U.S. Census Bureau economists and social scientists are set to present their research findings at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA) and Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) in San Antonio January 5-7. This conference typically hosts more than 13,000 attendees from around the world and showcases the latest research in economics.

This year’s conference includes 29 papers by Census Bureau researchers examining the outcomes of children, adults, households, workers and businesses on a variety of dimensions including earnings, employment, education, poverty, marriage, health, crime, pollution exposure and productivity:

• Divorce, Family Arrangement, and Children’s Adult Outcomes (Andrew Johnston, Maggie R. Jones and Nolan G. Pope). Using linked tax records and Census Bureau data, this paper finds that experiencing a parental divorce in childhood reduces adult earnings and college attendance while increasing the likelihood of teen birth and incarceration. The negative effects of divorce are larger for children who experience a divorce at younger ages and children of low-income families.

• Cash Transfers and Long-Run Child Earnings' Mobility (Emilia Simeonova, Randall Akee and Maggie R. Jones). This paper examines the effect of a pure cash transfer on a child’s long-run earnings and employment by analyzing cash transfers received in childhood for American Indian children residing off of reservation lands, comparing children of the same birth cohorts who did and did not receive such transfers.

• The Long-Run Effects of Residential Racial Desegregation Programs: Evidence From Gautreaux (Eric Chyn, Robert Collinson and Danielle H. Sandler). Linking historical records on the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program to administrative data, the authors find being placed in a White neighborhood significantly increases children’s future lifetime earnings, employment and wealth. They are also significantly more likely to be married, twice as likely to be married to a White spouse, and more likely to live in more racially diverse neighborhoods with higher rates of upward mobility nearly 40 years later.

• Universal Preschool Lottery Admissions and Its Effects on Long-Run Earnings and Outcomes (Randall Akee and Leah R. Clark). By linking individuals both admitted and nonadmitted to a universal preschool program to administrative data, including tax records, the authors find admitted children have between 5% and 6% higher earnings as young adults. The impacts are strongest for individuals from the lower half of the household income distribution in childhood. Likely mechanisms include high-quality teachers and curriculum.

• Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults (Paul Youngmin Yoo, Thurston Domina, Andrew McEachin, Leah Clark, Hannah Hertenstein and Andrew Penner). Linking statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records housed at the Census Bureau, this paper finds that virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor’s degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools.

• Race, Class, and Mobility in U.S. Marriage Markets (Ariel J. Binder, Caroline Walker, Jonathan Eggleston, and Marta Murray-Close). Linking American Community Survey (ACS) respondents born from 1978 to 1987 to their parents’ tax records, the authors find that, conditional on childhood family income (CFI), Black non-Hispanic women obtain 60% less income from a romantic partner than do White non-Hispanic women, driven by a lower propensity to partner and a lower partner CFI rank. These marriage market dynamics account for 84% to 90% of the observed family income mobility gap.

• Using Multiple Data Sources to Learn About the Race and Ethnicity of Taxpayers (James Pearce, Shannon Mok, Rebecca Heller and Jonathan Rothbaum). A difficulty in using administrative tax data to study income distribution and other aspects of economic well-being is these tax data lack information on race and ethnicity. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) maintains an individual tax model that statistically merges administrative tax data with the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) to create a household distribution model used in CBO reports. This paper compares the CBO's statistically matched data and the Census Bureau’s linked data, and discusses implications of the differences for future CBO analyses.

• A More Equal Union? A New Source on Income Disparities for U.S. Communities Defined by Race, Place, and Ethnicity (Brandon Hawkins, Illenin Kondo, Kevin Rinz, John Voorheis and Abigail Wozniak). This paper introduces a new source for wide-ranging statistics on income distributions, earnings mobility, and earnings volatility, for subnational and sub-state populations. These data will enable the exploration of questions related to the evolution of income inequality within and across communities defined by race, ethnicity, and place, as well as other demographics.
  

• Moving From a Place-Based to a Person-Based Accounting of Environmental Inequality in the United States (Jonathan Colmer and John Voorheis). Using a new microdata infrastructure that allows examination of the near-population of the United States over time and space for the last two decades, this paper presents new findings on the disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, highlighting the importance of moving from a place-based to a person-based understanding of environmental inequality.

• Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States (Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin, John Voorheis and Reed Walker). By combining administrative data from tax returns between 1984 and 2019, remote sensing measurements of particulate exposure, and sociodemographic information from linked survey, census, and administrative data, this paper provides systematic evidence on the relationship between pollution exposure, income, wealth, and race. The authors find that racial disparities in pollution exposure are unlikely to be ameliorated by relative improvements in the distribution of income or wealth in the short and medium run.

