Harnessing changes in funding for a voucher program that subsidizes consumers’ use of child care services at private providers, this study quantifies effects on local markets’ service capacity and prices. We also estimate how increased funding effects provider entry rate, exit rate, and highly rated provider market share. The evidence shows that an additional $100 in private voucher funding per local young child would 1) raise the number of private-provider slots by 0.026per local young child, 2) raise average prices by $0.56 per week, mainly driven by a price increase among incumbent providers, and 3) induce new provider entry to the market by 0.4 percentage points. The estimates imply a highly elastic supply elasticity of 10.7. Thus an increase in public funding and subsequent increase in demand is expected to result in expansion of available slots accompanied by a limited increase in price.

Labor unions might have various effects beyond the workplace. We link data on mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to data on their children from the NLSY79 Child Survey to analyze whether a mother's unionization history while a child is growing up affects two childhood outcomes-cognitive skill and behavior-and two adult outcomes-educational attainment and earnings. We similarly use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to analyze the effect of the unionization history of the household heads on similar childhood and adult outcomes. As these outcomes are likely the product of cumulative childhood experiences, we emphasize the use of unique, cumulative measures of mother or household head union status. We do not find a strong pattern of results indicative of a significant union influence on these measures of the quality of a child's life course.

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is higher, and less likely to be provided by relatives where average quality is lower. Even within types of childcare, higher-SES children tend to receive care of higher measured quality and higher cost. Inequality is evident at home as well: measures of parental enrichment at home, from both self-reports and outside observers, are on average higher for higher-SES children. We also find that parental and non-parental quality is reinforcing: children who receive higher quality non-parental care also tend to receive higher quality parental care. Head Start, one of the largest government care subsidy programs for low-income households, reduces inequality in care provided, but it is mainly limited to older children and to the lowest income households. Our evidence is from the pre-COVID-19 period, and the latest year we examine is 2019.

A large body of work highlights disparities in survival rates across Black and White newborns during childbirth. We posit that these differences may be ameliorated by racial concordance between the physician and newborn patient. Findings suggest that when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved. Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns. No such concordance effect is found among birthing mothers. Data and materials are available by limited use agreement from the Florida AHCA.

Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer's problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, in which platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation systems and test its predictions on Amazon Mechanical Turk, on which employers may decline to pay workers while keeping their work product and workers protect themselves using third-party reputation systems, such as Turkopticon. We find that (1) in an experiment on worker arrival, a good reputation allows employers to operate more quickly and on a larger scale without loss to quality; (2) in an experimental audit of employers, working for good-reputation employers pays 40% higher effective wages because of faster completion times and lower likelihoods of rejection; and (3) exploiting reputation system crashes, the reputation system is particularly important to small, good-reputation employers, which rely on the reputation system to compete for workers against more established employers. This is the first clean field evidence of the effects of employer reputation in any labor market and is suggestive of the special role that reputation-diffusing technologies can play in promoting gig work, in which conventional labor and contract laws are weak.

<p>The authors study how union certification affects the enforcement of workplace-safety laws. To generate credible causal estimates, a regression discontinuity design compares outcomes in establishments in which unions barely won representation elections to outcomes in establishments in which unions barely lost such elections. The study combines two main data sets: the census of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) enforcement database since 1985. Evidence shows positive effects of union certification on establishment’s rate of OSHA inspection, the share of inspections carried out in the presence of a union representative, violations cited, and penalties assessed.</p>

Workers struggle to understand prospective employers. Through experienced workers' volunteered reviews, Glassdoor is a platform that seeks to provide information about prospective employers to jobseekers. We find that the content most valuable to job-seekers (negative information) is the kind most risky to supply, pointing to a Catch-22. Higher ratings increase labor supply to less well-known firms, creating an incentive for smaller firms to discourage negative reviews. Concerns about employer retaliation discourage negative reviews and motivate employees who do disclose to conceal aspects of their identity, degrading the information's value. Reputation institutions provide valuable but partial solutions to workers' information problems. JEL: J3, J28, D83, J62.

Defaults have been shown to have a powerful effect on retirement saving behavior yet there is limited research on who is most affected by defaults and whether this varies based on features of the choice environment. Using administrative data on employer-sponsored retirement accounts linked to survey data, we estimate the relationship between retirement saving choices and individual characteristics – long-term discounting, present bias, financial literacy, and exponential growth bias – under two distinct choice environments: an opt-in regime and an auto-enrollment regime. Consistent with our conceptual model, we find that the determinants of following the default and contribution behavior are regime-specific. Under the opt-in regime, financial literacy plays an important role in predicting total contributions, active saving choices, and maxing out contributions in the tax-preferred account. In contrast, under the auto-enrollment regime, present bias is the most significant behavioral predictor of contribution behavior. A causal interpretation of the estimates suggests that auto-enrollment increases saving primarily among those with low financial literacy.

This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use available geographic data to account for the fact that families can cross arbitrary administrative boundaries, such as census tract or ZIP code lines, and thus better reflect the real experiences of families than conventional area-based measures. Combining synthetic family locations simulated from Census demographic and geographic data and information on ECE provider locations, we calculate travel time between the locations of families with young children and ECE providers to measure families’ access to providers of different types. The results yield a map of areas with low and high relative ECE access. The average family in Minnesota lives in a location where there are nearly two children for every nearby slot of licensed capacity, however, access to ECE supply varies considerably at the local level. The supply measure can also serve as a weight useful in computing family-centered measures of ECE quality and access costs, incorporating both prices and travel costs, to further characterize the local ECE market from the perspective of families. Improving the measures of variation in families’ access to ECE quantity, cost, and quality is valuable as policymakers consider expansions to public supports for early learning and ECE entrepreneurs decide where to invest.

In a nationally-representative sample, we predict retirement savings using survey- based elicitations of exponential-growth bias (EGB) and present bias (PB). We find that EGB, the tendency to neglect compounding, and PB, the tendency to value the present over the future, are highly significant and economically meaningful predictors of retirement savings. These relationships hold controlling for cognitive ability, financial literacy, and a rich set of demographic controls. We address measurement error as a potential confound and explore mechanisms through which these biases may operate. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that eliminating EGB and PB would increase retirement savings by approximately 12 percent.

The Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) was designed to promote the development of low-birth weight (up to 2,500 grams) and premature (up to 37 weeks gestational age) infants. There is evidence that the IHDP intervention, a randomly-assigned bundle of services including primarily free, high-quality child care from 12 to 36 months, boosted cognitive and behavioral outcomes by the time participants at the end of the intervention. The literature has established that the intervention was more effective among the subsample of heavier low birth weight (2,000-2,500 grams) than among those born lighter. Among the heavier group, it was more effective for children from lower-income families. Families who participated in the intervention were diverse in key observable characteristics like income, race or ethnicity. In addition, families reallocated their time in different ways when then had the opportunity to use the free services provided by the IHDP. The goal of this paper is to understand the economic decisions and constraints faced by households who gained access to the IHDP and explain their differential behavior. In order to do so, we propose an economic model, construct measures of theoretically-relevant drivers of postnatal investment decisions, and explore patterns of heterogeneity in parental response and child development along these dimensions.