Book Description

This dissertation consists of three essays that address important questions within the fields of labor economics and public economics. I use advanced empirical methods and a combination of restricted access and public-use data to study the role of inequality in labor markets and wealth.In Chapter 1, I study whether the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) extensions are different for workers exposed to higher levels of local labor market concentration, a potential source of employer market power. UI extensions can improve the bargaining power of job seekers relative to employers by improving workers' outside options. I exploit measurement error in state unemployment rates that led to quasi-random assignment of UI durations in the U.S. during the Great Recession. Using matched employer-employee data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, I find that UI extensions lengthen nonemployment durations by one week and cause economically meaningful but not statistically significant increases in earnings. The UI-earnings effect is significantly lower at higher levels of concentration, while there is no difference in the UI-duration effect. The lower UI-earnings effect is driven by differences at the extremes of the distribution of concentration. Workers exposed to higher concentration also are slightly more likely to change workplaces, local labor markets, and industries following an extension, but they are not induced to match into less-concentrated markets. My results imply that the benefits of more generous UI, in terms of match quality, are attenuated at higher levels of concentration, and so UI policy that accounts for local concentration is potentially warranted.In Chapter 2, joint with Anne M. Burton, we revisit how Ban the Box (BTB) policies affect the employment of minority men. BTB policies are intended to help ex-offenders find employment by delaying when employers can ask about criminal records. Existing evidence finds BTB causes discrimination against young, non-college-educated minority men. We show that effects for this group are not robust to a simple change in specification and the coding of BTB laws. Using a distinct treatment definition, we find no evidence of statistical discrimination: employment effects are near zero, precisely estimated, and not statistically significant.In Chapter 3, joint with N. Meltem Daysal and Michael F. Lovenheim, we study the effect of changes in parental wealth in childhood on the intergenerational transmission of wealth. Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. Prior research has found an intergenerational correlation between 0.2 and 0.4 and has emphasized the role of family characteristics in driving this correlation. We contribute to this literature by examining the intergenerational transmission of wealth changes, which allows us to isolate the causal effect of wealth shocks from pre-determined parental preferences and household characteristics. Using Danish Register Data, we examine the effect of home price changes that occur between ages 0-5, 6-11, and 12-17 on overall wealth, housing wealth, and nonhousing wealth of adult children at ages 29-33. For the youngest age group, we find that 16.5% and 22.2% of each Krone of home price change is transmitted to overall wealth and housing wealth in adulthood, respectively. The corresponding transmission rates for the 6-11 age group are 30.8% and 18.5%, with a transmission to non-housing wealth of 12.3%. There is no transmission of home price changes that occur during the teenage years for any wealth outcome. Examining mechanisms, we find that home price increases in the first two age groups lead to modest increases in home ownership, educational attainment, and income. There also is an increase in partner wealth for the younger two groups. Income and education can explain less than a third of the intergenerational transmission we document. We argue that our results largely reflect changes to parental/household behaviors and preferences that are passed down to children and cause them to accumulate more housing wealth in young adulthood.