Working papers

In-kind Government Assistance and Crowd-out of Charitable Services: Evidence from Free School Meals (with Orgul Ozturk and Pelin Pekgun)

Extends and subsumes "Free School Meals and Demand for Community Resources"

Many community organizations provide services similar to government programs, but there is limited evidence how increased government assistance affects the use of charitable services. We examine how greater access to federal nutritional aid through schoolwide free meal programs affects food bank use across the US’s largest food bank network. We find that a 10% increase in free school meal access reduces food bank utilization by 0.9-1.4%, without significantly reducing the amount of charitable resources available. The reduction of food bank use is only found in areas where relatively few students qualified for government aid prior to universal meals.

Does Unconditional Cash during Pregnancy Affect Infant Health?

Old version: Minneapolis Fed Working Paper, OIGI policy brief

This paper examines how cash transfers that are not conditional on contemporaneous employment affect infant health. Leveraging variation in four pandemic-era payments, I find that eligibility for an additional $1,000 before birth reduces the prevalence of low birthweight by 1.6-3.5% and preterm births by at least 1.4%. Effects are larger for births that were conceived before the pandemic, indicating that additional resources can mitigate some of the adverse effects of an unanticipated negative shock. The payments decreased smoking in the third trimester and increased prenatal care, consistent with families using the payments to invest in children's health.

Alleviating Worker Shortages Through Targeted Subsidies: Evidence from Incentive Payments in Healthcare (with Ashvin Gandhi, Andrew Olenski, and Karen Shen)

Worker shortages are common in many industries. This paper examines the effect of government subsidies to address these shortages in the context of a reform that tied Medicaid payments to nursing home staffing levels. We find that the reform substantially increased staffing, especially for facilities serving many Medicaid patients. Facilities responded primarily by hiring workers in lower-wage roles rather than increasing hours of incumbent or high-wage staff. This contrasts with null effects we estimate for a non-incentivized rate increase, suggesting that the incentive structure of government payments—rather than just the level—is key to boosting employment in sectors facing worker shortages.

Minimum Wages and Employment Composition (with Ashvin Gandhi)

This paper examines how minimum wages change the allocation of hours across workers and the nature of low-wage work. We leverage information on more than 700 million daily worker shifts covering the entire US nursing home industry over the 2016-2019 period matched to more than 300 state, county, and city minimum wage changes. Higher minimum wages shift the allocation of hours at the firm level towards workers with high levels of firm-specific experience. The shift in the allocation of hours is due to greater retention amongst the most experienced workers and increased hours worked by individual workers. These hours responses undo about 40 percent of the estimated relative earnings gains between workers in the first and third terciles of experience. Therefore, while higher wages increase the experience-adjusted amount of services provided, which may improve the consumer experience, they also attenuate relative earnings gains for new workers.

The Effects of Lump-Sum Food Vouchers on Spending, Hardship and Health (with Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)

This paper examines how providing families with vouchers to use for groceries when school meals are not available affects food hardship, economic well-being, and parental health. We study the introduction of a new program, Pandemic EBT during spring and summer 2020, that provided grocery vouchers worth approximately $300 per student to those who lost access to free school meals during the pandemic. Using cross-state variation in when states disbursed Pandemic EBT, we find that families spent $8-16 per student per week in the 6 weeks after benefit receipt. Household food hardship and children’s food hardship decline by approximately 40% among low-income families in the month following disbursement, and maternal mental health improves by 0.14 standard deviations.

Select works in progress (drafts coming soon)

Effects of school meals on nutrition: Evidence from the start of the school year (with Marianne Bitler, Janet Currie, Hilary Hoynes, Lisa Schulkind, and Barton Willage)

You Get What You Pay For: Incentive Payments and Staffing in Healthcare (with Ashvin Gandhi, Andrew Olenski, and Karen Shen)

Air Pollution and Student Absenteeism (with Patricio Dominguez)

Evaluation of Rapid Re-housing for Homeless Families in the Child Welfare System (with Jane Mauldon and Emily Putnam-Hornstein). Pre-analysis plan, Overview

Spending Responses to Non-recurrent In-kind Transfers: Evidence from the Roll-out of Pandemic EBT (with Tessa Bonomo and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)