Publications and forthcoming

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.

Many community organizations provide services similar to government programs, but there is limited evidence how increased government aid affects the use and availability of charitable services. This study examines how greater access to federal nutrition assistance through schoolwide free meal programs affects food bank use within the U.S.’s largest food bank network. A 10 percent increase in access to free school meals reduces the amount of food that food banks distribute by 0.9–1.4 percent, without significantly reducing donations, fundraising activity, or the amount of food available. The reduction of food bank use is only found in areas where relatively few students previously qualified for government aid. Our findings highlight that even safety net programs that serve a specific population and offer distinct services can reduce pressures on charitable organizations, particularly in areas previously underserved by government assistance.

Free and reduced-price school lunches are available in nearly all public and some private schools, and most of these schools also offer the School Breakfast Program. Children’s eligibility for these programs is conditioned on having low income. An existing literature documents the effects of school meals and school meal nutrition standards on child outcomes, yet causal evidence on how this program affects nutritional intake is still lacking. We compare nutritional intake between the periods just before and just after the school year begins for children likely to be eligible for free school meals (incomes under 200% of the poverty guideline) versus students unlikely to be eligible for or participate in the program (incomes above 200% of the poverty guideline), using granular data we collected about school year start dates. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find access to school meals reduces caloric intake, driven by a reduction in soda consumption for younger children, and a reduction in total fat intake for older children. Given increasing obesity among school children and the specific ways that calories are reduced, these findings likely represent improvements in students’ diets. We do not find any statistically significant effects on food insecurity or any spillover effects onto mothers’ consumption or time spent on food activities, which suggests these effects come from changes in children’s access to school meals and not from other differences between the academic year and summer for school meal eligible vs. higher income families. These results suggest school meals programs can improve nutritional intake, and policymakers should consider this benefit when considering changes to availability such as expanding or reforming universal free meals programs.

This paper examines how providing families with lump-sum in-kind assistance during the pandemic affected food hardship, economic well-being, and maternal health. We study the introduction of a new program, P-EBT, that provided grocery vouchers worth approximately $300 per student during spring and summer 2020. Using cross-state variation in program timing, we find that families spent $18-42 per student per week in the 6 weeks after benefit receipt. Household food insufficiency and children’s food insecurity among low-income families declined by 27-49% in the month following receipt, and maternal mental health improved by 0.9 standard deviations.

This paper examines whether higher earnings for frontline workers affects the quality of employees' output. I leverage increases in the statutory minimum wage, combined with worker, consumer, and firm outcomes in the nursing home sector. I find that higher minimum wages  increase income and retention among low-wage employees and improve consumer outcomes, measured by fewer inspection violations; lower rates of adverse, preventable health conditions; and lower resident mortality. Firms maintain profitability by attracting consumers with a greater ability to pay and increasing prices for these individuals.

We analyze 2008–2018 nationwide school district-level math and reading/language arts (RLA) test scores for 3rd-8th grade students combined with information on SYG laws by state and year. We implement two estimation approaches—two-way-fixed effects and group-time average treatment effects—and conduct analyses stratified by student race (Black, White) and area income level. We find negative effects of SYG on math achievement among all students using both estimation approaches (−0.0377 standard deviation decline, p < 0.001 and −0.0493, p < 0.001). We find adverse effects of SYG on math among White students (−0.0315, p = 0.001 and −0.0312, p = 0.08) and among students in low-income districts (−0.0616, p < 0.001 and −0.0903, p < 0.001). The precision of estimates for the effect on math scores among Black students varies across approaches (−0.0666, p = 0.05, −0.0444, p = 0.48). We estimate negative effects of SYG on RLA achievement in only a subset of models.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a widely used program. Previous research shows that WIC improves birth outcomes, but evidence about impacts on children and families is limited. We use a regression discontinuity leveraging an age five when children become ineligible for WIC and examine nutritional and laboratory outcomes for adults and children. We find little impact on children who aged out of the program. But among adult women caloric intake falls and food insecurity increases, suggesting that mothers protect children by consuming less themselves. We find no effect on others in the household.

This paper examines whether additional time in elementary and secondary school affects economic well-being in adulthood. We leverage cross-municipality and cross-cohort variation in a reform that increased the Chilean school day by 30 percent between 1997 and 2010 and find that full-day schooling increased educational attainment, delayed childbearing, and increased earnings when students reached young adulthood. These findings are consistent with a human capital channel and demonstrate large-scale investments in public education can yield long-term economic benefits.

