Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

The Great Recession has ruined the finances of millions of families and has had long-lasting impacts on employment. But less is known about its social consequences, about how it affected the intimate lives of the most disadvantaged – and in particular how it affected their fertility. Prior research has found that fertility decisions are often disconnected from economic concerns. In a new paper, I find the opposite: fertility falls in response to severe economic shocks among unmarried and teen women.1 I show that during the Great Recession, unmarried women increased their use of contraceptives and made use of more effective contraceptive methods. My results suggest that the Great Recession decreased fertility with consequences for the society as a whole.

In June 2015, California became the 26th state to pass its own Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The new credit, worth as much as $2,653 per year for families with low earned income, supplements the federal EITC. Families will start receiving the credit in 2016 on income they earned in 2015, and approximately 2 million residents are expected to benefit. The average qualifying household is expected to receive $460 per year, for a total cost to California of $380 million for tax year 2015.

Social Security was originally created to provide a basic floor for retirees’ living standards. However, many Americans – and in particular an increasing number of Baby Boomers – rely on Social Security as their major source of retirement income. There is a gap between what Social Security can provide at current funding levels, and what Americans expect it to provide. Many Baby Boomers appear at risk of suffering a major decline in their living standard in retirement. Since the government is not likely to expand Social Security in the short term, Baby Boomers should not be discouraged from increasing their lifetime earnings by working harder and longer. In a recent paper, 1 my colleagues and I measure the work disincentives confronted by people aged 50-79, based on an evaluation of the entire array of explicit federal and state taxes and implicit taxes arising from the loss of benefits as one earns more. We find that these work disincentives are much higher than suggested by previous research. Working longer can raise older workers’ living standards, but those additional earnings are effectively taxed at a high rate (typically between 40-60%). Reducing these work disincentives could help increase the lifetime earnings of retirees and thereby reduce poverty rates among the elderly.

Since the late 1990s, the share of agricultural workers who migrate within the United States fell by about 60%. On average over this period, one-third of the drop in the migration rate was due to changes in the demographic makeup of the workforce, while two-thirds was due to government and institutional changes in the market. However, in recent years, demographic change were responsible for nearly half of the overall change.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is now the primary anti-poverty program in the U.S., but it has not kept up with wage stagnation. Berkeley faculty recently proposed an increase in the federal EITC, California has adopted an expansion of its own state EITC, and Congress passed a tax bill that fails to help EITC recipients.

On November 8, 2016, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington enacted large increases in their states’ minimum wage levels—to $12 and higher. These states join California, New York, Oregon and eight large cities that will be increasing their minimum wages to levels at or near $15. What are the expected effects of such minimum wage increases? Will they reduce jobs, lead to price increases, and/or reduce profits? We take advantage of the emergence of websites such as AllMenus and GrubHub to obtain information about restaurant menu prices, and show that an overnight 25 percent increase in San Jose in 2013 led to price increases, on average, of about 1.5 percent. San Jose was thus able to substantially boost the wages of the lowest paid workers without layoffs or reducing the competitiveness of its restaurants. These results suggest that the new and higher minimum wages may primarily transfer income from most consumers to low-wage workers.

The achievement gap between rich and poor students in the United States is large and growing. On average, children from low-income families have lower test scores, lower rates of high school and college completion, and eventually lower earnings than their peers from higher-income families. Addressing this is key to breaking the cycle of poverty an inequality across generations.

One contributing factor is differences in resources between schools attended by high- and low-income students. In our recent paper, “School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement,” we show that school resources play a major role in student achievement, and that finance reforms can effect major improvements in student achievement in low-income school district. Accordingly, states that have implemented reforms have seen steady declines in the test score gap between high- and low-income school districts, over a period when states that did not implement reforms saw rising gaps.

Nearly 100,000 workers are employed in the retail and food service sector in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Nationally, jobs in the service sector are characterized by low pay and few fringe benefits, and workers employed in the service sector have little control over the days and times that they will work. In addition, many service sector employers across the country rely on just-in-time and on-call scheduling practices designed to minimize labor costs by closely aligning staffing with consumer demand. These practices can introduce a great deal of instability into the lives of workers and their families.

Nearly 250,000 workers are employed in the retail and food service sector in the state of Connecticut. Nationally, jobs in the service sector are characterized by low pay and few fringe benefits, and workers employed in the service sector have little control over the days and times that they will work. In addition, many service sector employers across the country rely on just-in-time and on-call scheduling practices designed to minimize labor costs by closely aligning staffing with consumer demand. These practices can introduce a great deal of instability into the lives of workers and their families.