Unconditional Cash Assistance During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Infant Health accepted, Journal of Human Resources
This paper examines how cash transfers that are not conditional on contemporaneous employment and are distributed during an economic downturn affect infant health. Leveraging variation in four pandemic-era payments, I find that eligibility for an additional $1,000 before birth reduces the prevalence of low birthweight by 1.6-3.5% and preterm births by at least 1.4%. Effects are larger for births that were conceived before the pandemic and vulnerable populations, indicating that additional resources can mitigate some of the adverse effects of an unanticipated negative shock. The payments decreased maternal smoking and increased prenatal care, consistent with families investing in children’s health.
Structuring Consumption Subsidies: How Transfer Design Shapes Household Spending (with Tessa Bonomo and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach)
Government transfers vary along two design dimensions that standard models predict should not matter: whether benefits are paid in cash or kind, and whether they arrive as one-time or recurring payments. We test to what extent these design choices affect household spending using sharp changes in four pandemic-era transfers to low-income families with children: one-time food vouchers, monthly food benefits, one-time cash payments, and monthly cash payments. Linking variation in benefit timing and amount to high-frequency household scanner data, we estimate spending responses in a harmonized difference-in-differences and event-study framework.
We find that households spend more out of in-kind benefits than out of cash transfers of similar value, and more out of recurring payments than out of one-time transfers in the short-run. Our estimates produce the first internally comparable set of short-run food-store MPCs across different transfer types ranging from 0.20 (one-time) and 0.43 (monthly) for in-kind benefits, versus 0.07 (one-time) and 0.22 (monthly) for cash. The patterns suggest that the form and timing of transfers systematically shape household spending in ways that are consistent with mental accounting, labeling, and forward-looking responses. More broadly, our results imply that transfer design—not just generosity and targeting—is a first-order policy lever for both social insurance and short-run demand stabilization.
Minimum Wages and Employment Composition (with Ashvin Gandhi)
This paper examines how minimum wages change the allocation of hours across workers and the nature of low-wage work. We leverage information on more than 700 million daily worker shifts covering the entire US nursing home industry over the 2016-2019 period matched to more than 300 state, county, and city minimum wage changes. Higher minimum wages shift the allocation of hours at the firm level towards workers with high levels of firm-specific experience. The shift in the allocation of hours is due to greater retention amongst the most experienced workers and increased hours worked by individual workers. These hours responses undo about 40 percent of the estimated relative earnings gains between workers in the first and third terciles of experience. Therefore, while higher wages increase the experience-adjusted amount of services provided, which may improve the consumer experience, they also attenuate relative earnings gains for new workers.
Evaluation of Philadelphia's Zero-Fare Transit Program (with Daniel Banko-Ferran, Sebastian Jilke, and Lindiwe Rennert) Pre-analysis plan
Evaluation of Rapid Re-housing for Homeless Families in the Child Welfare System (with Jane Mauldon and Emily Putnam-Hornstein). Pre-analysis plan, Overview Policy Brief and Report
You Get What You Pay For: Incentive Payments and Staffing in Healthcare (with Ashvin Gandhi, Andrew Olenski, and Karen Shen)
Air Pollution and Student Absenteeism (with Patricio Dominguez)