Research

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Are occupational licensing restriction binding for undocumented immigrants? (JMP)

Undocumented immigrants, although not authorized to work in the United States, are nonetheless employed at high rates in this country. Despite high employment rates, undocumented immigrants earn relatively low wages and experience flat age-earnings profiles compared to observably similar authorized immigrants. One proposed explanation is that legal barriers to work reduce occupational mobility for immigrants. I investigate the effect of a particular legal barrier, occupational licensing, on undocumented immigrant outcomes. Until recently, federal law has prevented states from issuing occupational and professional licenses to undocumented immigrants, potentially hampering their occupational mobility. Using a recent policy change that granted undocumented immigrants access to licenses in California, I estimate the effect of lifting these restrictions on immigrant licensing rates and earnings. I find that licensing reform increased access to licenses: after 2015, the number of licenses granted to people with Hispanic names increased 10% relative to non-Hispanic whites, and self-reported licensing increased 2 percentage points among likely undocumented workers in California relative to other groups. I find that access to licenses improves outcomes for undocumented workers: comparing California to other states, earnings increased more after the reform for undocumented immigrants working in more heavily licensed occupations. Moreover, this increase in earnings was not at the expense of other groups; there was no concurrent decrease in earnings for natives or naturalized immigrants.

Occupational Licensing and Immigrants, 1850-1940

I estimate the effect of occupational licensing laws on immigrant participation in various occupations in the US from 1850 to 1940. The effect of occupational licensing on access to professions for disadvantaged groups is theoretically ambiguous. While economists typically view licensing as a barrier to entry which should reduce labor supply, some scholars suggest that licensing may make professions more accessible to disadvantaged groups by creating clear and objective standards for entry (Redbird 2017). Using the staggered adoption of licensing for fifteen occupations initially licensed in most states during the Age of Mass Migration, together with difference-in-differences empirical strategies and historic Census data, I estimate the effect of licensing on the share of foreign-born workers in a given occupation-state pair. I find that, after licensing, the share of foreign-born workers increases 3-5 percentage points. These results are fairly consistent across alternative estimation strategies, including recent difference-in-differences methodologies that are robust to heterogeneous and dynamic treatment effects (Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille (2021)

Crowdfunding Medical Expenses

Do Medicaid expansions crowd-out private donations for medical expenses? Using a novel data set of over 180,000 fundraisers scraped from GoFundMe, a crowdfunding website, I compare changes in crowdfunding activity in states that passed Medicaid expansions with states that do not. I find no effect of Medicaid expansion on intensive margin fundraising outcomes (funds raised and fundraiser goal). I do find large and statistically significant effects of Medicaid expansion at the extensive margin; after expansion, fundraisers declined by nearly 20\% in states that expanded Medicaid. These results are robust to estimation methods that allow for heterogeneous treatment effects and staggered treatment adoption (Chaisemartin and D’Haultfœuille’s 2021). This research is important for understanding the role of crowdfunding in the medical finance ecosystem, and more broadly for understanding how big the problem of public transfers crowding out private insurance is for the ACA Medicaid expansion.