David Neumark

David Neumark

About David Neumark

David Neumark (born July 7, 1959) is an American economist and a Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine.

Neumark graduated with a B.A. in economics in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, with Honors. He went on to complete his M.A. in 1985 and Ph.D. in 1987 in economics from Harvard University. His fields were labor economics and econometrics, and his dissertation was entitled Male-Female Differentials in the Labor Force: Measurement, Causes and Probes, and published in parts in the Journal of Human Resources.

From 1989 to 1994, Neumark was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He became a professor at Michigan State University in 1994 and remained at MSU until 2004. Since 2005, he has been a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

Neumark’s research interests include minimum wages and living wages, affirmative action, sex differences in labor markets, the economics of aging, and school-to-work programs. He has also done work in demography, health economics, development, industrial organization, and finance.

His work has been published in economics journals like the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. He is currently the editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Policy and a co-editor of the Journal of Urban Economics. A list of his citations can be found on Google Scholar.

Books

Although there is great debate about how work is changing, there is a clear consensus that changes are fundamental and ongoing. The Changing Nature of Work examines the evidence for change in the world of work. The committee provides a clearly illustrated framework for understanding changes in work and these implications for analyzing the structure of occupations in both the civilian and military sectors.

This volume explores the increasing demographic diversity of the workforce, the fluidity of boundaries between lines of work, the interdependent choices for how work is structured-and ultimately, the need for an integrated systematic approach to understanding how work is changing. The book offers a rich array of data and highlighted examples on:

-Markets, technology, and many other external conditions affecting the nature of work.
-Research findings on American workers and how they feel about work.
-Downsizing and the trend toward flatter organizational hierarchies.
-Autonomy, complexity, and other aspects of work structure.

The committee reviews the evolution of occupational analysis and examines the effectiveness of the latest systems in characterizing current and projected changes in civilian and military work. The occupational structure and changing work requirements in the Army are presented as a case study.

Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance (multiple co-authors), 1999, The
Changing Nature of Work: Implications for Occupational Analysis (Washington, DC: National
Academy Press).

Holzer and Neumark collect journal articles from 1976 through 2000 on affirmative action, narrowly construed as targeting contractors and broadly construed as encompassing many anti- discrimination efforts. Articles look at affirmative action in the labor mark.

Holzer, Harry J, and David Neumark. 2004. The Economics Of Affirmative Action. Cheltenham, UK: E. Elgar.

As anxieties about America’s economic competitiveness mounted in the 1980s, so too did concerns that the nation’s schools were not adequately preparing young people for the modern workplace. Spurred by widespread joblessness and job instability among young adults, the federal government launched ambitious educational reforms in the 1990s to promote career development activities for students. In recent years, however, the federal government has shifted its focus to test-based reforms like No Child Left Behind that emphasize purely academic subjects. At this critical juncture in education reform, Improving School-To-Work Transitions, edited by David Neumark, weighs the successes and failures of the ’90s-era school-to-work initiatives, and assesses how high schools, colleges, and government can help youths make a smoother transition into stable, well-paying employment. Drawing on evidence from national longitudinal studies, surveys, interviews, and case studies, the contributors to Improving School-To-Work Transitions offer thought-provoking perspectives on a variety of aspects of the school-to-work problem. Deborah Reed, Christopher Jepsen, and Laura Hill emphasize the importance of focusing school-to-work programs on the diverse needs of different demographic groups, particularly immigrants, who represent a growing proportion of the youth population. David Neumark and Donna Rothstein investigate the impact of school-to-work programs on the “forgotten half,” students at the greatest risk of not attending college. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they find that participation by these students in programs like job shadowing, mentoring, and summer internships raise employment and college attendance rates among men and earnings among women. In a study of nine high schools with National Academy Foundation career academies, Terry Orr and her fellow researchers find that career academy participants are more engaged in school and are more likely to attend a four-year college than their peers. Nan Maxwell studies the skills demanded in entry-level jobs and finds that many supposedly “low-skilled” jobs actually demand extensive skills in reading, writing, and math, as well as the “new basic skills” of communication and problem-solving. Maxwell recommends that school districts collaborate with researchers to identify which skills are most in demand in their local labor markets. At a time when test-based educational reforms are making career development programs increasingly vulnerable, it is worth examining the possibilities and challenges of integrating career-related learning into the school environment. Written for educators, policymakers, researchers, and anyone concerned about how schools are shaping the economic opportunities of young people, Improving School-To-Work Transitions provides an authoritative guide to a crucial issue in education reform.

Neumark, David, Ed., 2007, Improving School-to-Work Transitions (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).

Minimum wages exist in more than one hundred countries, both industrialized and developing. The United States passed a federal minimum wage law in 1938 and has increased the minimum wage and its coverage at irregular intervals ever since; in addition, as of the beginning of 2008, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia had established a minimum wage higher than the federal level, and numerous other local jurisdictions had in place "living wage" laws. Over the years, the minimum wage has been popular with the public, controversial in the political arena, and the subject of vigorous debate among economists over its costs and benefits.

In this book, David Neumark and William Wascher offer a comprehensive overview of the evidence on the economic effects of minimum wages. Synthesizing nearly two decades of their own research and reviewing other research that touches on the same questions, Neumark and Wascher discuss the effects of minimum wages on employment and hours, the acquisition of skills, the wage and income distributions, longer-term labor market outcomes, prices, and the aggregate economy.

Arguing that the usual focus on employment effects is too limiting, they present a broader, empirically based inquiry that will better inform policymakers about the costs and benefits of the minimum wage. Based on their comprehensive reading of the evidence, Neumark and Wascher argue that minimum wages do not achieve the main goals set forth by their supporters. They reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers and tend to reduce their earnings; they are not an effective means of reducing poverty; and they appear to have adverse longer-term effects on wages and earnings, in part by reducing the acquisition of human capital. The authors argue that policymakers should instead look for other tools to raise the wages of low-skill workers and to provide poor families with an acceptable standard of living.