• Maternal and Infant Health Inequality: New Evidence From Linked Administrative Data (Kate Kennedy-Moulton, Sarah Miller, Petra Persson, Maya Rossin-Slater, Laura Wherry and Gloria Aldana). Using data from the universe of California birth records, hospitalizations, and death records, along with parental income from tax records and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics file, this paper finds various economic inequalities and racial disparities in birth weight, preterm birth, infant mortality, and maternal health and mortality. Benchmarking the health gradients in California to those in Sweden, the authors find that infant and maternal health is worse in California than in Sweden for most outcomes throughout the entire income distribution.

• Is the Gender Pay Gap Largest at the Top? New Evidence from Postsecondary Transcript Records (Ariel J. Binder, Amanda Eng, Kendall Houghton, and Andrew Foote). Linking ACS responses to transcripts from state higher education systems, this paper examines how the gender pay gap varies across the distribution of postsecondary education credentials for recent graduates in the 15 years after graduation. The authors find that the gap is smaller at higher degree levels and that field-of-degree and occupation effects explain most of the gap among top Bachelor graduates, while labor supply and unobserved channels matter more for graduates with certificate and associate degrees.

• Re-Assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis (David Card, Jesse Rothstein and Moises Yi). This paper quantifies the gap in access to “good jobs” — the relative distance between white and Black workers’ home locations and the locations of employers offering relatively high pay premiums — and examines the degree to which this gap varies with worker skills and whether such spatial mismatch is a greater barrier to Black workers' labor market success in more residentially segregated cities.

• Who Bears the Cost of Aggregate Fluctuations and Why? (Maarten Meeuwis, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Lawrence Schmidt and Jonathan Rothbaum). Business cycles are typically associated with lower firm cashflows and higher discount rates which lead to declines in earnings for workers in the top of the income distribution and lower earnings for workers at the bottom of the income distribution. The authors build an equilibrium model of labor market search that quantitatively replicates these facts and has several implications regarding unemployment fluctuations, the cyclicality of aggregate worker earnings, and the redistributive effects of business cycle fluctuations and monetary policy.

• Unemployment Insurance Extensions, Labor Market Concentration, and Match Quality (David Wasser). This paper finds that unemployment insurance (UI) extensions lengthen nonemployment durations by one week and cause economically meaningful but not statistically significant increases in earnings, an effect that is lower at higher levels of labor market concentration. Workers exposed to higher labor market concentration also are slightly more likely to change workplaces, local labor markets, and industries following a UI extension.

• Advance Layoff Notices and Worker Outcomes (Bruce Fallick, Andrew Foote, Pawel Krolikowski and Lee Tucker). This paper’s findings suggest that advance layoff notices under the Worker Retraining and Notification (WARN) Act improve the employment and earnings outcomes of workers after separation. These results are not driven by variation in the generosity of services provided by state employment agencies. The paper also examines turnover and attrition at notifying establishments and the incidence of unrealized notifications.

• How Do Health Insurance Costs Affect Firm Labor Composition and Technology Investment? (Janet Gao, Shan Ge, Lawrence Schmidt and Cristina Tello-Trillo). Using Census Bureau microdata, the authors show that firms reduce employment following an increase in health insurance premiums and that lower-skilled workers are more likely to be laid off and remain unemployed for two years following the shock. In addition, they find that firms also invest more in information technology, potentially to substitute for labor.

• Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors (Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag). This paper, using data on the employment history and jobs of over 760,000 U.S. inventors, finds that inventors are increasingly concentrated in large incumbents, less likely to work for young firms, and less likely to become entrepreneurs — and their earnings increase 12.6% and their innovative output declines by 6% to 11% when hired by an incumbent versus young firm.

• Pay, Productivity and Management (Melanie Wallskog, Nicholas Bloom, Scott Ohlmacher and Cristina Tello-Trillo). Combining data on employer-employee earnings and firm employment and sales, this paper finds that more productive firms have higher employee pay across all percentiles of the earnings distribution but also higher within-firm inequality, particularly at larger publicly traded firms. These patterns are consistent with more aggressive performance-based pay schemes for top executives at more productive firms.

• The Natural Laws of Management (John Van Reenen, Lucia Foster, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and Nicholas Bloom). Using data from a common management practices survey collected by the Census Bureau and other countries, the authors find huge variation in structured management across firms within countries; firm performance is strongly positively associated with management; and the positive firm size-management relationship is much greater in countries with lower market and institutional frictions. The misallocation of resources to poorly managed firms accounts for much of the aggregate productivity differences between countries.

