Research

Works in Progress

The Effects of Public School Locations on Parental Employment

How does the location of traditional public schools affect whether and where parents work? Using administrative data linking home locations, workplace locations, birth records, and zoned school locations, I show that mothers are disproportionately likely to work in the direction of their child's zoned school. To test whether this relationship is causal, I use variation in school locations from school closures, comparing parents to nonparents in the same closed-school zones, and examine how closures affect parents' workplace locations, employment, and earnings. I find that mothers, but not fathers, move their work places towards their child's newly assigned school after a school closure. I then build a structural model in which households with one or two adults choose where to live, where to work, and how to divide school-based childcare responsibilities, trading off commute distance against wages. I use the model, estimated in seven focal cities that experienced mass school closures, to compare historical closure decisions to welfare-maximizing alternatives and to quantify their effects on maternal employment and child poverty.

Why Does Public Pre-K Crowd Out Private Child Care? Evidence on Market Conditions and Program Design from Wisconsin

Publicly funded four-year-old kindergarten (4K) programs may generate equilibrium effects in the private child care market that affect the availability of child care for children under four. Previous estimates of the effect of new 4K on the availability of care for younger children are mixed with some studies finding large negative effects and others finding precisely null effects, even when using the same methodology. This paper helps reconcile the literature by identifying characteristics of places and programs that generate crowd-out of private care for infants and toddlers. I estimate the impact of 4K on the availability of private child care for infants and toddlers in low-income families in Wisconsin leveraging variation in the timing of 4K classroom roll out and a difference-in-differences design. I find substantial heterogeneity across markets. In urban and suburban areas, 4K adoption reduces participation in private child care, consistent with crowd-out and provider exit. In rural areas, 4K adoption increases participation, suggesting that public pre-K expands effective child care capacity. I also find that mixed-delivery 4K programs, which fund public 4K classrooms in private facilities, eliminate these positive rural effects and do not mitigate crowd-out in urban areas. The results suggest that the consequences of public pre-K expansion depend critically on preexisting local child care market conditions and program design.

Wage Transparency Laws and Firms' Use of Labor Market Intermediaries

Wage transparency laws aim to reduce pay inequality and strengthen worker bargaining by protecting employees’ right to discuss pay with coworkers. These protections cover a firm’s own employees, but not workers hired through contractors or staffing agencies. I show that firms respond to new wage transparency laws by changing the boundary of the firm and moving workers out of the internal pay structure and into domestic outsourcing. I build a model of the firm’s outsourcing decision in which in-house workers may learn coworkers’ wages and renegotiate, while workers rented through a labor market intermediary cannot. Firms outsource low-wage workers to keep them at low wages, and outsource high-wage workers to keep those wages hidden from in-house employees. The model predicts that outsourcing is U-shaped across the within-occupation wage distribution, and that greater transparency raises outsourcing mostly in the tails. I test these predictions using the staggered adoption of state wage transparency laws between 2004 and 2016, with data from the QCEW and the American Community Survey. The laws raise the share of state employment in outsourcing industries, and the increase is concentrated among the lowest- and highest-paid workers. These results suggest that transparency laws that are limited to direct employees can affect who is hired, the nature of their employment, and the wages paid to both in-house and outsourced workers.