Neumark, David, and William L Wascher. 2010. Minimum Wages. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

In recent years, a flurry of reports on downsizing, outsourcing, and flexible staffing have created the impression that stable, long-term jobs are a thing of the past. According to conventional wisdom, workers can no longer count on building a career with a single employer, and job security is a rare prize. While there is no shortage of striking anecdotes to fuel these popular beliefs, reliable evidence is harder to come by. Researchers have yet to determine whether we are witnessing a sustained, economy-wide decline in the stability of American jobs, or merely a momentary rupture confined to a few industries and a few classes of workers. On the Job launches a concerted effort to reconcile the conflicting evidence about job stability and security. The book examines the labor force as a whole, not merely the ousted middle managers who have attracted the most publicity. It looks at the situation of women as well as men, young workers as well as old, and workers on part-time, non-standard, or temporary work schedules. The evidence suggests that long-serving managers and professionals suffered an unaccustomed loss of job security in the 1990s, but there is less evidence of change for younger, newer recruits. The authors bring our knowledge of the labor market up to date, connecting current conditions in the labor market with longer-term trends that have evolved over the past two decades. They find that layoffs in the early 1990s disrupted the implicit contract between employers and staff, but it is too soon to declare a permanent revolution in the employment relationship. Having identified the trends, the authors seek to explain them and to examine their possible consequences. If the bonds between employee and employer are weakening, who stands to benefit? Frequent job-switching can be a sign of success for a worker, if each job provides a stepping stone to something better, but research in this book shows that workers gained less from changing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s than in earlier decades. The authors also evaluate the third-party intermediaries, such as temporary help agencies, which profit from the new flexibility in the matching of workers and employers. Besides opening up new angles on the evidence, the authors mark out common ground and pin-point those areas where gaps in our knowledge remain and popular belief runs ahead of reliable evidence. On the Job provides an authoritative basis for spotting the trends and interpreting the fall-out as U.S. employers and employees rethink the terms of their relationship.

Neumark, David, Ed., 2000, On the Job: Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).

Sex differences abound in labor markets. In the United States three differences in particular have attracted the most attention: the earnings gap, occupational segregation, and the greater responsibility of women for child care and housework, and consequential lower participation in the labor market. This volume brings together David Neumark's work of the past fifteen years: in it he tries to understand and analyze the relative importance of family economic decision-making and sex discrimination in generating sex differences in labor markets. Neumark's research covers three main levels of inquiry. The first studies non-discriminatory sources of sex differences in labor markets; the second grapples with the problem of sex discrimination; while the third evaluates policies to combat and reduce sex differences in labor markets.

Neumark, David, 2004, Sex Differences in Labor Markets (U.K.: Routledge).

Publications

Policy changes intended to delay retirements of older workers and extend their work lives may run up against barriers owing to rising physical challenges of work as people age. We examine whether physical challenges at work influence employment transitions of older male workers in the age range for which public policy is trying to extend work lives and whether older male workers are able to mitigate these challenges while still remaining employed. The evidence indicates that physical challenges pose a barrier to extending work lives, although some older male workers with physically demanding jobs are able to mitigate these demands—either at new jobs or with the same employer. Our findings suggest that greater accommodation of physical challenges faced by older workers would likely increase the success of policies intended to induce later retirement.

McLaughlin, Joanne Song, and David Neumark, 2018, “Barriers to Later Retirement for Men: Physical Challenges at Work and Increases in the Full Retirement Age,” Research on Aging, pp. 232-56.

Rent extraction by public sector workers may be limited by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet. But rent extraction may be higher in regions where high amenities mute the migration response. This paper develops a theoretical model that predicts such a link between public sector wage differentials and local amenities, and the predictions are tested by analyzing variation in these differentials and amenities across states. Public sector wage differentials are, in fact, larger in the presence of high amenities, with the effect stronger for unionized public sector workers, whose political power may allow greater scope for rent extraction.

Brueckner, Jan, and David Neumark, 2014, “Beaches, Sunshine, and Public-Sector Pay: Theory and
Evidence on Amenities and Rent Extraction by Government Workers,” American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy, pp. 198-230.

"Business climate indexes" characterize state economic policies, and are often used to try to influence economic policy debate. However, they are also useful in research as summaries of a large number of state policies that cannot be studied simultaneously. Prior research found that business climate indexes focused on productivity and quality of life do not predict economic growth, while indexes emphasizing taxes and costs of doing business indicate that low-tax, low-cost states have faster growth of employment, wages, and output. In this paper, we study the relationship between these two categories of business climate indexes and the promotion of equality or inequality. We do not find that the productivity/quality-of-life indexes predict more equitable outcomes, although some of the policies underlying them suggest they might. We do find, however, that the same tax-and-cost related indexes that are associated with higher economic growth are also associated with increases in inequality.

Neumark, David, and Jennifer Muz, 2016, “The ‘Business Climate’ and Economic Inequality,” Review of Income and Wealth, pp. 161-80.

We explore the decline in teen employment in the United States since 2000, which was sharpest for those age 16–17. We consider three explanatory factors: a rising minimum wage that could reduce employment opportunities for teens and potentially increase the value of investing in schooling; rising returns to schooling; and increasing competition from immigrants that, like the minimum wage, could reduce employment opportunities and raise the returns to human capital investment. We find that higher minimum wages are the predominant factor explaining changes in the schooling and workforce behavior of those age 16–17 since 2000. We also consider implications for human capital. Higher minimum wages have led both to fewer teens in school and employed at the same time, and to more teens in school but not employed, which is potentially consistent with a greater focus on schooling. We find no evidence that higher minimum wages have led to greater human capital investment. If anything, the evidence points to adverse effects on longer-run earnings for those exposed to these higher minimum wages as teenagers.

Neumark, David, and Cortnie Shupe, 2019, “Declining Teen Employment: Minimum Wages, Other Explanations, and Implications for Human Capital Investment,” Labour Economics, pp. 49-68.

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However, Heckman and Siegelman (1993) show that group differences in the variance of unobservable determinants of productivity can still generate spurious evidence of discrimination in either direction. This paper shows how to recover an unbiased estimate of discrimination when the correspondence study includes variation in applicant characteristics that affect hiring. The method is applied to actual data and assessed using Monte Carlo methods.

Neumark, David, 2012, “Detecting Evidence of Discrimination in Audit and Correspondence Studies,”
Journal of Human Resources, pp. 1128-57.

We examine whether stronger age discrimination laws at the state level moderated the impact of the Great Recession on older workers. We use a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences strategy to compare older and younger workers, in states with stronger and weaker laws, before, during, and after the Great Recession. We find very little evidence that stronger age discrimination protections helped older workers weather the Great Recession, relative to younger workers. The evidence sometimes points in the opposite direction, with stronger state age discrimination protections associated with more adverse effects of the Great Recession on older workers. We suggest that during an experience such as the Great Recession, severe labor market disruptions make it difficult to discern discrimination, weakening the effects of stronger state age discrimination protections. Alternatively, higher termination costs associated with stronger age discrimination protections may do more to deter hiring when future product and labor demand is highly uncertain.

