How skills and training can be improved to enhance the job prospects of low-wage workers remains an important issue. Conservatives have argued that job training is ineffective, whereas progressives have focused on raising earnings through changes in labor market standards—minimum and living wages and efforts to revitalize employment law by addressing issues such as mis-classification and outsourcing. Economist Paul Osterman will write a book that examines training programs for low-wage workers.
The General Social Survey has consistently found in four national surveys since 2002 that about a fifth of U.S. adult workers report having employee equity in the companies where they are employed. Existing studies also find that employee owners generally have lower turnover and absenteeism, more company pride and loyalty, greater willingness to work hard, greater access to information and participation in decision making, and more control over their work-life balance. There is also evidence that employee share ownership is associated with higher market-level pay and benefits.
Additive manufacturing technology, also known as 3D printing, emerged in the 1980s, but during the past decade the use of additive manufacturing in production of parts and finished goods has grown rapidly. This emerging technology is expected to transform the location of production, supply chains, transportation systems, the look and feel of products, and organizations. Economists Avner Ben-Ner and Ainhoa Urtasun-Alonso will examine differences in tasks and skills of core production employees—engineers, technicians and operators—in additive manufacturing and traditional manufacturing jobs.
Recent studies have found that transferring income to disadvantaged families improves outcomes for children, including cognitive development, socio‐behavioral development, and educational attainment. For example, an extra $1000 from the Earned Income Tax Credit has been shown to improve child test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation. However, one income source that has received little attention are Social Security benefits, for which the number of child beneficiaries has been increasing.
The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program is HUD’s largest low-income housing subsidy program, aiding 2.2 million households. It provides subsidies for renting units on the private market, with the goal of improving access to stable, affordable housing and neighborhoods that have greater opportunities for upward mobility. However, the program too often fails to provide recipients with meaningful choices in housing and neighborhoods, and many recipients cannot find a landlord who will accept their vouchers.
Many researchers and policymakers have expressed concerns that new technologies will lower the effective cost of capital and lead firms to replace workers with machines, especially those with limited skills. Will increasing capital accumulation increase inequality between skilled and unskilled workers? Does capital investment increase employment or leads firms to substitute between capital and labor? Suárez Serrato, Curtis and Ohrn will study the effects of capital investments on worker outcomes.
In recent decades, U.S. manufacturing employment has declined sharply, leading to a reduction in middle-income jobs and resulting in earnings losses for many displaced workers.
Economists Sari Kerr and Kristin Butcher will examine the effects of paid family leave on firm and worker outcomes. They will utilize employer-household panel data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database and analyze the extent to which paid leave policy alters the earnings gap between men and women, and if there is a net cost or benefit to the firm from providing such policies.
Co-funded with the W. K.
Behavioral economist Linda Babcock and a team of three psychologists will investigate the impact of stereotype threat on college students’ decision making that can lead to educational disparities across categories such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. They will examine how stereotype threat impacts students’ attitudes toward risk (risk aversion), how students weigh losses versus gains in evaluating risky situations (loss aversion), and how they spend their time on activities where the benefits will accrue now versus in the future (present bias).