Working Papers

Interstate migration by working-age adults in the US declined substantially during the Great Recession and remained subdued through 2019. We document that interstate migration rose sharply following the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, nearly recovering to pre-Great recession levels, and provide evidence that this reversal was primarily driven by the rise in work from home (WFH). Before the pandemic, interstate migration by WFH workers was consistently 50% higher than for commuters. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, this migration gap persisted while the WFH share tripled. Using quasi-panel data and plausibly exogenous changes in employer WFH policies, we address concerns about omitted variables or reverse causality and conclude that access to WFH induces greater interstate migration. An aggregate accounting exercise suggests that over half of the rise in interstate migration since 2019 can be accounted for by the rise in the WFH share.  Moreover, both actual WFH and pre-pandemic WFH potential, based on occupation shares, can account for a sizable share of cross-state variation in migration.

In 1979, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) began following a group of US residents born between 1957 and 1964. It has continued to re-interview these same individuals for more than four decades. Despite this long sampling period, attrition remains modest. This paper shows that after 40 years of data collection, the remaining NLYS79 sample continues to be broadly representative of their national cohorts with regard to key labor market outcomes. Life-cycle profiles of employment, hours worked, and earnings tightly track those in the Current Population Survey for the same cohorts.  Moreover, average lifetime earnings over the age range 25 to 55 closely align with the same measure in Social Security Administration data for the same cohorts. Our results suggest that the NLSY79 can continue to provide useful data for economists and other social scientists studying life-cycle and lifetime labor market outcomes, including earnings inequality.

Shortly after the COVID shock hit the US, we started running a Current Population Survey (CPS)-style online survey (initially twice a month, between October 2020 and June 2021 once a month). Between May 2020 and June 2021 the survey was run in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The goal was twofold: first, to provide real-time data on the state of the labor market in the US; second, to gather extra information that the CPS and many other datasets do not have, or that will only become available to researchers with a significant time lag. With every new data release, we published an update on the state of the US labor market. The PDF linked above was the last of these reports, all other reports including media coverage are available on the project website. For the surveys covering the same reference week as the CPS, we released a forecast about three weeks before the release of Employment Situation Report by the BLS. Therefore in analogy to the CPS, we called the survey the Real-Time Population Survey. We used the additional questions in our survey to address questions of interest, both for academic research and for public policies. We published two academic papers based on the RPS in the Review of Economic Dynamics and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.