Research

Publications and Active Research Projects

Please see my Google Scholar Page for my Published work (Link Here). I also occasionally post code from my projects on my Github page, though this is less regularly updated (Link Here).

 

My Recent Publications include:

“The Minimum Wage, Self-Employment, and the Online Gig Economy”

  • Journal of Labor Economics 2023 (vol. 41, no. 1)
  • This paper estimates the effect of minimum wage increases on work that is not covered by minimum wage laws. I find minimum wage increases in the early 2000s resulted in small reductions in engagement in traditional self-employment. Following the development of the online gig economy in the 2010s, a 10% increase in the minimum wage increased the number of nonemployer establishments classified as transportation and
    warehousing services by approximately 2.7%. The counties most likely to exhibit a positive relationship between the minimum wage and participation in uncovered work are those with low labor market concentration and active Uber marketplaces.

 

“No Evidence The Child Tax Credit Expansion Had An Effect On The Well-Being And Mental Health Of Parents” 

  • Health Affairs. 2022, November.
  • The expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021 temporarily increased the size of payments and switched from an annual partially-refundable credit to a fully-refundable credit delivered monthly. Growing evidence from quasi-experimental studies in the US and experimental studies in low- and middle-income countries shows that moderate-to-large cash transfers improve subjective well-being and mental health. We estimate the effect of the Child Tax Credit expansion on subjective well-being and mental health
    among adult recipients. Using a nationally representative survey, the Understanding America Study (N = 7,198 and 2,743 unique respondents with children), we do not find evidence of a significant short-term impact of the Child Tax Credit expansion on measures of life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression symptomology. We speculate that null effects may be due to the temporary nature of the expansion.

 

Papers Under Review:

“Effects of the Expanded Child Tax Credit on Employment Outcomes: Evidence from Real-World Data from April to December 2021”

  • National Bureau of Economic Research. 2022. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29823
  • Studies have established that the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which provided monthly cash payments to most U.S. families with children from July to December 2021, substantially reduced poverty and food hardship. Other studies posit, however, that the CTC payments may generate negative employment effects that could offset its potential poverty-reduction effects. Scholars have simulated employment scenarios assuming various labor supply elasticities, but less work has empirically assessed how the monthly payments affected employment outcomes using real-world data. To evaluate employment effects, we apply a series of difference-in-differences analyses using data from the monthly Current Population Survey and the Census Pulse, both from April through December 2021. Across both samples and several model specifications, we find very small, inconsistently signed, and statistically insignificant impacts of the CTC both on employment in the prior week and on active participation in the labor force among adults living in households with children. Further, labor supply responses to the policy change do not differ for households for whom the CTC’s expansion eliminated a previous work incentive. Thus, our analyses of real-world data suggest that the expanded CTC did not have negative short-term employment effects that offset its documented reductions in poverty and hardship.