Research

Job Market Paper

Did Organized Labor Induce Labor? Unionization and the American Baby Boom

Presentations: Economic History Association (2024), NBER Summer Institute: Development of the American Economy (2024), Mountain West Economic History Conference (2024), World Congress of Cliometrics (2023), Midwest Economic Association (2023), Social Science History Association (2022), Young Economist Symposium (2022)

Abstract Labor unions have many well-documented effects on economic outcomes that are plausibly related to family formation. I study the impact of unionization on fertility using evidence from the largest expansion of unionism in American history: the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). I introduce new estimates of local union membership and exploit variation in exposure to the NLRA shock to estimate the place level effect of union growth on fertility outcomes. Unionization has positive effects on birth rates and completed fertility, and can account for approximately 20% of overall fertility increases during the Baby Boom. Effects are driven primarily by wage growth, protection against adverse labor market shocks, and impacts on female labor force participation.

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Publications

The Effect of Emergency Financial Assistance on Healthcare Use

with David Phillips and James Sullivan

Journal of Public Economics (2022)

Presentations: Allied Social Science Association (2021)

Abstract Does providing financial assistance to people who have just experienced an income shock affect their healthcare use? To address this question, we examine healthcare outcomes in a setting where people at risk of homelessness due to an income shock were offered or denied referral to financial assistance quasi-randomly. Among callers who have been screened as eligible for assistance at Chicago’s Homelessness Prevention Call Center (HPCC), some are denied assistance because the availability of funding varies. Conditional on some observable characteristics, funding availability is as-good-as-randomly assigned to callers. We link callers to healthcare utilization records and observe their inpatient hospital stays and emergency department visits. We find that referral to financial assistance has little effect on overall healthcare use – we can reject increases in total utilization greater than 7% of the base rate and decreases of more than 4%. This null effect can be explained, in part, by the fact that the income shock does not significantly change overall healthcare use among those not receiving assistance, suggesting that these individuals can insure health and healthcare demand against these shocks in other ways.

[Published Version]

Working Papers

Can Moves to Opportunity be Constructed? Evidence from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

with John Soriano and George Zuo

Presentations: Southern Economic Association (2024), Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (2023)

Abstract Low-income households often cannot afford to live in opportunity-rich neighborhoods. We investigate the mobility impacts of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), a large and fast-growing federal housing affordability program that subsidizes the construction of rent-restricted housing for low-income tenants. We estimate causal impacts by linking propietary application and waitlist data from a large LIHTC developer to administrative address history data. Preliminary evidence suggests that successful LIHTC applicants experience mixed mobility outcomes, although we observe substantial heterogeneity based on the quality of neighborhoods that applicants move from.

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Work in Progress

Jim Crow in Federal Labor Law? The Davis-Bacon Act and Black Economic Mobility

Presentations: Fighting for Freedom Symposium: Labor and Civil Rights in the American South (2024)

Abstract This paper studies the racialized effects of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which remains a cornerstone of federal labor law today. Davis-Bacon stipulated that all federally-funded construction projects pay workers based on local prevailing wages, which were often set according to union wage scales. Since the building trades were highly segregated until the 1960s, Davis-Bacon may have perpetuated inequality by blocking non-unionized Black tradesmen from competing on price with unionized white tradesmen. I evaluate the impact of Davis-Bacon on racial economic gaps using individual-level Census links. I find that Black workers employed in the building trades in 1930 experienced declines in occupational status and were less likely to remain in the labor force, remain employed in building trades, and remain in the same geographic area by 1940 relative to comparable white workers. This work supplies new evidence on the ways that labor policies have historically interacted with institutionalized racism to widen economic disparities, with effects that persist over time.

[Slides]

Growth Dynamics of the American Labor Movement

with Rob Gillezeau

Abstract This paper examines the spatial rearrangement of the trade union movement in the United States that occurred during World War II in order to determine the importance of path dependence and increasing returns to scale in union density. The compact between the federal government and trade unions during the war is employed as an exogenous shock to union membership across the United States. This shock relies on the differential enforcement of government protection for unionization based on the relative importance of firms to the war effort. The results indicate that shocks to union membership are durable and that increasing returns to scale in union membership have played an important role in the spatial evolution of the labour movement in both the public and private sectors.

The Effects of Moving to LIHTC-Subsidized Housing on Labor Market Outcomes

with Stephanie Karol, John Soriano, and Georze Zuo