• Global Value Chains: Firm Level Evidence From the U.S. (Aaron Flaaen, Fariha Kamal, Eunhee Lee, and Kei-Mu Yi). This paper uses business data from the Census Bureau to measure the extent of international inputs embodied in U.S. exports, providing a new way to characterize global value chains, distinct from alternatives, such as those built from combining national-level input-output tables. Comparisons to such alternatives yield insights on the role of aggregation bias, proportionality assumptions, and the intermediate vs. final goods classification of imports in global value chains.

• The Distributional Implications of Growing Electrical Vehicle Use (Kalee E. Burns and Julie L. Hotchkiss). This paper examines the distribution of the gasoline tax burden in the presence of increased electric vehicle (EV) adoption. The authors find that the gasoline tax is highly regressive, with lower-income households bearing a greater burden as a share of their income, and that this regressivity is even greater in an environment with increased EV adoption, which is expected to be greater in high-income households.

• The Impact of Financial Sanctions: Regression Discontinuity Evidence From Driver Responsibility Fee Programs in Michigan and Texas (Michael Mueller-Smith, Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross and Elizabeth Luh). This paper finds consistent evidence that the driver responsibility fees introduced in Michigan and Texas had no impact on recidivism, earnings or romantic partners’ outcomes over the next decade.

• Criminal Court Fees, Earnings, and Expenditures: A Multi-state RD Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data (Elizabeth Luh, Carl Lieberman and Michael Mueller-Smith). This paper examines the impact of fines and user fees in the criminal court system on long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, and other self-reported measures of well-being. The authors find consistent evidence that rules out large, long-run impacts on total earnings and total recidivism.

• Stimulus Payments and Crime: Randomized Timing From Social Security Serial Digits (David Pritchard and Jillian Carr). Using the randomized timing of stimulus payments, determined by the last two digits of a tax filer’s social security number, the authors find little evidence of an effect on criminal offenses in 2001, when payments were small and the economic downturn was mild, versus 2008, when payments had a significant impact on overall crime and individual crime types, especially for individuals with a previous arrest record. During harsh economic downturns, large stimulus payments can increase family violence, potentially through increased substance use.

• The Role of Mandated Mental Health Treatment in the Criminal Justice System (Rachel Nesbit). This paper evaluates how mandated mental health treatment as a term of probation impacts the likelihood that individuals return to the criminal justice system and finds that being assigned to seek such treatment significantly decreases the likelihood of three-year recidivism. Longer-term effectiveness is strongest among more financially advantaged probationers. The author calculates a 5-to-1 benefit-to-cost ratio, suggesting that decreases in future crime would be more than sufficient to offset the costs of treatment.

• Criminal Justice Involvement and Well-Being in Old Age (Michael Mueller-Smith, Jennifer L. Doleac, Jonathan Eggleston, William G. Gale, and Briana Sullivan). This paper uses Criminal Justice Administrative Records Systems, linked with survey and administrative data sources from the Census Bureau, to provide the first evidence on the pending retirement crisis stemming from the aging generations of Americans that have been increasingly impacted by criminal justice policies like mass incarceration. This population exhibits serious economic vulnerability, higher disability rates, and greater detachment from kinship networks — factors that put these individuals at risk in retirement.

• National Experimental Well-being Statistics (Jonathan Rothbaum, Adam Bee, Joshua Mitchell, Nikolas Mittag and Carl Sanders). This paper summarizes the National Experimental Wellbeing Statistics (NEWS) Project, which simultaneously addresses the measurement errors stemming from unit nonresponse, item nonresponse, and misreporting that have biased key official estimates of household income and poverty. The authors bring together all the available survey and administrative data to address many of the shortcomings of individual data sources.

• Married... With Children?: Assessing Alignment Between Tax Units and Survey Households (Matthew Unrath). This paper assesses the accuracy of the construction of likely tax units from the person-level CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) file and finds that less than 60% of CPS ASEC tax units are exactly reflected on actual IRS 1040 rosters. Over 30% were assigned a different filing status and more than 20% were assigned a different number of dependents. The author also identifies the impact of dependent misassignment on the Census Bureau’s estimates of after-tax income and poverty statistics.
  

There will also be presentations based on Census Bureau microdata by researchers using the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network.

Census Bureau economists and our FSRDC collaborators play a key role in creating and improving statistical products essential to policymakers, businesses, researchers and the public. These products come from a variety of sources such as survey microdata on businesses and households, linked employer-employee data and confidential microdata from federal and state administrative and statistical agencies. Our economists use these data to study a variety of topics to help the Census Bureau better measure the economy.

More information on all the papers to be presented at the AEA/ASSA meeting, including a preliminary program with abstracts, is available at <www.aeaweb.org/conference/2024/preliminary>.

More information on working papers by Census Bureau and FSRDC researchers is available at <www.census.gov/topics/research/library/working-papers.html>.