Neumark, David, and Patrick Button, 2014, “Did Age Discrimination Protections Help Older Workers
Weather the Great Recession?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 566-601.

We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods to improve upon evaluations of the effectiveness of state enterprise zones, focusing on California's program. Because zone boundaries do not follow census tracts or zip codes, we created digitized maps of original zone boundaries and later expansions. We combine these maps with geocoded observations on most businesses located in California. The evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase employment. We also find no shift of employment toward the lower-wage workers targeted by enterprise zone incentives. We conclude that the program is ineffective in achieving its primary goals.

Neumark, David, and Jed Kolko, 2010, “Do Enterprise Zones Create Jobs? Evidence from California’s
Enterprise Zone Program,” Journal of Urban Economics, pp. 1-19.

There have been over 80 field experiments on traditional dimensions of discrimination in labor and housing markets since 2000, in 23 countries. These studies nearly always find evidence of discrimination against minorities. However, the estimates of discrimination in these studies can be biased if there is differential variation in the unobservable determinants of productivity or quality of majority and minority groups, so it is possible that this experimental literature as a whole overstates the evidence of discrimination. We re-assess the evidence from the 10 existing studies of discrimination that have sufficient information to correct for this bias. For the housing market studies, the estimated effect of discrimination is robust to this correction. For the labor market studies, in contrast, the evidence is less robust, as just over half of the estimates of discrimination either fall to near zero, become statistically insignificant, or change sign.

Neumark, David, and Judith Rich, 2019, “Do Field Experiments on Labor and Housing Markets Overstate Discrimination? A Re-examination of the Evidence,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, pp. 223-52

We test for evidence of spatial, residence-based labor market networks. Turnover is lower for workers more connected to their neighbors generally and more connected to neighbors of the same race or ethnic group. Both results are consistent with networks producing better job matches, while the latter could also reflect preferences for working with neighbors of the same race or ethnicity. For earnings, we find a robust positive effect of the overall residence-based network measure, whereas we usually find a negative effect of the same-group measure, suggesting that the overall network measure reflects productivity-enhancing positive network effects, while the same-group measure may capture a non-wage amenity.

Hellerstein, Judith K., Mark Kutzbach, and David Neumark, 2014, “Do Labor Market Networks Have An
Important Spatial Dimension?” Journal of Urban Economics, pp. 39-58.

We estimate the effect of opioid prescriptions on the duration of temporary disability benefits among workers with work‐related low‐back injuries, based on variation in local opioid prescribing patterns, which predict whether injured workers receive opioid prescriptions. More longer term opioid prescribing leads to considerably lengthier durations of temporary disability.

Savych, Bogdan, David Neumark, and Randy Lea, 2019, “Do Opioids Help Injured Workers Recover and Get Back to Work? The Impact of Opioid Prescriptions on Duration of Temporary Disability Benefits,” Industrial Relations, pp. 549-90.

We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy, but Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this conclusion was flawed, and based on improved methods and using data for the manufacturing sector they concluded that there was no relationship between establishment size and net job creation. Using the NETS data, we examine evidence for the overall economy, as well as for different sectors. The results indicate that small establishments and small firms create more jobs, on net, although the difference is much smaller than what is suggested by Birch's methods. However, the negative relationship between establishment size and job creation is much less clear for the manufacturing sector, which may explain some of the earlier findings contradicting Birch's conclusions.

Neumark, David, Brandon Wall, and Junfu Zhang, 2011, “Do Small Businesses Create More Jobs? New
Evidence from the National Establishment Time Series,” Review of Economics and Statistics, pp. 16-
29

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase employment. However, the evidence also suggests that the enterprise zone program has a more favorable effect on employment in zones that have a lower share of manufacturing and in zones where managers report doing more marketing and outreach activities. On the other hand, devoting more effort to helping firms get hiring tax credits reduces or eliminates any positive employment effects, which may be attributable to idiosyncrasies of California's enterprise zone program during the period we study.

Kolko, Jed, and David Neumark, 2010, “Do Some Enterprise Zones Create Jobs?” Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management, pp. 5-38.

We provide evidence from a field experiment in all 50 states on age discrimination in hiring for retail sales jobs. We relate measured age discrimination – the difference in callback rates between old and young applicants – to state variation in anti-discrimination laws protecting older workers. Anti-discrimination laws could boost hiring, although they could have the unintended consequence of deterring hiring if their main effect is to increase termination costs. We find some evidence that there is less discrimination against older men and women in states where age discrimination law allows larger damages, and some evidence that there is lower discrimination against older women in states where disability discrimination law allows larger damages. But this evidence is not robust to all of the estimations we consider. However, we reach a robust conclusion that stronger or broader laws protecting older workers from discrimination do not have the unintended consequence of deterring their hiring.

Neumark, David, Ian Burn, Patrick Button, and Nanneh Chehras, 2019, “Do State Laws Protecting Older
Workers from Discrimination Reduce Age Discrimination in Hiring? Evidence from a Field
Experiment,” Journal of Law and Economics, pp. 373-402.

Supply-side Social Security reforms intended to increase employment and delay benefit claiming among older individuals may be frustrated by age discrimination. We test for policy complementarities between these reforms and demand-side efforts to deter age discrimination, specifically studying whether stronger state-level age discrimination protections enhanced the impact of the 1983 Social Security reforms that increased the Full Retirement Age (FRA) and reduced benefits. The evidence indicates that, for older individuals for whom early retirement benefits fell and the FRA increased, stronger state age discrimination protections were associated with delayed benefit claiming and increases in employment, with benefit claiming pushed from 65 to the new FRA, and increased employment after age 62 and age 65 that is then curtailed at the new FRA.

Neumark, David, and Joanne Song, 2013, “Do Stronger Age Discrimination Laws Make Social Security
Reforms More Effective?” Journal of Public Economics, pp. 1-16.

The authors estimate the effects of the interactions between the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and minimum wages on labor market outcomes. They use information on policy variation from the Department of Labor's Monthly Labor Review, reports published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and data on individuals and families from the Current Population Survey to assess the economic impact of minimum wages and the EITC on families. Their results indicate that for single women with children, the EITC boosts employment and earnings, and coupling the EITC with a higher minimum wage enhances this positive effect. Conversely, for less-skilled minority men and for women without children, employment and earnings are more adversely affected by the EITC when the minimum wage is higher. Turning from individuals to families, for very poor families with children a higher minimum wage increases the positive impact of the EITC on incomes, so that a higher minimum wage appears to enhance the effects of the EITC. Whether the policy combination of a high EITC and a high minimum wage is viewed as favorable or unfavorable depends in part on whom policymakers are trying to help.

