Jacob Alex Klerman

Job Continuity Among New Mothers

In the early 1990s, both state and federal governments enacted maternity-leave legislation. The key provision of that legislation is that after a leave of a limited duration, the recent mother is guaranteed the right to return to her preleave employer at the same or equivalent position. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we correlate work status after childbirth with work status before pregnancy to estimate the prevalence, before the legislation, of returns to the preleave employer. Among women working full-time before the pregnancy, return to the prepregnancy employer was quite common. Sixty percent of women who worked full-time before the birth of a child continued to work for the same employer after the child was born. Furthermore, the labor market behavior of most of the remaining 40% suggests that maternity-leave legislation is unlikely to have a major effect on job continuity. Compared with all demographically similar women, however, new mothers have an excess probability of leaving their jobs.

The Work-Employment Distinction Among New Mothers

CPS data for 1979 to 1988 are used to examine the determinants of employment, actual work, and maternity leave for women in the year following childbirth. Women with better market skills (higher expected wages, older, more education) are more likely than other new mothers to have a job and to work. Among employed women, paid leave is also positively related to market skills. Work responds to childbirth more than employment does, with the greatest differences in the first three months following childbirth. Therefore, most women working when their child was one year old had returned to work within three months of childbirth.

Evaluating the Differential Effects of Alternative Welfare-to-Work Training Components: A Re-Analysis of the California Gain Program

We show how data from an evaluation in which subjects are randomly assigned to some treatment versus a control group can be combined with nonexperimental methods to estimate the differential effects of alternative treatments. We propose tests for the validity of these methods. We use these methods and tests to analyze the differential effects of labor force attachment (LFA) versus human capital development (HCD) training components with data from California’s Greater Avenues to Independence (GAIN) program. While LFA is more effective than HCD training in the short term, we find that HCD is relatively more effective in the longer term.

Explaining changes in married mothers’ employment over time

Employment of married mothers with preschool children rose dramatically between 1971 and 1990. Using CPS data, we find that about one-fifth of the increase in labor supply can be attributed to changes in mothers’ demographic characteristics (age, education, and number of children). Changes in the earnings opportunities of new mothers and their husbands explain another one-fifth of the growth in employment. Over the two decades, infants up to three months old became less of a barrier to employment, while women’s labor supply became more sensitive to their own earnings opportunities and less sensitive to those of their husbands.

A Stock-Flow Analysis of the Welfare Caseload

This paper reconsiders the methods used in previous studies to assess the welfare caseload movements during the 1990s. We develop a model in which the welfare caseload is the net outcome of past flows onto and off of the caseload and show that such a stock-flow model can explain some of the anomalous findings in previous studies. We then estimate the stock-flow model using California administrative data. We find that approximately 50 percent of the caseload decline in California can be attributed to the declining unemployment rate. These estimates are more robust and larger than those obtained when applying more typical methods to the same California data.

Did Welfare Reform Cause the Caseload Decline

The federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, created in 1996 to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), devolved considerable policy‐making responsibility to states. In the 2006 reauthorization of TANF, Bush administration officials and others proclaimed welfare reform a dramatic success, yet research has not comprehensively assessed the extent to which specific welfare policies caused the caseload to decline. Employing 7 years of AFDC data and 9 years of TANF data, in combination with methods sensitive to the effect of gradually implemented policies on caseload stocks, this work obtains plausible estimates of the effects of the economy and of four policies (financial incentives, sanctions, time limits, and diversion) that characterize the shift from AFDC to TANF. Simulations imply that the examined policies pushed the caseload down in the 1990s but that neither they nor the economy can explain the majority of the decline.

Using regional data to reexamine the contribution of demographic and sectoral changes to increasing U.S. wage inequality

This paper uses geographical disaggregation to reevaluate the importance of sectoral and demographic shifts in explaining recent changes in the U.S. wage distribution. Using hourly earnings data from the Current Population Survey we explore two approaches to assessing the contribution of demographic and sectoral changes to the increase in inequality in that distribution. The first approach uses fine disaggregations of the sample of workers by age and industry to conduct shift-share analyses. The second approach conducts regression analyses of the trend in inequality of our panel sample of geographic areas as a function of aggregate measures of demographic industry macroeconomic and international trade variables. This chapter is reprinted from the Changing Distribution of Income in an Open U.S. Economy edited by J. H. Bergstrand et al. pp. 183-216 Amsterdam Netherlands Elsevier Science 1994. (EXCERPT)

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ECONOMY AND THE WELFARE CASELOAD: A DYNAMIC APPROACH

Nationally, the welfare caseload declined by more than fifty percent between 1994 and 2000. Considerable research has been devoted to understanding what caused this decline. Much of the literature examining these changes has modeled the total caseload (the stock) directly. Klerman and Haider (2001) model the underlying flows and show analytically and empirically that previous methods are likely to be biased because they ignore important dynamics. However, due to their focus on the bias of the stock models, they present only limited results concerning the robustness of their findings and utilize only a single measure of economic conditions, the unemployment rate. This paper examines the robustness of the basic stock-flow model developed in Klerman and Haider (2001), considering both richer dynamic specifications and richer measures of economic condition. The authors find that more complex dynamic specifications do not change the substantive conclusions, but richer measures of the economy do. While a model that only includes the unemployment rate attributes about half of the California caseload decline between 1995 and 1998 to the economy, models that incorporate richer measures of the economy attribute more than ninety percent of the decline to the economy.

Asset and reporting policies in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Over the past decade and a half legislative and regulatory changes at the federal level have given US states additional authority to design their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP). This devolution of policymaking authority has led to considerable ambiguity at the national level about the policies that states have put in place. Drawing on a new survey of state SNAP administrators, this paper characterizes two key areas of policy devolution: the treatment of household assets in eligibility determinations and participants’ paperwork burden. We find asset and reporting policy changes to be widespread, and the states that have made changes most often adopt the most expansive policy change allowed. We also demonstrate that more accurate policy data sharpens the inferences we make about the effects of several of these policies on participation in SNAP.

How similar are different sources of CHIP enrollment data

We compare two different sources of enrollment counts for the Children’s Health Insurance Program from 2000–2005. Although it is impossible to know which sources accurately report enrollment, we classify instances where data sources do not agree as an indication that at least one source reports enrollment inaccurately. We find that 26 states have Medicaid expansion programs and 18 states have stand-alone programs that report similar enrollment counts across the two data sources. Eight states with Medicaid expansion programs and five states with a stand-alone program have substantial inconsistencies that include missing enrollment counts or a disagreement in enrollment counts.