The Motherhood Penalty and the Fatherhood Premium in Employment during COVID-19: Evidence from The United States with Felipe Dias and Arianna Buchanan. Published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. Covered by the Washington Post.
Abstract: In this paper, we present evidence from the Current Population Survey examining the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on parental status and gender inequalities in employment in the United States. We show that the drop in the employment rate in post-outbreak months was largely driven by mass layoffs and not by workers quitting their jobs. Results from fixed-effects regression models show a strong fatherhood premium in the likelihood of being laid off for post-outbreak months compared to mothers, men without children, and women without children. We also found that the “fatherhood premium” was higher among lower-educated and mid-educated workers. These findings show that gaps in layoff rates exacerbated pre-existing forms of parental status and gender inequality in employment. Possible mechanisms are discussed, but more work is needed to explain why employers were less likely to lay off fathers following the outbreak, and the short- and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in reinforcing parental status and gender inequality in employment in the United States.
The Geography of Worker Adaptation to Unanticipated Job Losses with Jeff Zabel, Keren Horn, and Henry Pollakowski
Abstract: This paper addresses the 21 st century worker adaptation to a changing economy, using near-universal quarterly matched employee-employer microdata from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD). Our contributions include specific consideration of impacts of geography - how place shapes outcomes for dislocated workers. To provide results relevant to the current COVID pandemic, we begin with an examination of the Great Recession. We focus on how a major disruption (with a large number of mass layoffs) affects future employment and earnings for displaced workers. To accomplish this, we follow 250,000 displaced workers over time. We focus on the heterogeneous impacts of involuntary job loss by industry, education level, race, gender, location, and labor market history on the ability of workers to become re-employed and earn similar wages. We carry out an extensive study of the geography of dislocated worker adaptation, including emphasis on the effects on the mobility decision of relative job opportunities and housing costs. We also place substantive emphasis on job loss among less-educated workers, given the trend in secular loss of opportunities for these workers.
Explaining the Decline in US Residential Migration with Jeff Zabel
Abstract: One reason the U.S. has been able to sustain long-term economic growth is that workers have been willing to move to where the jobs were located. But the decline in the mobility rate over the last 40+ years means that workers seem less interested in moving for jobs. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate reasons for why the residential migration rate has fallen over time. Generally, this is linked to a decline in the net benefits of moving. We focus on job-related moves. This includes the decrease in the net benefits of moving related to the differences in expected wages and cost of housing between the origin and destination areas. We provide information for the Current Population Survey that documents the decline in migration in the U.S. over the last 35+ years. We then develop and estimate a model of job-to-job mobility using publicly available Job-to-Job Flows (J2J) data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program. We look at moves across 383 MSAs and estimate separate models for the four Census regions. The results show that the difference in expected earnings has a strong positive relationship with job-to-job moves across the four Census regions. The difference in house prices also has a negative relationship with job-to-job moves in the Midwest and South regions but this relationship is positive in the Northeast and West where house prices are generally higher. This is ostensibly picking up other positive factors in these higher house price MSAs. Both these relationships can help explain the decline in job-to-job mobility over time.
COVID-19, Public Charge Rules, and Immigrant Employment in the United States with Felipe Dias
Abstract: This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant employment in the United States using data from the Current Population Survey. It also provides the first evidence about the impact of the new public charge rules on the employment behavior of immigrants during the post-outbreak recovery. The authors find that among immigrants with household earnings at levels that make them susceptible to inadmissibility under the new rules, noncitizen status is associated with a 3.7% increase in employment among immigrant men. This effect is robust to inclusion of controls for socioeconomic characteristics and various fixed effects, and it is concentrated for men in states with below average unemployment benefit take-up. Findings also show that the differential employment effect is stronger in state-months with higher COVID-19 rates, suggesting that impacted workers may be increasing their workplace exposure to COVID-19.
State Level Jobless Recoveries and Routine Labor (Master's Thesis)
Abstract: American recessions since 1990 have led to recoveries that have been characterized by significantly slower employment growth than previous recoveries. Over a similar time period, there has been a documented decrease in employment in occupations that involve a high level of routine tasks due to the tendency of recent technological change to automate routine tasks. I investigate if declining demand for routine labor is driving the joblessness of recent American recoveries. I develop a search-and-matching model with routine and non-routine labor sectors wherein a negative productivity shock leads to larger employment losses for routine labor than non-routine labor, larger initial employment losses in aggregate employment, and ambiguous differences in employment growth thereafter. I use data on routine task intensity by occupation and state-level panel data of 711 detailed occupations to measure the share of each state’s employment in routine occupations. In order to estimate the effect that a state’s preceding routine labor share might have on the joblessness of that state’s recovery, I use fixed effects regressions to exploit the variation in routine labor share and the variation in states’ changes in their employment-population ratios. My results suggest that routine labor share does not explain lower employment growth during the recovery, but higher routine labor shares lead to larger per capita employment losses during the recession itself. A 1 percentage point increase in routine labor share leads to a 0.06 percentage point decrease in the change in a state’s employment-population ratio over the 4 quarters leading to a recession trough. These findings have important implications for structural change in American labor markets resulting from routine-biased technological change and the effects that structural change may have on labor dynamics over the business cycle.