Neumark, David, and William Wascher, 2011,“Does a Higher Minimum Wage Enhance the Effectiveness of the Earned Income Tax Credit?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, pp. 712-46.

Reductions in the implicit taxation of Social Security benefits from reducing or eliminating the earnings test are an appealing means of encouraging labor supply of older individuals. The downside, however, is that the same policy reforms can encourage earlier claiming of Social Security benefits, which permanently lowers a recipient’s benefits in the future. Depending on the magnitude of the effects on earnings and how households or individuals adjust their consumption and saving, the net effect can be lower incomes at ages well beyond retirement. We explore the consequences of the 2000 reforms eliminating the earnings test from the Full Retirement Age to age 69 for the longer-run evolution of income and poverty of older individuals, especially women.

Figinski, Theodore, and David Neumark, 2018, “Does Eliminating the Earnings Test Increase Old-Age Poverty of Women?” Research on Aging, pp. 27-53.

Employment-contingent health insurance may create incentives for ill workers to remain employed at a sufficient level (usually full-time) to maintain access to health insurance coverage. We study employed married women, comparing the labor supply responses to new breast cancer diagnoses of women dependent on their own employment for health insurance with the responses of women who are less dependent on their own employment for health insurance, because of actual or potential access to health insurance through their spouse's employer. We find evidence that women who depend on their own job for health insurance reduce their labor supply by less after a diagnosis of breast cancer. In the estimates that best control for unobservables associated with health insurance status, the hours reduction for women who continue to work is 8 to 11% smaller. Women's subjective responses to questions about working more to maintain health insurance are consistent with the conclusions from observed behavior.

Bradley, Cathy J., David Neumark, and Scott Barkowski, 2013, “Does Employer-Provided Health
Insurance Constrain Labor Supply Adjustments to Health Shocks? New Evidence on Women
Diagnosed with Breast Cancer,” Journal of Health Economics, pp. 833-49.

We assess a prominent argument for local economic policies that favor locally-owned businesses – namely, that locally-owned firms are more likely to internalize the costs to the community of decisions to reduce employment and hence help to insulate cities from adverse economic shocks. We test this argument by examining how establishment-level employment responses to economic shocks are affected by establishment ownership. We find evidence that some types of local ownership do insulate regions from economic shocks, although the clearest benefits do not come from small, independent businesses, but instead from corporate headquarters and, to a lesser extent, from small, locally-owned chains.

Kolko, Jed, and David Neumark, 2010, “Does Local Business Ownership Insulate Cities from Economic
Shocks?” Journal of Urban Economics, pp. 103-15.

We explore the effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of older workers. A concern with antidiscrimination laws is that they may reduce hiring by raising the cost of terminations and-in the specific case of disability discrimination laws-raising the cost of employment because of the need to accommodate disabled workers. Moreover, disability discrimination laws can affect nondisabled older workers because they are fairly likely to develop work-related disabilities, but are generally not protected by these laws. Using state variation in disability discrimination protections, we find little or no evidence that stronger disability discrimination laws lower the hiring of nondisabled older workers. We similarly find no evidence of adverse effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of disabled older workers.

Neumark, David, Joanne Song, and Patrick Button, 2017, “Does Protecting Older Workers from
Discrimination Make It Harder to Get Hired? Evidence from Disability Discrimination Laws,”
Research on Aging, pp. 29-63.

I discuss the econometrics and the economics of past research on the effects of minimum wages on employment in the United States. My intent is to try to identify key questions raised in the recent literature, and some from the earlier literature, which I think hold the most promise for understanding the conflicting evidence and arriving at a more definitive answer about the employment effects of minimum wages. My secondary goal is to discuss how we can narrow the range of uncertainty about the likely effects of the large minimum wage increases becoming more prevalent in the United States. I discuss some insights from both theory and past evidence that may be informative about the effects of high minimum wages, and try to emphasize what research can be done now and in the near future to provide useful evidence to policymakers on the results of the coming high minimum wage experiment, whether in the United States or in other countries.

Neumark, David, 2019, “The Econometrics and Economics of the Employment Effects of Minimum Wages: Getting from Known Unknowns to Known Knowns,” German Economic Review, 293-329.

We conducted a randomized controlled trial, enrolling low-income uninsured adults in Virginia (United States), to determine whether cash incentives are effective at encouraging a primary care provider (PCP) visit, and at lowering utilization and costs. Subjects were randomized to four groups: untreated controls, and one of three incentive arms with incentives of $0, $25, or $50 for visiting a PCP within six months of group assignment. We used the exogenous variation generated by the experiment to obtain causal evidence on the effects of a PCP visit. We observed modest reductions in non-urgent emergency department visits and increased outpatient visits, but no reductions in overall costs. These findings in utilization are consistent with the expectation that PCPs offer an alternative to the emergency department for non-emergent conditions. Total costs did not decline because any savings from avoiding the emergency department were offset by increased outpatient utilization.

Bradley, Cathy, David Neumark, and Lauryn Saxe Walker, 2018, “The Effect of Primary Care Visits on
Other Health Care Utilization: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Cash Incentives Offered to Low
Income, Uninsured Adults in Virginia,” Journal of Health Economics, pp. 121-33.

Employment-contingent health insurance (ECHI) has been criticized for tying insurance to continued employment. Our research sheds light on two central issues regarding employment-contingent health insurance: whether such insurance "locks" people who experience a health shock into remaining at work; and whether it puts people at risk for insurance loss upon the onset of illness, because health shocks pose challenges to continued employment. We study how men's dependence on their own employer for health insurance affects labor supply responses and health insurance coverage following a health shock. We use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) surveys from 1996 through 2008 to observe employment and health insurance status at interviews 2 years apart, and whether a health shock occurred in the intervening period between the interviews. All employed married men with health insurance either through their own employer or their spouse's employer, interviewed in at least two consecutive HRS waves with non-missing data on employment, insurance, health, demographic, and other variables, and under age 64 at the second interview are included in the study sample. We then limited the sample to men who were initially healthy. Our analytical sample consisted of 1,582 men of whom 1,379 had ECHI at the first interview, while 203 were covered by their spouse's employer. Hospitalization affected 209 men with ECHI and 36 men with spouse insurance. A new disease diagnosis was reported by 103 men with ECHI and 22 men with other insurance. There were 171 men with ECHI and 25 men with spouse employer insurance who had a self-reported health decline. Labor supply response differences associated with ECHI-with men with health shocks and ECHI more likely to continue working-appear to be driven by specific types of health shocks associated with future higher health care costs but not with immediate increases in morbidity that limit continued employment. Men with ECHI who have a self-reported health decline are significantly more likely to lose health insurance than men with insurance through a spouse. With the passage of health care reform, the tendency of men with ECHI as opposed to other sources of insurance to remain employed following a health shock may be diminished, along with the likelihood of losing health insurance.

