Search Results
Working Paper
Does Medicaid Generosity Affect Household Income?
Almost all recent literature on Medicaid and labor supply has used Affordable Care Act (ACA)-induced Medicaid eligibility expansions in various states as natural experiments. Estimated effects on employment and earnings differ widely due to differences in the scope of eligibility expansion across states and are potentially subject to biases due to policy endogeneity. Using a Regression Kink Design (RKD) framework, this paper takes a uniquely different approach to the identification of the effect of Medicaid generosity on household income. Both state-level data and March CPS data from ...
Journal Article
Spotlight: Texas subprime mortgages: metros vary on risky loans--and delinquencies
The current financial crisis has brought a severe decline in subprime mortgage lending. Like the nation, Texas and its metros still have exposure to existing loans. Housing prices, unemployment and overall economic activity will play a significant part in determining how many of them run into trouble.
Working Paper
Did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Create Jobs and Stimulate Growth?
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 is the most extensive overhaul of the U.S. income tax code since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Existing estimates of TCJA’s economic impact are based on economic projections using pre-TCJA estimates of tax effects. I exploit plausibly exogenous state-level variation in tax changes from TCJA and find that an income tax cut equaling 1 percent of GDP led to a 1.3 percentage point faster job growth and nearly 1.5 percentage points higher GDP growth. The impact on growth was the strongest in the year of the tax change, with much smaller effects in the ...
Journal Article
Texas Sees Job, Output Gains from 2018 U.S. Tax Cut
Texas is among the top 10 states in terms of tax stimulus received from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The law likely played an important role in the state’s stronger subsequent job growth relative to the nation.
Journal Article
Texas twist: why did state's unemployment fall below nation's?
Symbolic of Texas’ relative economic health during the recent recession, the unemployment rate has trailed U.S. joblessness by an average 1 percentage point since January 2007.
Journal Article
Texas Joblessness Persists Above U.S. Rate, Weighing on Black, Hispanic Workers
Texas lost proportionately fewer jobs than the nation during the pandemic, yet the unemployment rate rose above the national rate—a gap that has persisted. Women and minorities were affected disproportionately at the outset. While the gender unemployment gap has largely dissipated, the gaps between white workers and both Black and Hispanic workers have persisted above pre-COVID-19 levels.
Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as micro data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...
Journal Article
Strength of economy, limited benefit eligibility in Texas curb long-term unemployment rate
An unemployment rate with a persistent long-term component can be more detrimental to the economy than the same jobless rate with a smaller share of long-term unemployed.
Working Paper
Nonparametric estimation of the impact of taxes on female labor supply
Econometric models with nonlinear budgets sets frequently arise in the study of impact of taxation on labor supply. Blomquist and Newey (2002) have suggested a nonparametric method to estimate the uncompensated wage and income effects when the budget set is nonlinear. This paper extends their nonparametric estimation method to censored dependent variables. The modified method is applied to estimate female wage and income elasticities using the 1987 PSID. I find evidence of bias if the nonlinearity in the budget set is ignored. The median compensated elasticity is estimated at 1.19 (with a ...
Journal Article
Does foreign direct investment help emerging economies?