Steven Raphael

School-Based Peer Effects and Juvenile Behavior

We use a sample of tenth-graders to test for peer-group influences on the propensity to engage in five activities: drug use, alcohol drinking, cigarette smoking, church going, and the likelihood of dropping out of high school. We find strong evidence of peer-group effects at the school level for all activities. Tests for bias due to endogenous school choice yield mixed results. We find evidence of endogeneity bias for two of the five activities analyzed (drug use and alcohol drinking). On the whole, these results confirm the findings of previous research concerning interaction effects at the neighborhood level.

Is housing unaffordable? why isn't it more affordable?

This paper reviews trends in housing affordability in the U.S. over the past four decades. There is little evidence that owner-occupied housing has become less affordable. In contrast, there have been modest increases in the fraction of income that the median renter household devotes to housing. We find pronounced increases in the rent burdens for poor households. We explore the low-income rental market, analyzing the importance of changes in the income distribution, and in housing quality in affecting rent burdens. We conclude that zoning and land use restrictions are more important factors driving up rents. We also sketch out some policies that might improve housing affordability.

PERCEIVED CRIMINALITY, CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS, AND THE RACIAL HIRING PRACTICES OF EMPLOYERS*

In this paper, we analyze the effect of employer‐initiated criminal background checks on the likelihood that employers hire African Americans. We find that employers who check criminal backgrounds are more likely to hire African American workers, especially men. This effect is stronger among those employers who report an aversion to hiring those with criminal records than among those who do not. We also find similar effects of employer aversion to ex‐offenders and their tendency to check backgrounds on their willingness to hire other stigmatized workers, such as those with gaps in their employment history. These results suggest that, in the absence of criminal background checks, some employers discriminate statistically against black men and/or those with weak employment records. Such discrimination appears to contribute substantially to observed employment and earnings gaps between white and black young men.

Car Ownership, Employment, and Earnings

In this paper, we assess whether the positive effects of car ownership on employment outcomes observed in past research are causal. We match state data on car insurance premiums and per-gallon gas taxes to a microdata sample containing information on car ownership and employment outcomes comparable to the those explored in previous research. In OLS regressions that control for observable demographic and human capital variables, we find large differences in employment rates, weekly hours worked, and hourly earnings between those with and without cars. Instrumenting car ownership on insurance and gas tax costs yields estimates of the employment and hours effects of car ownership that are quite close to the OLS estimates. Concerning wages, the IV models yield negative effects of car ownership on wages. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that employers located in states with high auto maintenance costs must pay compensating differentials to their employees. When we stratify the sample by skill groupings, we find positive significant employment and hours effects for all skill groups, with larger car-employment effects for low-skilled workers and comparable hours effects across skill categories. Again, the IV results for wages yield negative effects that are insignificant for low- and medium-skilled workers and significant for high-skilled workers.

DID THE 2007 LEGAL ARIZONA WORKERS ACT REDUCE THE STATE'S UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANT POPULATION?

We test for an effect of Arizonas 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on the proportion of the states population characterized as noncitizen Hispanic. We use the synthetic control method to select a group of states against which Arizonas population trends can be compared. We document a notable and statistically significant reduction in the proportion of the Hispanic noncitizen population in Arizona. The decline observed matches the timing of LAWAs implementation, deviates from the time series for the synthetic control group, and stands out relative to the distribution of placebo estimates for other states in the nation.

HOMELESS IN AMERICA, HOMELESS IN CALIFORNIA

It is generally believed that the increased incidence of homelessness in the United States has arisen from broad societal factors, such as changes in the institutionalization of the mentally ill, increases in drug addiction and alcohol usage, and so forth. This paper presents a comprehensive test of the alternate hypothesis that variations in homelessness arise from changed circumstances in the housing market and in the income distribution. We assemble essentially all the systematic information available on homelessness in U.S. urban areas: census counts, shelter bed counts, records of transfer payments, and administrative agency estimates. We estimate similar statistical models using four different samples of data on the incidence of homelessness, defined according to very different criteria. Our results suggest that simple economic principles governing the availability and pricing of housing and the growth in demand for the lowest-quality housing explain a large portion of the variation in homelessness among U.S. metropolitan housing markets. Furthermore, rather modest improvements in the affordability of rental housing or its availability can substantially reduce the incidence of homelessness in the United States.