Bradley, Cathy, David Neumark, and Meryl Motika, 2012, “The Effects of Health Shocks on
Employment and Health Insurance: The Role of Employer-Provided Health Insurance,” International
Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, pp. 253-67.

We provide updated evidence on the effects of living wage laws in U.S. cities, relative to the earlier research covering only the first six or seven years of existence of these laws. There are some challenges to updating the evidence, as the CPS data on which it relies changed geographic coding systems in the mid-2000s. The updated evidence is broadly consistent with the conclusions reached by prior research, including a recent review of that earlier evidence. Living wage laws reduce employment among the least-skilled workers they are intended to help. But they also increase wages for many of them. This implies that living wage laws generate both winners and losers among those affected by them. For broader living wage laws that cover recipients of business or financial assistance from cities, the net effects point to modest reductions in urban poverty.

Neumark, David, Matthew Thompson, and Leslie Koyle, 2012, “The Effects of Living Wage Laws on Low-Wage Workers and Low-Income Families: What Do We Know Now?” IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 1:11 (on-line).

There is a long-standing policy discussion over whether the choice of
health care provider in workers’ compensation cases should be left to
workers or to employers. Workers and their advocates have emphasized the importance of trust between workers and medical providers (Ellenberger, 1992), while employer advocates have argued that employer choice helps ensure that costs of provided care are
reasonable and appropriate (Morrison, 1990). Prior evidence on the effects of provider choice policies on workers’ compensation costs is far from definitive
and is generally rather dated. The recently released
WCRI study The Effects of Provider Choice Policies on Workers’ Compensation Costs provides updated evidence regarding the
relationships between medical and indemnity costs and statutes
concerning control of the choice of provider.

Neumark, David, and Bogdan Savych, 2018, “The Effects of Provider Choice Policies on Workers’
Compensation Costs,” Health Services Research, pp. 5057-77.

State and federal policymakers grappling with the aftermath of the Great Recession sought ways to spur job creation, in many cases adopting hiring credits to encourage employers to create new jobs. However, there is virtually no evidence on the effects of these kinds of counter-recessionary hiring credits – the only evidence coming from much earlier studies of the federal New Jobs Tax Credit in the 1970s. This paper provides evidence on the effects of state hiring credits on job growth. For many of the types of hiring credits we examine we do not find positive effects on job growth. However, some specific types of hiring credits – most notably including those targeting the unemployed, those that allow states to recapture credits when job creation goals are not met, and refundable hiring credits – appear to have succeeded in boosting job growth, more so during the Great Recession period or perhaps recessions generally. At the same time, some credits appear to generate hiring without increasing employment or to generate much more hiring than net employment growth, consistent with these credits leading to churning of employees that raises the costs of producing jobs via hiring credits.

Neumark, David, and Diego Grijalva, 2017, “The Employment Effects of State Hiring Credits,” ILR Review, pp. 1111-45.

This paper revisits an important analysis of enterprise zones (EZs) by Ham et al. (2011), who report substantial poverty reductions from state and federal EZs, as well as improvements in other labor market outcomes. In our re-analysis, we find that a data error accounts for a large share of the estimated impact of state EZs in reducing poverty. More generally, we find that both state and federal EZs appear to be endogenously selected based on prior changes in poverty and other labor market outcomes. Once we account for this selection, much of the evidence that state and federal EZs reduce poverty largely evaporates, as does most of the evidence for other beneficial effects of enterprise zones, with the main exception of some limited evidence for federal Empowerment Zones. Thus, we confirm the more widely-prevailing view that EZs – and especially state EZs – have for the most part been ineffective at reducing urban poverty or improving labor market outcomes in the United States.

Neumark, David, and Timothy Young, 2019, “Enterprise Zones and Poverty: Resolving Conflicting Evidence,” Regional Science and Urban Economics, Vol. 78.

We design and implement a large-scale field experiment on age discrimination to address limitations of past research that may bias their results. One limitation is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which they are applying, to make them "otherwise comparable." The second limitation is ignoring the likelihood of greater variation in unobserved differences among older workers owing to human capital investment. Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against older men.

Neumark, David, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, 2016, “Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and
the Heckman Critique,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, pp. 303-8.

Understanding whether labor market discrimination explains inferior labor market outcomes for many groups has drawn the attention of labor economists for decades— at least since the publication of Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination in 1957. The decades of research on discrimination in labor markets began with a regression-based “decomposition” approach, asking whether raw wage or earnings differences between groups—which might constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination—were in fact attributable to other productivity-related factors. Subsequent
research—responding in large part to limitations of the regression-based approach—moved on to other approaches, such as using firm-level data to estimate both marginal
productivity and wage differentials. In recent years, however, there has been substantial growth in experimental research on labor market discrimination—although the earliest experiments were done decades ago. Some experimental research on labor market discrimination takes place in the lab. But far more of it is done in the field, which makes this particular area of experimental research unique relative to the explosion of experimental economic research more generally. This paper surveys the full range of experimental literature on labor market discrimination, places it in the context of the broader research literature on labor market discrimination, discusses the
experimental literature from many different perspectives (empirical, theoretical, and
policy), and reviews both what this literature has taught us thus far, and what remains to be done.

Neumark, David, 2018, “Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination,” Journal of Economic Literature, pp. 799-866.

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are
more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor stores is significantly increased in jurisdictions where sales tax rates increase. We also find that manufacturing employment is significantly lowered in these jurisdictions. These results suggest that local officials in jurisdictions with higher sales tax rates concentrate on attracting large stores and shopping centers and that their efforts crowd out manufacturing. A rise of one percentage point in a county-level local sales tax rate is predicted to result in 258 additional retail jobs and the loss of 838 manufacturing jobs.

Burnes, Daria, David Neumark, and Michelle White, 2014, “Fiscal Zoning and Sales Taxes: Do Higher
Sales Taxes Lead to More Retailing and Less Manufacturing,” National Tax Journal, 7-50.

