Full Citation
Title: Three Essays on the Employment Effects of Policy Decisions
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2019
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: Public policy decisions designed to address a public need frequently have secondary effects, especially on hard-to-predict employment outcomes. In this dissertation, I study three laws or groups of laws and the effects they have on labor-related outcomes. Economic theory proposes that laws increasing the minimum wage should increase employment discrimination. Employers theoretically have longer queues of job applicants, allowing them to exercise their biases in hiring decisions. In Chapter 1, I exploit the wide variation in state minimum wage rates since 2005 to estimate the effect on discrimination, using 4.8 million allegations from publicly unavailable administrative data provided by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. I find overall discrimination allegations do increase with minimum wage changes. Higher rates of discrimination filings are driven by private sector firms; by allegations of firings and promotions; by alleged violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act; and in states where discrimination reporting is already common. Consistent with human capital theory, age discrimination allegations do not statistically significantly increase following minimum wage changes.... In Chapter 1, I exploit the wide variation in state minimum wage rates since 2005 to estimate the effect on discrimination, using 4.8 million allegations from publicly unavailable administrative data provided by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission... In Chapter 2, I study the effects of wage floors on labor force participation, providing a new method of estimating labor supply elasticity... Using BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and a triple-differences approach, in Chapter 3 I examine the employment effects of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, a policy that led to millions of newly-insured Americans. Exploiting differences among states’ participation and variation in federal aid they received, I find that the wide expansion of Medicaid insurance led to only small increases in employment rates across the health care and health insurance industries and a moderate 8.5% increase in jobs among home care providers. This small result was robust to a number of adjustments to my analysis and consistent with existing stimulus research.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Treacy, Paul, C
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department: Public Policy
Advisor: Jeremy Moulton
Degree: Ph.D.
Publisher Location: North Carolina
Pages: 1-139
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Population Data Science, Population Health and Health Systems
Countries: