The Impact of Preference Programs in Public Procurement: Evidence from Veteran Set-Asides (with Rodrigo Carril)
Veteran-owned businesses are given preferential treatment in the allocation of procurement contracts from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs -- currently the largest civilian federal agency in terms of procurement spending. We exploit a 2016 Supreme Court ruling that significantly increased the scope of these set-asides, to study the impacts of preference programs on both the targeted businesses and procurement outcomes. The policy change increased the share of contracts awarded to the target population, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and benefited not only preexisting vendors but also new entrants, including those who had previously failed to win contracts. We find no evidence of spillovers to awards by other federal agencies, no decline in competition for awards, and no deterioration of contract execution performance by vendors. These findings suggest that VA set-asides have successfully improved outcomes for the target population without imposing significant costs on the government.
The Revenue and Distributional Impacts of Unemployment Insurance Reform: Evidence from California (with Mark Duggan and Jonathan Gruber)
In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is funded through employer-side payroll taxes that are experience-rated based on previous UI claims. States differ significantly with respect to the financing of their programs, and a majority of state programs do not currently meet minimum UI trust fund solvency standards. A common culprit in the least solvent states is a very low tax base of earnings on which UI taxes are levied. We focus on California, the least solvent of the 50 state UI programs, with debt currently to the federal government of $21 billion, and which has the lowest base of taxable earnings at $7000 per year. We use matched employer-employee administrative data to estimate the impact of financing reforms to California’s UI system. We find that raising the taxable earnings base would replenish the state’s UI trust fund and would increase experience rating by reducing the number of systematically subsidized firms. While this improves vertical equity of ! the UI system, it would also worsen horizontal equity by imposing much larger percentage increases in tax costs on the firms with the fewest layoffs. Alternatively, matching the higher tax base with both higher maximum and lower minimum rates could improve both experience rating and horizontal equity.
The Changing Nature of Temporary Help Employment in the United States (with Emilie Jackson and Melanie Wallskog)
New Employer Payroll Taxes and Entrepreneurship (with Melanie Wallskog) Forthcoming, Journal of Public Economics
Payroll Tax Incidence: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance Journal of Public Economics (2024)
Experience Rating as an Automatic Stabilizer (with Mark Duggan and Andrew Johnston) Tax Policy and the Economy (2023)
The Effects of State Business Taxes on Plant Closures: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance Taxation and Multi-Establishment Firms Review of Economics and Statistics (2023)
Would Broadening the UI Tax Base Help Low-Income Workers? (with Mark Duggan and Andrew Johnston) AEA Papers and Proceedings (2022)
The Finance of Unemployment Compensation and Its Consequences (with Andrew Johnston) Public Finance Review (2021)
To Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not At All? How Disability Benefits Affect the Employment Decisions of Older Veterans (with Courtney Coile and Mark Duggan) Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2021)
What to Expect When You Are Expecting: Are Health Care Consumers Forward-Looking? (with Jonathan Zhang) Journal of Health Economics (2019)
Veterans' Labor Force Participation: What Role Does the VA's Disability Compensation Program Play? (with Courtney Coile and Mark Duggan) American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (2015)
Press Coverage: The Economist
Outsourcing, Occupational and Industrial Concentration (with Nicholas Bloom and Brian Lucking)
Labor Market Effects of Medicaid Expansion and Premium Subsidies: New Evidence from Panel Data (with Jonathan Zhang)