The impending retirement of the baby boom cohort represents the first time in the history of the United States that such a large and well-educated group of workers will exit the labor force. This could imply skill shortages in the U.S. economy. We develop near-term labor force projections of the educational demands on the workforce and the supply of workers by education to assess the potential for skill imbalances to emerge. Based on our formal projections, we see little likelihood of skill shortages emerging by the end of this decade. More tentatively, though, skill shortages are more likely as all of the baby boomers retire in later years, and skill shortages are more likely in the near-term in states with large and growing immigrant populations.

Neumark, David, Hans Johnson, and Marisol Cuellar Mejia, 2013, “Future Skill Shortages in the U.S.
Economy?” Economics of Education Review, pp. 151-67.

We study the effects of immigration on the diversity of consumption choices. Data from California in the 1990s indicate that immigration is associated with fewer stand-alone retail stores and a greater number of large and in particular big-box retailers—evidence that likely contradicts a diversity-enhancing effect of immigration. In contrast, focusing on the restaurant sector for which we can better identify the types of products consumed by customers, we find that immigration is associated with increased ethnic diversity of restaurants. This latter effect appears to come in part from the comparative advantage of immigrants in the production of ethnic goods.

Mazzolari, Francesca, and David Neumark, 2012, “Immigration and Product Diversity,” Journal of
Population Economics, pp. 1107-37.

We design and implement a large-scale resume correspondence study to address limitations of existing field experiments testing for age discrimination that may bias their results. One limitation that may bias results is giving older and younger applicants similar experience to make them “otherwise comparable.” A second limitation is that greater unobserved differences in human capital investment of older applicants may bias the results against finding age discrimination. On the basis of over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men.

Neumark, David, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, 2019, “Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New
and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Journal of Political Economy, 922-70.

One-third of children in the United States are born to unmarried parents. A substantial number of black and Hispanic children live with a never-married mother. Children of never-married mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, repeat grades, and have behavioral problems than are children raised in more traditional family structures. But these relationships may be driven by other factors that affect marital status at birth, post-conception marriage decisions, and later child outcomes, rather than causal effects of family structure.

Given that changes in the availability of men in the marriage market should affect marriage decisions, we use incarceration rates for men as an instrumental variable for family structure in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on the likelihood that children drop out of high school, focusing on blacks and Hispanics. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that unobserved factors rather than a causal effect drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, at least for the children of women whose marriage decisions are most affected by variation in incarceration rates for men. For Hispanics, in particular, we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.

Finlay, Keith, and David Neumark, 2010, “Is Marriage Always Good for Children? Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration,” Journal of Human Resources, pp. 1046-88.

We measure the changing efficacy of neighborhood-based labor market networks, across the business cycle, in helping displaced workers become re-employed, focusing on the periods before, during, and just after the Great Recession. Networks can only be effective when hiring is occurring, and hiring varied greatly between 2005 and 2012, the period we study. We therefore focus on a measure of the strength of the labor market networks that includes not only the number of employed neighbors of a laid off worker, but also the gross hiring rate at that person's neighbors’ workplaces. Our evidence indicates that local labor market networks increase re-employment following mass layoffs, and in particular, that networks serve to markedly increase the probability of re-employment specifically at neighbors’ employers. This is especially true for low-earning workers. Moreover, although hiring and employment rates decreased during the Great Recession period, the productivity of labor market networks in helping to secure re-employment for laid off workers was remarkably stable during our sample period.

Hellerstein, Judith K., Mark Kutzbach, and David Neumark, 2019, “Labor Market Networks and
Recovery from Mass Layoffs: Evidence from the Great Recession Period,” Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 113.

The Affordable Care Act will expand health insurance coverage for an estimated thirty-two million uninsured Americans. Increased access to care is intended to reduce the unnecessary use of services such as emergency department visits and to achieve substantial cost savings. However, there is little evidence for such claims. To determine how the uninsured might respond once coverage becomes available, we studied uninsured low-income adults enrolled in a community-based primary care program at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. For people continuously enrolled in the program, emergency department visits and inpatient admissions declined, while primary care visits increased during the study period. Inpatient costs fell each year for this group. Over three years of enrollment, average total costs per year per enrollee fell from $8,899 to $4,569--a savings of almost 50 percent. We conclude that previously uninsured people may have fewer emergency department visits and lower costs after receiving coverage but that it may take several years of coverage for substantive health care savings to occur.

Bradley, Cathy, Sabina Ohri, David Neumark, Sheryl Garland, and Sheldon Retchin, 2012, “Lessons for
Coverage Expansion: A Virginia Primary Care Program for The Uninsured Reduced
Utilization And Cut Costs,” Health Affairs, pp. 350-9.

We assess evidence on the longer‐run effects of minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare on key economic indicators of economic self‐sufficiency in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The evidence suggests that the longer‐run effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit are to increase employment and to reduce poverty and public assistance. We also find some evidence consistent with higher welfare benefits having longer‐run adverse effects, and stronger evidence that tighter welfare time limits reduce poverty and public assistance in the longer‐run. The evidence on the longer‐run effects of the minimum wage on poverty and public assistance is not robust.

David Neumark, Brian Asquith, and Brittany Bass, “Longer-Run Effects of Anti-Poverty Policies on
Disadvantaged Neighborhoods,” forthcoming in Contemporary Economic Policy.

A central issue in estimating the employment effects of minimum wages is the appropriate comparison group for states (or other regions) that adopt or increase the minimum wage. In recent research, Dube et al. (2010) and Allegretto et al. (2011) argue that past U.S. research is flawed because it does not restrict comparison areas to those that are geographically proximate and fails to control for changes in low-skill labor markets that are correlated with minimum wage increases. They argue that using "local controls" establishes that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment of less-skilled workers. In Neumark et al. (2014), we present evidence that their methods fail to isolate more reliable identifying information and lead to incorrect conclusions. Moreover, for subsets of treatment groups where the identifying variation they use is supported by the data, the evidence is consistent with past findings of disemployment effects. Allegretto et al. (2013) have challenged our conclusions, continuing the debate regarding some key issues regarding choosing comparison groups for estimating minimum wage effects. We explain these issues and evaluate the evidence. In general, we find little basis for their analyses and conclusions, and argue that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for very low-skilled workers - in particular, for teens.

Neumark, David, J.M. Ian Salas, and William Wascher, 2014, “More on Recent Evidence on the Effects
of Minimum Wages in the United States,” IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 3:24 (on-line).

We specify and implement a test for the presence and importance of labor market networks based on residential proximity, in determining the establishments at which people work. Using matched employer-employee data at the establishment level, we measure the importance of these network effects for groups broken out by race, ethnicity, and measures of skill. The evidence indicates that these types of labor market networks do exist and play an important role in determining the establishments where workers work; that they are more important for minorities and the less skilled, especially among Hispanics; and that they appear to be race based.

Hellerstein, Judith, Melissa McInerney, and David Neumark, 2011, “Neighbors and Co-Workers: The
Importance of Residential Labor Market Networks,” Journal of Labor Economics, pp. 659-95.

We study the effect of minimum wage increases on employment in automatable jobs – jobs in which employers may find it easier to substitute machines for people – focusing on low-skilled workers for whom such substitution may be spurred by minimum wage increases. Based on CPS data from 1980-2015, we find that increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers, and increases the likelihood that low-skilled workers in automatable jobs become nonemployed or employed in worse jobs. The average effects mask significant heterogeneity by industry and demographic group, including substantive adverse effects for older, low-skilled workers in manufacturing. We also find some evidence that the same changes improve job opportunities for higher-skilled workers. The findings imply that groups often ignored in the minimum wage literature are in fact quite vulnerable to employment changes and job loss because of automation following a minimum wage increase.

Lordan, Grace, and David Neumark, 2018, “People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs,” Labour Economics, pp. 40-53.

Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various hypotheses in urban and labor economics, such as agglomeration economies and spatial mismatch - hypotheses that entail market failures and often predict overlap between poor economic performance and disadvantaged residents. The evidence on enterprise zones is very mixed. We need to know more about what features of enterprise zone policies make them more effective or less effective, who gains and who loses from these policies, and how we can reconcile the existing findings. Some evidence points to positive benefits of infrastructure expenditure, and also investment in higher education and university research - likely because of the public-goods nature of these policies. However, to better guide policy, we need to know more about what policies create self-sustaining longer-run gains.

Neumark, David, and Helen Simpson, 2015, “Place-Based Policies,” in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Vol. 5, Gilles Duranton, Vernon Henderson, and William Strange, eds. (Amsterdam:
Elsevier), pp. 1197-1287.

Neumark, David, and Kenneth Troske, 2012, “Point/Counterpoint: ‘Addressing the Employment Situation in the Aftermath of the Great Recession,’ and ‘Lessons from Other Countries, and
Rethinking (Slightly) Unemployment Insurance as Social Insurance Against the Great Recession,”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, pp. 160-68, 188-91.

The depth of the Great Recession, the slow recovery of job creation, the downward trend in labor force participation, high long-term unemployment, stagnant or declining wages for low-to-medium skill jobs owing to adverse labor demand shifts, and a greater rebound in low-wage than mid- or higher-wage jobs raised concerns that the normal business cycle dynamics of recovery from the recession will be insufficient to offset the diminished labor market prospects of many workers. These concerns have spurred serious consideration of policies to encourage job creation and higher income from work beyond the more immediate countercyclical policies that were adopted in response to the Great Recession. Among the policies generating continuing or renewed interest are hiring credits, higher (sometimes much higher) minimum wages, and a more substantial earned income tax credit (EITC) for childless individuals. This paper discusses these policy options, what we know about their likely effects and trade-offs, and what the unanswered questions are; the focus is on US evidence.

Neumark, David, 2016, “Policy Levers to Increase Jobs and Increase Income from Work after the Great
Recession,” IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 5:6 (on-line).

We study the effects of the size of older cohorts on labor force participation and wages of older workers in the United States. We use panel data on states, treating the age structure of the population as endogenous, owing to migration. When older cohorts (50–59 or 60–69) are large relative to a young cohort (aged 16–24), the evidence fits the relative supply hypothesis. However, when older cohorts are large relative to 25- to 49-year-olds, the evidence points to a relative demand shift. Thus, we need a more nuanced view than simply whether the older cohort is large relative to the population: the cohort that they are large relative to matters.

Neumark, David, and Maysen Yen, 2019, “Relative Sizes of Age Cohorts and Labor Force Participation
of Older Workers,” Demography, pp. 1-31.

The authors make three points in this reply to the article by Allegretto, Dube, Reich, and Zipperer (ADRZ 2017). First, ADRZ shed no new light on the sensitivity of estimated minimum wage employment effects to the treatment of trends in state-level panel data, and they make some arguments in this context that are misleading or simply wrong. Second, the key issue ADRZ emphasize—using ‘‘close controls’’ to account for shocks that are correlated with minimum wage changes—does not generate large differences in findings, and ADRZ do not address evidence from Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (NSW 2014a) that questions the validity of the close controls used in Allegretto, Dube, and Reich’s (ADR 2011) and
Dube, Lester, and Reich’s (DLR 2010) work. Third, ADRZ ignore or dismiss a growing number of studies that address in various ways the same issue of potential correlations between minimum wages and
shocks to low-skill labor markets that ADRZ argue generate spurious
evidence of disemployment effects, yet often find rather large negative effects of minimum wages on low-skilled employment.

Neumark, David, and William Wascher, 2017, “Reply to Credible Research Designs for Minimum Wage
Studies,” ILR Review, pp. 593-609.

We revisit the minimum wage-employment debate, which is as old as the Department of Labor. In particular, we assess new studies claiming that the standard panel data approach used in much of the "new minimum wage research" is flawed because it fails to account for spatial heterogeneity. These new studies use research designs intended to control for this heterogeneity and conclude that minimum wages in the United States have not reduced employment. We explore the ability of these research designs to isolate reliable identifying information and test the untested assumptions in this new research about the construction of better control groups. Our evidence points to serious problems with these research designs. Moreover, new evidence based on methods that let the data identify the appropriate control groups leads to stronger evidence of disemployment effects, with teen employment elasticities near −0.3. We conclude that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage.

Neumark, David, J.M. Ian Salas, and William Wascher, 2014, “Revisiting the Minimum Wage Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?” Industrial and Labor Relations
Review, 608-648.

Policy researchers often have to estimate the future effect of imposing a policy in a particular location. There is often evidence on the effects of similar policies in other jurisdictions, but no information on the effects of the policy in the jurisdiction in question. And the policy may have specific features not reflected in the experiences of other areas. It is then necessary to combine the evidence from other locations with detailed information and data specific to the jurisdiction in question, with which to simulate the effects of the policy in the new jurisdiction. We illustrate and use this approach in estimating the impact of a proposed living wage mandate for New York City, emphasizing how our ex ante simulations make use of detailed location-specific information on workers, families, and employers using administrative data and other new public data sources.

