Search Results
Discussion Paper
Using credit reporting agency data to assess the link between the Community Reinvestment Act and consumer credit outcomes
We use a regression discontinuity design to investigate the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act on consumer credit outcomes using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?s Consumer Credit Panel database (Equifax data) for the years 2004 to 2012. A bank?s activities in census tracts with median family incomes less than 80 percent of the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) median family income count toward a lending institution?s compliance with CRA rules. Assuming census tracts with median incomes at 79.9 percent of the MSA median are the same as census tracts at 80 percent?except ...
Newsletter
Assessing the impact of job loss on workers and firms
Many economists agree that the United States? openness to competition and technological change raises our living standards, but sometimes results in job losses. This article summarizes ?Job Loss: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses,? a conference which was cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation.
Working Paper
Making the (Letter) Grade: The Incentive Effects of Mandatory Pass/Fail Courses
In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade ...
Working Paper
Reading, writing, and raisinets: are school finances contributing to children’s obesity?
The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to ?junk? foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure are more likely to adopt potentially unhealthful food policies. Next, we examine whether students? Body Mass Index (BMI) is higher in counties where a greater proportion of schools are predicted to allow these food policies. Because the financial ...
The Labor Market for Childcare Workers
Each day, millions of parents rely on childcare workers to care for their young children. The labor market for childcare workers determines the wages paid to these workers and affects the operating costs of childcare businesses as well as the price and availability of childcare. As part of our Spotlight on Childcare and the Labor Market—a targeted effort to understand how access to childcare can affect employment and the economy—we use several data sources to study the paid childcare labor market.1 We first describe who childcare workers are, how many there are, where they work, and how ...
Working Paper
Female offenders use of social welfare programs before and after jail and prison: does prison cause welfare dependency?
Prior studies indicate that incarcerated women are among the most economically disadvantaged populations in the U.S. In this paper we focus on the links between incarceration and use of the social welfare system. Is prison, for example associated with increased welfare dependency? To better understand this relationship, we examine the temporal pattern of social welfare receipt for 45,000 female offenders from Cook County, Illinois over a ten year period. We find that this group does in fact have high rates of social welfare receipt, especially if they were incarcerated in state prison rather ...
Working Paper
Women and the Phillips curve: do women’s and men’s labor market outcomes differentially affect real wage growth and inflation?
During the economic expansion of the 1990s, the United States enjoyed both low inflation rates and low levels of unemployment. Juhn, Murphy, and Topel (2002) point out that the low unemployment rates for men in the 1990s were accompanied by historically high rates of non-employment suggesting that the 1990s economy was not as strong as the unemployment rate might indicate. We include women in the analysis and examine whether the Phillips curve relationships between real compensation growth, changes in inflation, and labor market slackness are the same for men and women and whether measures of ...
Journal Article
Economic perspectives on childhood obesity
Obesity rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Among adults, obesity rates more than doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Children obesity rates nearly tripled over the same period. This article discusses why obesity is of interest from an economic perspective. It them examines changes in children's lives, particularly the increase in maternal employment, that may have contributed to increases in children's weight.
Working Paper
Why are immigrants' incarceration rates so low? evidence on selective immigration, deterrence, and deportation
Much of the concern about immigration adversely affecting crime derives from the fact that immigrants tend to have characteristics in common with native born populations that are disproportionately incarcerated. This perception of a link between immigration and crime led to legislation in the 1990s increasing punishments toward criminal aliens. Despite the widespread perception of a link between immigration and crime, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born. More recently arrived immigrants have the lowest comparative incarceration rates, and ...
Newsletter
Immigration and the Labor Market in the Post-Pandemic Recovery
Standard estimates based on the main household survey used to shed light on labor markets—the Current Population Survey (CPS)—suggest that after a significant drop during the pandemic, recent rapid growth has brought the foreign-born population in the United States back to, or above, levels predicted by the pre-pandemic trend. However, we document that the weighting factors used to make the CPS nationally representative have recently displayed some unusual movements and conclude that standard estimates of the foreign-born population may currently be too high.