The school meals program is the largest nutritional assistance program for school-aged children. Whereas program eligibility was historically determined by family income, recent reforms allow schools to offer free meals to all students. This paper evaluates the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision, the largest schoolwide free meals program, on academic performance. I leverage within- and across-state variation in the timing of CEP participation and  find universal free meals increases breakfast and lunch participation by 38 and 12 percent, respectively. Math performance improves in districts with baseline low free meal eligibility, particularly among racial/ethnic groups with low income-based participation rates.

Government agencies around the world struggle to retain frontline workers, as high job demands and low job resources contribute to persistently high rates of employee burnout. Although four decades of research has documented the predictors and potential costs of frontline worker burnout, we have limited causal evidence on strategies that reduce it. In this article, we report on a multi-city field experiment (n=536) aimed at affirming social belonging among 911 dispatchers. We find that a six-week intervention that prompts dispatchers to share advice anonymously and asynchronously with their peers in other cities reduces burnout by 8 points (0.4 SD) and cuts resignations by more than half (3.6 percentage points) four months after the intervention ended. We provide supporting evidence that the intervention operates by increasing perceived social belonging in an online laboratory experiment (n=497). These findings suggest that low-cost belonging affirmation techniques can reduce frontline worker burnout and help agencies retain workers, saving a mid-sized city at least $400,000 in personnel costs.

We review several spending programs designed to support Americans through the Covid pandemic in 2020. We group these into programs designed to stabilize the labor market and facilitate its recovery and those that provided financial relief to households independent of their employment history. We review the extent to which these programs reached intended beneficiaries along with early evidence of program impacts. Overall, we find the programs were highly successful at delivering intended aid in 2020. Nevertheless, we identify common areas where programs could improve as support continues through 2021, and we discuss related needs that have so far received less attention from policymakers.

COVID symptom screening, a new workplace practice, is already affecting many millions of American workers. As of this writing, 34 states already require, and federal guidance recommends, frequent screening of at least some employees for fever or other symptoms. This paper provides the first empirical work identifying major features of symptom screening in a broad population and exploring the trade‐offs employers face in using daily symptom screening. First, we find that common symptom checkers could screen out up to 7 percent of workers each day, depending on the measure used. Second, we find that the measures used will matter for three reasons: Many respondents report any given symptom, survey design affects responses, and demographic groups report symptoms at different rates, even absent fluctuations in likely COVID exposure. This last pattern can potentially lead to disparate impacts and is important from an equity standpoint.

Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these strategies have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. In this paper, we catalog the policy responses, the existing literature on the effectiveness of these strategies, and the major gaps that need to be addressed in future research. We focus on studies from randomized controlled trial evaluations and the best quasi-experimental designs, and discuss outstanding questions that can be addressed with these same methods.

In the spring of 2020, 55 million school-age children were not in school and tens of millions lost access to school-based nutrition assistance programs. To alleviate the effects of lost daily school meals and to help households with children meet their nutritional needs, Congress authorized a new program, Pandemic EBT, which provides families with a voucher to purchase groceries for an amount equal in value to the school meals missed from the start of school closures to the end of the 2019–20 school year. We find that Pandemic EBT reduced food hardship experienced by low-income families with children and lifted at least 2.7-3.9 million children out of hunger.

This paper examines whether schoolwide free meals affect disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with school meals. We leverage the staggered rollout of CEP across states and school discipline measures for the near-universe of public schools to assess how disciplinary infractions change within a school as it becomes eligible for CEP. We conclude that schoolwide free meals reduced suspensions statistically significantly for white male elementary students by approximately 17 percent. Point estimates for other subgroups in elementary schools, and overall, are negative but smaller in magnitude; while treatment effects for black students are statistically insignificant, we also cannot rule out equal treatment effects between black and white students. We lack statistical power to rule large positive or negative effects for middle and high school students. The reductions among white students are somewhat larger in areas with high baseline poverty rates, consistent with universal meals programs serving an unmet need.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that promotes work. Research has shown that it also reduces poverty and improves health and education outcomes. The maximum credit for families with two or fewer children has remained flat in inflation-adjusted terms since 1996. Over the same period, earnings prospects have stagnated or diminished for many Americans, and prime-age employment rates have fallen. This paper proposes to build on the successes of the EITC with a ten percent across-the-board increase in the federal credit. This expansion would provide a meaningful offset to stagnating real wages, encourage more people to enter employment, lift approximately 600,000 individuals out of poverty, and improve health and education outcomes for millions of children.