Neumark, David, Matthew Thompson, Francesco Brindisi, Leslie Koyle, and Clayton Reck, 2013,
“Simulating the Economic Impacts of Living Wage Mandates Using New Public and Administrative
Data: Evidence for New York City,” Economic Development Quarterly, pp. 271-83.

In a randomized controlled trial, we studied low-income adults newly covered by a primary care program to determine whether a cash incentive could encourage them to make an initial visit to a primary care provider. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four groups: three groups whose members received $10 to complete a baseline survey during an interview and who were randomized to incentives of $50, $25, or $0 to visit their assigned primary care provider within six months after enrolling in the study; and a nonincentivized control group not contacted by the research team. Subjects in the $50 and $25 incentive groups were more likely to see a primary care provider (77 percent and 74 percent, respectively), compared to subjects in the $0 incentive group (68 percent). The effects of the intervention were about twice as large when we compared the proportions of subjects in the $50 and $25 incentive groups who visited their providers and the proportion in the nonincentivized group (61 percent). Cash incentive programs may steer newly covered low-income patients toward primary care, which could result in improved health outcomes and lower costs.

Bradley, Cathy J., and David Neumark, 2017, “Small Cash Incentives Can Encourage Primary Care Visits
by Low-Income People with New Health Care Coverage,” Health Affairs, pp. 1376-84.

We study the relationship between Hispanic employment and location-specific measures of the distribution of jobs. We find that it is only the local density of jobs held by Hispanics that matters for Hispanic employment, that measures of local job density defined for Hispanic poor English speakers or immigrants are more important, and that the density of jobs held by Hispanic poor English speakers are most important for the employment of these less-skilled Hispanics than for other Hispanics. This evidence is consistent with labor market networks being an important influence on the employment of less-skilled Hispanics, as is evidence from other sources. We also find that in MSAs where the growth rates of the Hispanic immigrant population have been highest, which are also MSAs with historically low Hispanic populations, localized job density for low-skilled jobs is even more important for Hispanic employment than in the full sample. We interpret this evidence as consistent with the importance of labor market networks, as strong labor market networks are likely to have been especially important in inducing Hispanics to migrate, and because of these networks employment in these "new immigrant" cities is especially strongly tied to the local availability of jobs.

Hellerstein, Judith K., Melissa McInerney, and David Neumark, 2010, “Spatial Mismatch, Immigrant Networks, and Hispanic Employment in the United States", Annales d’Economie et de Statistique, pp.
141-67.

The continuing adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. In periods when labor demand and supply are in balance, either hiring credits or worker subsidies can be used to boost employment - hiring credits by reducing labor costs for employers, and worker subsidies by raising the economic returns to work. Historically, both types of policies have been used in pursuit of distributional goals as well, with hiring credits targeting employment of disadvantaged workers, and worker subsidies targeting low-income families. Hiring credits targeting the disadvantaged have generally been regarded as ineffective at both creating jobs and increasing incomes of low-income families, whereas worker subsidies have been viewed as more successful at both. However, in the context of the Great Recession - and severe recessions more generally - hiring credits may be particularly effective at spurring job creation, but only if they are designed quite differently from past hiring credits targeting the disadvantaged. Moreover, establishing a national hiring credit that kicks in during and after recessions may be an effective countercyclical measure - a useful addition to the "automatic stabilizers" already in place, and one that specifically targets job creation.

Neumark, David, 2013, “Spurring Job Creation in Response to Severe Recessions: Reconsidering Hiring Credits,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, pp. 142-71.

International trade exposure affects job flows along the intensive margin (from expansions and contractions of firms' employment) as well as along the extensive margin (from births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992–2011 employment data from U.S. establishments to construct job flows at both the industry and commuting-zone levels, and then estimates the impact of the ‘China shock’ on each job-flow type. Using the two most influential measures of Chinese exposure, we find that the China shock affects U.S. employment mainly through deaths of establishments. At the commuting-zone level, we find evidence of large job reallocation from the Chinese-competition exposed sector to the nonexposed sector. Moreover, we demonstrate that the job-flow effects of the China shock are fundamentally different from those of a more general adverse shock affecting the U.S. demand for domestic labor.

Asquith, Brian, Sanjana Goswami, David Neumark, and Antonio Rodriquez-Lopez, 2019, “U.S. Job
Flows and the ‘China Shock’,” Journal of International Economics, pp. 123-37.

State business climate indexes capture state policies that might affect economic growth. State rankings in these indexes vary wildly, raising questions about what the indexes measure and which policies are important for growth. Indexes focused on productivity do not predict economic growth, while indexes emphasizing taxes and costs predict growth of employment, wages, and output. Analysis of sub-indexes of the tax-and-cost-related indexes point to two policy factors associated with faster growth: less spending on welfare and transfer payments; and more uniform and simpler corporate tax structures. But factors beyond the control of policy have a stronger relationship with economic growth.

Kolko, Jed, David Neumark, and Marisol Cuellar Mejia, 2013, “What Do Business Climate Indexes Teach Us About State Policy and Growth?” Journal of Regional Science, pp. 220-55.

Given the short- and long-term disabilities associated with breast cancer and its treatment, the authors investigate the influence of workplace accommodations on the employment and hours worked of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer. Accommodations that allow women to work fewer hours or that ease the burden of work could also generate health benefits by reducing workplace demands and allowing women more time to tend to treatment needs and recovery. In prior research, the authors found modest labor supply impacts on employment for this group of women. Evidence from this study suggests that some accommodations are associated with fewer hours worked, while some are associated with higher employment or hours. In addition, some of the accommodations that may affect hours of work-sometimes positively and sometimes negatively-are associated with positive health benefits.

Neumark, David, Cathy J. Bradley, Miguel Henry, and Bassam Dahman, 2015, “Work Continuation
While Treated for Breast Cancer: The Role of Workplace Accommodations,” Industrial and Labor
Relations Review, pp. 915-954.

Awards

 

  • Bren Fellow, Public Policy Institute of California, 2009-2010
  • Chancellor’s Professorship, University of California, Irvine, 2012
  • Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009, for Minimum Wages (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)
  • 2000 Minnesota Award for “Age Discrimination Laws and Labor Market Efficiency”
  • National Institute on Aging, Special Emphasis Research Career Award
  • National Longitudinal Surveys, Michael E. Borus Memorial Dissertation Award
  • UCI Associated Graduate Students, 2015, Faculty Mentoring Award

 

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