply: The Case of Rent Control

Rental housing in urban areas across the U.S. has become increasingly unaffordable. In response, legislative momentum for rent control has grown, restricting rent growth in many local municipalities. Although economists generally oppose such regulations for distorting the housing market and creating significant efficiency costs, activists argue that they promote stability, equality, and social justice. Existing research on rent control has focused primarily on its direct effect on housing; little is known about potential spillover effects on tenant outcomes. Recognizing the close link between housing and labor markets, this project investigates whether rent control influences tenant labor supply, using high-quality micro-data on rent stabilization in New York City and employing rigorous statistical methods. Specifically, we ask: Does rent control increase tenants’ labor supply by fostering residential stability? Or does it reduce labor supply through an implicit rent subsidy (an income effect)? Which demographic groups of tenants are most affected? Answers to these questions will inform both the effectiveness and equity of rent control policies and deepen our understanding of how housing assistance shapes labor market outcomes more broadly

The Labor Supply Curve Is Upward Sloping: The Effects of Immigrant-Induced Demand Shocks

What is the effect of immigration on native labor-market outcomes? An extensive literature identifies the differential impact of immigration on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant labor (supply exposure). But immigrants consume in addition to producing output. Despite this, no literature identifies the impact on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant consumption (demand exposure). We study native labor market effects of supply and demand exposures to immigration. Theoretically, we formalize both measures of exposure and solve for their effects on native wages. Empirically, we combine employer-employee data with a newly collected data set covering electronic payments for the universe of residents in Norway to measure supply and demand exposures of all native workers to immigration induced by EU expansions in 2004 and 2007. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of demand exposure to EU expansion on native worker income

Effects of Fair Workweek Laws on Labor Market Outcomes

This paper models fair workweek regulations that require employers to provide employees with (1) schedule predictability via advance notice of their work schedule and premium payments for short-notice changes, and (2) access to hours meaning they must offer open hours to existing employees before hiring new workers. We develop a theoretical model of employers’ responses to these provisions and their implications for employment. Guided by the model, we estimate the effects of recently-adopted fair workweek regulation in New York City’s fast-food sector using a synthetic difference-in-differences design. We find a null employment effect

Short-Run Fiscal Effects of Expanding Michigan\u27s Preschool Program to be Universal

This policy paper provides some updated estimates of the short-run fiscal effects of expanding Michigan’s state-funded preschool program, the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), to encompass universal access for Michigan’s four-year-olds. This is an update to Policy Paper No. 2025-034, which analyzed the economic and fiscal effects of Michigan’s current GSRP program as compared to the state having no program. The update takes advantage of a high-quality recent study of the economic effects of universal preschool programs in nine states, authored by Jackson, Turner, and Bastian (2025). Using the estimated economic effects of universal preschool from this recent study, I estimate that during the first five years, the fiscal benefits to state and local governments in Michigan from expanding GSRP to universal access would cover about two-thirds of the incremental program costs

Implicit Insurance in the United States

A long literature in labor economics studies the causal effect of job loss on workers’ earnings trajectories, finding substantial and persistent long-run reductions in wage income after displacement (Jacobson et al., 1993; Couch and Placzek, 2010). However, this work has generally not studied the net effects of the tax system, government transfers, and self-insurance in mitigating these earnings losses in a single, unified dataset. For example, workers may receive transfer payments, implying smaller total income losses relative to wage losses. Households will exhibit net behavioral responses to job loss: workers may liquidate assets, enter self-employment, reduce reported income, or increase other family members’ labor market activity to further mitigate household income losses relative to worker wage losses. Progressive tax rates and tax credits aimed at low-income families might result in smaller after-tax income losses relative to pre-tax effects. To what extent do each of these factors provide implicit insurance against wage losses? To make progress on this question, we leverage a “mass layoff” design to uncover job losses that were caused by firm-level downsizing. Specifically, by using large worker flows in employer-employee linked data to identify large-scale displacement events, we can isolate workers for whom job loss is plausibly exogenous. This research design is commonly used for identification in other analyses of job displacement (Jacobson et al., 1993; Couch and Placzek, 2010; Sullivan and von Wachter, 2009). To jointly examine changes in net household resources following job loss, we will utilize a series of novel linkages between newly available administrative datasets at the United States Census Bureau. We first estimate the treatment effect of job loss on individual worker labor market outcomes, including wage employment, independent contracting entry, and total labor earnings. We supplement these outcomes with estimates of effects on public transfer receipt, including: unemployment insurance (UI), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Social Security, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF), housing assistance, and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. Next, we move to analyzing responses at the household or tax filing unit level, including changes in taxes paid, credits received, and spousal earnings responses. The prior literature studying these responses suffers from important data challenges, which our study aims to address. For example, many of our outcomes are generally underreported or unobserved in other datasets, and previous research has employed alternate empirical approaches, restricted samples to smaller subpopulations, or has been underpowered to examine heterogeneity in treatment effects due to sample size