The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) relies heavily on voluntary compliance with the tax code, but it is unable to collect about $1 trillion per year in taxes owed, $37 billion of which is due to individuals’ not filing returns. Economists Elliott Isaac and James Alm, economic psychologist Matthias Kasper, psychologist Erich Kirchler, and IRS management and program analyst Anne Herlache will examine whether behavioral nudges in IRS outreach can increase federal income filing among non-filers. They will conduct a nationwide field experiment for their study.

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has disrupted most areas of social and economic life, with disproportionate effects on service workers and low-income families. The negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may substantially reduce the financial, economic, social, mental, and physical wellbeing of disadvantaged workers and their families. Economists Sarah Miller, Alex Bartik, and Eva Vivalt, political scientist David Broockman, and social worker and political scientist Elizabeth Rhodes will examine the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income individuals and families.

Over 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, racial and socioeconomic segregation and the lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Voluntary desegregation busing problems aim to alleviate these disparities. The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) is a model desegregation program founded in 1996 in Massachusetts. Economist Elizabeth Setren will examine the impact of METCO on students’ academic outcomes by comparing outcomes among students admitted to METCO and similar students who applied and were not admitted.

Temperature stress – physical stress induced by excessive heat or cold – may affect cognitive performance, labor capacity, and workplace safety, suggesting that climate change might reduce earnings and job quality for many low-skilled workers. Could global warming, therefore, exacerbate economic inequality? And how resistant will companies be to implementing adaptive technologies, such as air conditioning and outdoor cooling stations, that could reduce the impacts of temperature stress? Environmental and labor economist R.

Increased earnings inequality can largely be accounted for by increased variation in the wages paid to similar workers by different companies. These “firm effects” suggest a lack of competition in the labor market and an increase in companies’ ability to dictate terms of employment. Lack of competition in the labor market also reduces wage growth. Economists Laura Giuliano and Arindrajit Dube will examine how companies set wages and why they differ.

In the past three decades, automation has increased enormously and automation has rapidly become one of the most debated political and economic issues in many countries. Despite rising interest in the topic, little is known about the causes and consequences of automation on individual companies and individual workers. Economists Sydnee Caldwell and Marco Tabellini will examine the effects of automation on workers’ employment trajectories and their political behaviors.

Slow wage growth and growing wage inequality are two major economic policy issues. One possible explanation is that declining unionization and the weakening of labor market institutions, such as minimum wage and employment protection regulation, contribute to these problems. A complementary explanation is that the consolidation of market power among a few large companies has reduced worker compensation.

Many studies have documented inconsistencies in judicial behavior. For example, federal appeals court judges become more politicized before elections and more unified during war time. Refugee asylum judges are two percentage points more likely to deny asylum to refugees if their previous decision granted asylum. Economists Daniel L. Chen and Elliott Ash will examine biases in human decision-making, focusing on judges and physicians. They will measure biases through 1) appeals and their outcomes for asylum and circuit court judges and 2) malpractice claims and their outcomes for physicians.

Although studies of job postings and the skills and knowledge needed for occupations have described the supply and demand side of the job market, few studies have assessed what skills are taught to college students and how they impact job market outcomes. Computational social scientist Morgan Frank and economist Sarah Bana will use a novel dataset of three million university course syllabi to examine skills taught in courses over the last decade.