Publications and forthcoming
Higher Wages, Service Quality, and Firm Profitability: Evidence from Nursing Homes and Minimum Wage Reforms (Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics)
Issue Brief (Washington Center for Equitable Growth), SSRN
Media coverage: Freakonomics, MD, NYTimes, Vox, Het Financieele Dagblad (in Dutch)
Policy mentions: Council of Economic Advisers, White House
Previously circulated as "Do Higher Wages Save Consumer Lives? Evidence from Nursing Homes and Minimum Wage Reforms"
This paper examines whether higher earnings for frontline workers affects the quality of employees' output. I leverage increases in the statutory minimum wage, combined with worker, consumer, and firm outcomes in the nursing home sector. I find that higher minimum wages increase income and retention among low-wage employees and improve consumer outcomes, measured by fewer inspection violations; lower rates of adverse, preventable health conditions; and lower resident mortality. Firms maintain profitability by attracting consumers with a greater ability to pay and increasing prices for these individuals.
Mothers as Insurance: Family Spillovers in WIC (2023, Vol. 91, Journal of Health Economics, with Marianne Bitler, Janet Currie, Hilary Hoynes, Lisa Schulkind, and Barton Willage)
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a widely used program. Previous research shows that WIC improves birth outcomes, but evidence about impacts on children and families is limited. We use a regression discontinuity leveraging an age five when children become ineligible for WIC and examine nutritional and laboratory outcomes for adults and children. We find little impact on children who aged out of the program. But among adult women caloric intake falls and food insecurity increases, suggesting that mothers protect children by consuming less themselves. We find no effect on others in the household.
Long-Term Gains from Longer School Days (2023, 58(4):1385-1427, Journal of Human Resources, with Patricio Dominguez)
This paper examines whether additional time in elementary and secondary school affects economic well-being in adulthood. We leverage cross-municipality and cross-cohort variation in a reform that increased the Chilean school day by 30 percent between 1997 and 2010 and find that full-day schooling increased educational attainment, delayed childbearing, and increased earnings when students reached young adulthood. These findings are consistent with a human capital channel and demonstrate large-scale investments in public education can yield long-term economic benefits.
Universal Access to Free School Meals and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision (2022, 57(3):776-820, Journal of Human Resources)
Brown Center Chalkboard blog, JHR Research Highlight
NPR On Point segment (2022-23 changes in universal free meals), Politico, Post & Courier
The school meals program is the largest nutritional assistance program for school-aged children. Whereas program eligibility was historically determined by family income, recent reforms allow schools to offer free meals to all students. This paper evaluates the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision, the largest schoolwide free meals program, on academic performance. I leverage within- and across-state variation in the timing of CEP participation and find universal free meals increases breakfast and lunch participation by 38 and 12 percent, respectively. Math performance improves in districts with baseline low free meal eligibility, particularly among racial/ethnic groups with low income-based participation rates.
Reducing Burnout and Resignations among Frontline Workers: A Field Experiment (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, July 2022, with Elizabeth Linos and Stephanie Wilcoxen)
Academy of Management Best Journal Article 2023 (Public and Nonprofit Division)
Government agencies around the world struggle to retain frontline workers, as high job demands and low job resources contribute to persistently high rates of employee burnout. Although four decades of research has documented the predictors and potential costs of frontline worker burnout, we have limited causal evidence on strategies that reduce it. In this article, we report on a multi-city field experiment (n=536) aimed at affirming social belonging among 911 dispatchers. We find that a six-week intervention that prompts dispatchers to share advice anonymously and asynchronously with their peers in other cities reduces burnout by 8 points (0.4 SD) and cuts resignations by more than half (3.6 percentage points) four months after the intervention ended. We provide supporting evidence that the intervention operates by increasing perceived social belonging in an online laboratory experiment (n=497). These findings suggest that low-cost belonging affirmation techniques can reduce frontline worker burnout and help agencies retain workers, saving a mid-sized city at least $400,000 in personnel costs.
Supporting Workers and Families in the Pandemic Recession: Results in 2020 and Suggestions for 2021 (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2021, with Abigail Wozniak)
Media coverage: Business Insider, Star Tribune, Huffington Post
We review several spending programs designed to support Americans through the Covid pandemic in 2020. We group these into programs designed to stabilize the labor market and facilitate its recovery and those that provided financial relief to households independent of their employment history. We review the extent to which these programs reached intended beneficiaries along with early evidence of program impacts. Overall, we find the programs were highly successful at delivering intended aid in 2020. Nevertheless, we identify common areas where programs could improve as support continues through 2021, and we discuss related needs that have so far received less attention from policymakers.
Who's In and Who's Out under Workplace COVID Symptom Screening? (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2021, 40:614-641, with Aaron Sojourner and Abigail Wozniak)
NBER Working Paper 27792, OIGI Working Paper
COVID symptom screening, a new workplace practice, is already affecting many millions of American workers. As of this writing, 34 states already require, and federal guidance recommends, frequent screening of at least some employees for fever or other symptoms. This paper provides the first empirical work identifying major features of symptom screening in a broad population and exploring the trade‐offs employers face in using daily symptom screening. First, we find that common symptom checkers could screen out up to 7 percent of workers each day, depending on the measure used. Second, we find that the measures used will matter for three reasons: Many respondents report any given symptom, survey design affects responses, and demographic groups report symptoms at different rates, even absent fluctuations in likely COVID exposure. This last pattern can potentially lead to disparate impacts and is important from an equity standpoint.
Policies to Reduce and Prevent Homelessness: What We Know and Gaps in the Research (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2021, 40:914-963, with Bill Evans and David Phillips)
Media coverage: Phys.org, Washington Post
Previously circulated as Reducing and Preventing Homelessness: A Review of the Evidence and Charting a Research Agenda
Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these strategies have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. In this paper, we catalog the policy responses, the existing literature on the effectiveness of these strategies, and the major gaps that need to be addressed in future research. We focus on studies from randomized controlled trial evaluations and the best quasi-experimental designs, and discuss outstanding questions that can be addressed with these same methods.
The Effect of Pandemic EBT on Measures of Food Hardship (The Hamilton Project/Brookings Institution with Lauren Bauer, Abigail Pitts, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)
Media coverage: NYTimes, NPR, Forbes, Idaho Statesman
In the spring of 2020, 55 million school-age children were not in school and tens of millions lost access to school-based nutrition assistance programs. To alleviate the effects of lost daily school meals and to help households with children meet their nutritional needs, Congress authorized a new program, Pandemic EBT, which provides families with a voucher to purchase groceries for an amount equal in value to the school meals missed from the start of school closures to the end of the 2019–20 school year. We find that Pandemic EBT reduced food hardship experienced by low-income families with children and lifted at least 2.7-3.9 million children out of hunger.
Schoolwide Free Meals and Student Discipline: Effects of the Community Eligibility Provision (Education Finance and Policy, 2021, 16(3):388-417, with Nora Gordon)
NBER Working Paper, SSN Policy Brief, Healthonomics podcast
Media coverage: Vox's The Weeds podcast (starts around 55:30)
This paper examines whether schoolwide free meals affect disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with school meals. We leverage the staggered rollout of CEP across states and school discipline measures for the near-universe of public schools to assess how disciplinary infractions change within a school as it becomes eligible for CEP. We conclude that schoolwide free meals reduced suspensions statistically significantly for white male elementary students by approximately 17 percent. Point estimates for other subgroups in elementary schools, and overall, are negative but smaller in magnitude; while treatment effects for black students are statistically insignificant, we also cannot rule out equal treatment effects between black and white students. We lack statistical power to rule large positive or negative effects for middle and high school students. The reductions among white students are somewhat larger in areas with high baseline poverty rates, consistent with universal meals programs serving an unmet need.
Making Work Pay Better Through an Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (in Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Ryan Nunn, eds. The 51%: Driving Growth through Women’s Economic Participation, The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, 2017, with Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein).
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that promotes work. Research has shown that it also reduces poverty and improves health and education outcomes. The maximum credit for families with two or fewer children has remained flat in inflation-adjusted terms since 1996. Over the same period, earnings prospects have stagnated or diminished for many Americans, and prime-age employment rates have fallen. This paper proposes to build on the successes of the EITC with a ten percent across-the-board increase in the federal credit. This expansion would provide a meaningful offset to stagnating real wages, encourage more people to enter employment, lift approximately 600,000 individuals out of poverty, and improve health and education outcomes for millions of children.
Select policy writings
The Case for and Challenges of Delivering In-kind Nutritional Benefits to Children (Hamilton Project Strategy Paper, with Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)
Food Security Shouldn't Take a Summer Vacation (with Lauren Bauer, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Natalie Tomeh)
Leveraging the Urgency of Economic Disparities Driven by the COVID-19 Pandemic to Strengthen the US Safety Net (National Academy of Medicine Perspectives, with Rita Hamad, Marianne Bitler, and Janet Currie)
An Update on the Effect of Pandemic EBT on Measures of Food Hardship (with Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)
Six Examples of the Long-Term Benefits of Anti-Poverty Programs (with Jason Furman)
CBPP policy briefs [external link]
Recent media mentions and interviews
Life is About to Get Much More Expensive for Millions of Families, Axios, July 17, 2023.
Looking Ahead to an Eventful New Year, Politico, January 3, 2023.
States Put Free School Meals on the Menu, Politico, December 31, 2022.
End of Nationwide Federal Free Lunch Program has Some States Scrambling, National Public Radio, October 26, 2022.
Lessons Learned from the Universal Free School Meals Program, Ohio Public Radio All Sides, August 25, 2022.
Impact on Families after End of Universal Free School Meal Program, Wisconsin Public Radio Central Time, August 9, 2022.
Lessons from America's brief experiment with universal free school meals, NPR On Point, July 7, 2022.
Economists Brace for Poor Jobs Report, The Hill, February 3, 2022.
How a Big Federal Spending Package Could Affect School Meals and Student Poverty Counts. Education Week, September 23, 2021.