From 2002 to 2018, the fraction of minority-segregated public schools in the United States roughly doubled, but the fraction of White-segregated schools decreased at an even faster rate. Endogenous segregation fueled by parents choosing schools on the basis of their racial compositions can in principle dwarf all other determinants of segregation over time because of social multiplier effects. However, we find that demographic change from Hispanic immigration has been the biggest driver of these trends. These findings are particularly pronounced in urban areas, which experienced the largest changes in segregation and are where policy makers are most concerned about the pernicious effects of segregation.
Worker mobility and wages have declined in the United States amid rising employer market power. I propose a theory of the labor market in which a decrease in employer competition, characterized by fewer firms per worker, drives the decline in worker mobility and wages. A finite and decreasing number of employers exert market power by excluding their offers from the outside options of their employees. This reduces the value of workers’ outside options and, consequently, their wages and transitions across employers. I quantify the model to explain the long-run decline in worker mobility and wages and examine its cross-sectional implications.
We investigate how reforms of Canada’s child allowances affected household poverty and maternal employment—the 2015 increase and expansion of the Universal Child Care Benefit and the 2016 introduction of a new Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We document that both reforms reduced child poverty, although the CCB had greater effect. By 2018, we estimate that the CCB reduced poverty by 11% in families headed by a single mother and by nearly 17% in two-parent families. We find no evidence, on either the extensive or the intensive margin, of a negative labor supply response to either of the program reforms.
Workers struggle to understand prospective employers. Through experienced workers’ volunteered reviews, Glassdoor is a platform seeking to provide information about prospective employers to job seekers. We find that the content most valuable to job seekers (negative information) is the kind most risky to supply, pointing to a catch-22. Higher ratings increase job applications to smaller firms only, creating an incentive for them to discourage negative reviews. Concerns about employer retaliation discourage negative reviews and motivate employees who do disclose to conceal aspects of their identity, degrading the information’s value. Reputation institutions provide valuable but partial solutions to workers’ information problems.
We provide evidence that short-term shocks to student cognitive performance have long-lasting consequences for human capital development. We use administrative data from Mexico City to show that students’ exposure to violent crime in the week immediately prior to a high-stakes exam lowers females’ test scores by 11% of a standard deviation. As a result, 19% of female students exposed to violent crime are subsequently assigned to less preferred, lower-quality high schools. We find no such effect for males and show that crime-induced concentration problems are an underlying mechanism behind the detrimental effects on females’ test scores.
Has the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States changed over time? Constructing a large historical linked sample, I show that upward mobility in the early twentieth century was greater for those who grew up in the coastal and industrial regions, in contrast to more recent times, where mobility is higher among persons who were raised in the middle of the country. The historical patterns are not driven by imperfections in record linkage or measurement error in economic status.
Do foreign students affect the likelihood that domestic students obtain a STEM degree and occupation? Using administrative student records from a US university, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the share of foreign classmates in introductory math classes and find that foreign classmates displace domestic students from STEM majors and occupations. However, displaced students gravitate toward high-earning social science majors, so their expected earnings are not penalized. We explore several mechanisms. Results indicate that displacement is concentrated in classes where foreign classmates possess weak English language ability, suggesting that diminished in-class communication and social interactions might play an important role.
China shifted its controversial one-child policy (1979–2015) to a two-child policy in 2016. We take advantage of this unexpected policy change and the heterogeneities in the prechange environment to investigate labor market discrimination against expected family responsibilities. In a two-wave correspondence study before and after the policy change, we sent 8,848 fictitious resumes with ages 22–29 in response to online job advertisements. Their gender and only-child/siblinged status were systematically varied. We find that women—but not men—are subject to labor market discrimination for expected family responsibilities. This discrimination worsens with the increase in women’s reproductive age.
This paper estimates the causal effect of equalizing revenues across school districts on students’ intergenerational mobility. I exploit cohort differences in exposure to equalization generated by state-level reforms. To address the endogeneity of postreform revenues due to household sorting after a reform, I use a simulated-instruments approach that uses newly collected data on states’ funding formulas to simulate revenues without sorting. I find that equalization has a large effect on the mobility of low-income students. Reductions in input gaps between low-income and high-income districts are likely channels behind this effect.
We examine the labor market effects of Secure Communities (SC), a police-based immigration enforcement policy implemented in 2008–13. Using variation in implementation across local areas and over time, we find that SC decreased the employment of likely undocumented immigrants. These effects are driven not only by deportations but also by adjustments among immigrants who remain in the United States. Importantly, SC also decreased the employment and hourly wages of US-born individuals. We provide support for two mechanisms that could explain this decline in labor demand: an increase in labor costs that decreases job creation and a reduction in local consumption.