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This paper examines the distribution of the gasoline tax burden in the presence of increased electric vehicle adoption. Automobile manufacturers and even some states have ambitious goals to phase out gas-powered cars. However, in spite of these plans, the primary source of automobile infrastructure funding in the United States continues to be gasoline taxes. Less demand for gasoline threatens this source of revenue for maintaining roads and further shifts the burden of the tax toward consumers who can't afford the still relatively expensive electric vehicles. The analysis here illustrates the fundamental regressivity of the gasoline tax, then simulates the distributional impact of replacing the current gas tax with a lump-sum/income tax with different assessment rules designed to replace revenue generated by the gasoline tax. For example, many states are considering switching from a gas tax to a tax based on miles driven to shore up infrastructure funding. Alternatively, the required revenue could be paid equally across income quartiles or assessed based on income. Not surprisingly, the degree of regressivity of replacing the gasoline tax depends on how the tax is assessed across the income distribution. JEL classification: H22, Q21, D11 Key words: gas tax, incidence, consumer demand system, income distribution, equity, I. Introduction In January 2021, General Motors announced that it plans to completely phase out cars using internal combustion (gasoline) engines (Eisenstein 2021) by 2035, and they aren't alone. Volkswagen, [...]

Using the Current Population Survey between 1996 and 2018, this paper investigates the role constraints to migration might play in explaining racial/ethnic disparities in the labor market. The Delta Index of dissimilarity is used to illustrate a greater distributional mismatch between race/education specific workers and jobs among minorities relative to white non-Hispanics. Regression analysis then shows that this mismatch is consistent with minorities being less responsive to changes in the distribution of job opportunities. However, minorities are more responsive when the growing job opportunities are located in areas with greater same-racial/ethnic representation, suggesting that social constraints might play a role in the observed distributional mismatch. The analysis focuses on 25-54 year old men. JEL classification: J61, J15, J18 Key words: racial labor market disparities, migration costs, Delta Index, social costs, place-based, people-based, mismatch, Migration Constraints and Disparate Responses to Changing Job Opportunities 1 Introduction and Background Long-standing disparities in labor market outcomes by race are well documented. (1) At the opening of a [...]

Consistent with predictions from the literature, we find that higher levels of in-migration dilute multiple dimensions of a community's level of social capital. The analysis employs a 2SLS methodology to account for potential endogeneity of migration. JEL classification: R23, D71, C36, C38 Key words: social capital, migration, decennial census, social capital community benchmark survey, nonpublic data, simultaneous equations, endogeneity, factor analysis, 1. Introduction and Background The extensive literature on social capital demonstrates that it has many forms and perspectives. (1) This diverse nature of social capital may have prompted Woolcock (2001, [...]

This paper calculates the change in optimal labor supply and total family welfare resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). We estimate labor supply elasticities for married families in the Current Population Survey from 2015 to 2017, using a joint family utility model. These elasticities are then used to simulate changes in optimal labor supply and resulting change in welfare among families with different characteristics under the new TCJA tax code. We find that optimal hours are lower post-TCJA, relative to before. However, there are differences across family members and family types. Both men's and women's optimal hours decline with income starting in the second quintile, but the decline is more dramatic for men. Overall, all families' welfare increased post-TCJA, with the gains in welfare disproportionately benefiting the wealthy; families with any self-employment income; families with children; and families renting, versus owning, their home. JEL classification: I30, J22, D19 Key words: family welfare, joint labor supply, microsimulation, TCJA https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2021-18, 1 Introduction and Backgrounds On December 31, 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) became the most sweeping reform of the U.S. tax code since the Economic Growth and [...]

Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. Proposed mechanisms often focus on spot differences in employee productivity or employer preferences, neglecting the dynamic nature of human capital development and addiction. In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of young workers as they transition from schooling to the labor market, a period in which the lifetime trajectory of wages is being developed. We estimate the model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort, and we simulate the model under counterfactual scenarios that isolate the contemporaneous effects of smoking from dynamic differences in human capital accumulation and occupational selection. Results from our preferred model, which accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the joint determination of smoking, human capital, labor supply, and wages, suggest that continued heavy smoking in young adulthood results in a wage penalty at age 30 of 14.8 percent and 9.3 percent for women and men, respectively. These differences are less than half of the raw mean difference in wages at age 30. We show that the contemporaneous effect of heavy smoking net of any life-cycle effects explains roughly 67 percent of the female smoking wage gap but only 11 percent of the male smoking wage gap. JEL classification: I10, I12 Key words: wages, smoking; dynamic system of equations, 1 Introduction Smoking cigarettes is associated with well-documented expected longevity (Doll et al., 2004; Darden et al., 2018) and health care expenditure (Sloan et al., 2006; Xu et al., 2015) [...]

This paper investigates differences in outcomes between historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) and traditional college and universities (non-HBCUs) using a standard Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition. This method decomposes differences in observed educational and labor market outcomes between HBCU and non-HBCU students into differences in characteristics (both student and institutional) and differences in how those characteristics translate into differential outcomes. Efforts to control for differences in unobservables between the two types of students are undertaken through inverse-probability weighting and propensity score matching methodologies. We find that differences in student characteristics make the largest contributions to each outcome difference. However, some hope in identifying policy levers comes in the form of how characteristics translate into outcomes. For example, whereas HBCUs appear to be doing a better job helping female graduates parlay their education into higher earnings, non-HBCUs are doing a better job in helping graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics translate their training into higher earnings. Patterns and importance of regressors are similar at different points of the distributions of outcomes. JEL classification: I24, I26, C21 Key words: HBCU, decomposition, student debt, returns to education, propensity-score matching, inverse-probability weighting, quantile regression https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2020-10, Decomposing Outcome Differences between HBCU and non-HBCU Institutions I. Introduction and Background The analysis in this paper decomposes average differences in educational and labor market outcomes observed between graduates from [...]

This paper applies a standard treatment effects model to determine that participation in Freshman Learning Communities improves academic performance and retention. Not controlling for individual self-selection into Freshman Learning Communities participation leads one to incorrectly conclude that the impact is the same across race and gender groups. Accurately assessing the impact of any educational program is essential in determining what resources institutions should devote to it. A table with the reduced-form of OLS estimation for earned hours, full sample, is appended. (Contains 6 tables and 18 notes.)

A study showing that families do not pool their incomes is presented. The conclusions are based on spending pattern on clothing of women once the child subsidy payment is shifted on to mother.

A replication of the findings regarding the decline in the employment among disabled people since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is presented. The decline seems to result from a drop in the labor force participation rate among those classified as disabled.

Using matched employer-employee data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates how employment of undocumented workers varies along the business cycle and how it differs from the adjustment in employment of documented workers. The cyclical component of undocumented employment is found to be significantly more volatile than the cyclical component of documented employment. Simulation results indicate that complementarities between documented workers and capital account for almost 90% of the difference in measured volatility between documented and undocumented employment. (JEL E24, J21, J15), 1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND The objective of this paper is to analyze the differences in the variation in the employment of undocumented and documented workers across business cycles in the [...]

This paper determines how individual, relative to community, social capital affects individual migration decisions. We make use of nonpublic data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to predict multidimensional social capital for observations in the Current Population Survey. We find evidence that individuals are much less likely to have moved to a community with average social capital levels lower than their own and that higher levels of community social capital act as positive pull-factor amenities. The importance of that amenity differs across urban/rural locations. We also confirm that higher individual social capital is a negative predictor of migration. JEL classification: R23, D71, C36, C38 Key words: social capital, migration, Current Population Survey, amenities, nonpublic data, factor analysis, 1. Introduction and background A growing body of research argues that workers make their migration decisions based on noneconomic factors, in addition to economic factors such as wages (Deller et [...]