Works in progress

Job Loss, Earnings, and Crime: Evidence from Administrative Data
Submitted

I use administrative records on criminal activity linked to unemployment insurance wage data to study earnings, job loss, and crime. Focusing on ex-offenders, I find arrest risk increases 40% immediately after job loss in a mass layoff, with effects concentrated in property crimes and domestic violence. Panel regressions estimated using coworkers’ earnings and employment as instruments yield similar results and a quarterly offending-income elasticity of -0.1. Analysis of seasonal patterns in crime and regression kink estimates of offending rates around maximum unemployment insurance benefit thresholds confirm that income losses are an important mechanism, consistent with Becker/Ehrlich rational models.

Does Banning the Box Help Ex-Offenders Get Jobs? Evaluating the Effects of a Prominent Example
Submitted; Online appendix

I evaluate a 2013 “ban the box” (BTB) ordinance passed in Seattle, WA, that bars employers from asking prospective hires about their criminal records until after an initial screening. I first use a statistical discrimination model to show that although BTB must have opposite effects on individuals with and without records, employment effects on demographic groups with high record shares are ambiguous. I then test whether Seattle’s law affected individuals with records using administrative earnings data for 300,000 ex-offenders. I find that BTB had no impact on ex-offenders’ employment or wages, regardless of their race, across multiple difference-in-differences specifications.

Published work

The Rise and Fall of Female Labor Force Participation During World War II in the United States
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September 2018); Online appendix

I use new data on employment and job placements during WWII to characterize the wartime surge in female work and its subsequent impact on female employment in the United States. The geography of female wartime work was primarily driven by industrial mobilization, not drafted men’s withdrawal from local labor markets. After the war, returning veterans and sharp cutbacks in war-related industries displaced many new female entrants, despite interest in continued work. As a result, areas most exposed to wartime work show limited overall effects on female labor force participation in 1950 and only marginal increases in durables manufacturing employment.