Essays in Labor and Public Economics

Abstract

This dissertation examines how institutional policies and labor market frictions affect human capital formation, employment outcomes, and economic mobility across generations. The three essays explore distinct but interconnected aspects of how families and workers navigate constraints in education, childcare, and credentialing systems.

The first essay is joint with Jonathan Rothbaum and investigates intergenerational spillovers from parental disability insurance receipt, using linked Census/IRS/SSA administrative data covering over 400,000 families. Using US administrative data, we link dependent children of SSDI recipients to their tax filings at age 25. We document a key descriptive fact, that the income of the child at age 25 is increasing in the age at which the parent receives their first SSDI transfer. We show that the probability that a child themselves receives an SSDI transfer as an adult is decreasing on the same margin; however, the pattern persists in the sample of children who do not receive such transfers. We build a model to show that these facts are consistent with a "lost-years" mechanism by which children whose parents become resource constrained earlier in life lose more years of costly intergenerational human capital investment.

The second essay examines firms' decisions to remove bachelor's degree requirements from job postings and the subsequent hiring outcomes. By tracking within-role requirements over time, I identify instances where employers have explicitly removed bachelor's degree prerequisites from job advertisements. Linking these changes to aggregated resume data, I analyze whether individuals subsequently hired have different educational credentials, alternative qualifications, or experiential backgrounds. After the removal of degree requirements, the share of individuals hired with a degree falls by 1-3 p.p. Concurrently, the share of people hired that report a non-degree credential is roughly unchanged, and the average years of labor market experience possessed by a candidate increases by 0.5 years. I detail a simple model explaining why firms may be motivated to remove degree requirements and substitute them with other screening mechanisms. To address potential endogeneity concerns, I employ an instrumental variable approach, exploiting staggered state-level policy shifts in the removal of degree requirements from public sector employment, which act as an information treatment to firms. I also show that these firm-level and state-level policy changes are broadly uncorrelated with local labor market conditions.

The third essay is joint with Maya Bidanda and analyzes how childcare access affects parents' choice between wage employment and self-employment. In this paper, we exploit variation in subsidized Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) to understand how access to childcare impacts mothers’ propensity for self-employment and formal work. We find that mothers of children who are too young for school are more likely to be self-employed and less likely to be in formal work than mothers of older children. We do not find similar trends for fathers. In addition, access to low-cost childcare increases the likelihood for formal work and decreases the likelihood of self-employment. This is evidence that mothers are pushed into self-employment due to frictions or barriers in formal work when childcare is not available. In the last part of the paper we discuss the impact of these patterns on mothers' lifetime income.