Can Boosting Minority Car-Ownership Rates Narrow Inter-Racial Employment Gaps

In this paper, we assess whether boosting minority car-ownership rates would narrow inter-racial employment rate differentials. We pursue two empirical strategies. First, we explore whether the effect of auto ownership on the probability of being employed is greater for more segregated groups of workers. Exploiting the fact that African-Americans are considerably more segregated from whites than are Latinos, we estimate car-employment effects for blacks, Latinos, and whites and test whether these effects are largest for more segregated groups. Second, we use data at the level of the metropolitan area to test whether the car-employment effect for blacks relative to that for whites increases with the degree of black relative isolation from employment opportunities. We find the strongest car effects for blacks, followed by Latinos, and then whites. Moreover, this ordering is statistically significant. We also find that the relative car-employment effect for blacks is largest in metropolitan areas where the relative isolation of blacks from employment opportunities is the most severe. Our empirical estimates indicate that raising minority car-ownership rates to the white car ownership rate would eliminate 45 percent of the black-white employment rate differential and 17 percent of the comparable Latinbo-white differential.

Racial Differences in Spatial Job Search Patterns: Exploring the Causes and Consequences

Abstract In this paper, we present an analysis of the spatial job search patterns of black, white, and Latino workers in Los Angeles. We find that blacks and Latinos tend to search in areas where employment growth is low, whereas whites tend to search in areas where it is high. Moreover, over half of the mean racial and ethnic differences in the quality of spatial job search (as measured by mean employment growth in areas searched) is explained by racial residential segregation. In addition, racial segregation is a more important explanation of racial differences in spatial job search quality than systematic differences in social networks and job search methods, though these factors matter. Spatial job search quality has a positive and significant effect on the employment of whites and blacks, but not Latinos, and explains nearly 40 percent of the difference between white and black employment rates. These results are consistent with the existence of spatial mismatch in urban labor markets and imply that racial residential segregation limits the job opportunities of blacks, and to a lesser extent Latinos, in metropolitan areas.

Immigration Reform and the Earnings of Latino Workers: Do Employer Sanctions Cause Discrimination?

This paper investigates whether employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers introduced by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) adversely affected the hourly earnings of Latino workers in the southwestern U.S. We exploit the staggering of the sanctions and employee verification requirements across sectors to estimate this effect. In particular, IRCAs employer-sanctions provisions were not extended to agricultural employers until two years after their imposition on non-agricultural employers. Hence, Latino agricultural workers provide a control group against which to compare changes in the wages of Latinos in non-agricultural employment. We find substantial pre-post IRCA declines in the hourly earnings of Latino non-agricultural workers relative to Latinos in agriculture. This pattern, however, is considerably stronger for Latino men than Latina women. We do not observe similar inter-sectoral shifts in relative wages among non-Latino white workers. In fact, the relative wage changes for non-Latino white workers are of the opposite sign. Finally, the pre-post IRCA relative decline in Latino non-agricultural wages reverses the pre-IRCA trend, where we observe the relative earnings of Latino non-agricultural workers increasing

Incarceration and Prisoner Reentry in the United States

This article addresses the reentry challenges faced by low-skilled men released from U.S. prisons. The author empirically characterizes the increases in incarceration occurring since 1970 and assesses the degree to which these changes result from changes in policy as opposed to changes in criminal behavior. The author discusses what is known about the children of inmates and the likelihood that a child in the United States has an incarcerated parent. The article then addresses the employment barriers that former prison inmates face, with a particular emphasis on how employers view criminal records in screening job applicants. Finally, the author discusses a number of alternative models for aiding the reentry of former inmates. Transitional cash assistance, the use of reentry plans, traditional workforce development efforts, and transitional jobs for former inmates all are among the tools used across the United States. The author reviews the existing evaluation literature on the effectiveness of these programmatic interventions.