The 2021 Paycheck Protection Program Reboot: Loan Disbursement to Employer and Nonemployer Businesses in Minority Communities

By Robert Fairlie and Frank M. Fossen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We analyze how Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds were disbursed to minority communities in the $278 billion rebooted program in January 2021. Using administrative microdata covering all PPP loans, we find strong positive relationships between PPP lo...

Easier to Start, Harder to Succeed: Barriers to Black Entrepreneurship since the Great Recession

By Pedro Bento and Sunju Hwang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We use a structural framework to interpret trends related to Black entrepreneurship, and infer how race-specific barriers faced by Black entrepreneurs have changed since the Great Recession. While all barriers declined consistently before the Recession, w...

Self-Reporting Race in Small Business Loans: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Evidence from PPP Loans in Durham, NC

By Raffi E. García and William A. Darity Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using hand-collected race information about small business owners that concealed their race in Paycheck Protection Program applications, we find evidence that not disclosing race information in loan applications pays off significantly. Our results show th...

Youth Hiring and Labor Market Tightness

By Eliza C. Forsythe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is well-known that recessions can lead to long-term scarring for young workers. I show that employers hire fewer young workers when there are few job openings per unemployed job seeker, while hiring rates for workers with more than 10 years of potentia...

Soft Skills in the Youth Labor Market

By Sara B. Heller and Judd B. Kessler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper provides new descriptive evidence about which soft skills employers value in young, entry-level workers. We ran employer surveys as part of an experiment to generate letters of recommendation for New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program ...

What's in a Job? Evaluating the Effect of Private Sector Employment Experience on Student Academic Outcomes

By Alicia Sasser Modestino, Urbashee Paul, and Joseph McLaughlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Although subsidized summer jobs programs have been shown to improve youth outcomes, little is known about the effects of private sector employment experiences. We study a unique program that brokers employer-paid summer internships for youth across a vari...

Parental Investments in Early Childhood and the Gender Gap in Math and Literacy

By Amanda Chuan, John A. List, Anya Samek, and Shreemayi Samujjwala

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Parental investments shape children's educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages three through five. We find that early parental investment can explain persistently higher Engli...

How Early Adolescent Skills and Preferences Shape Economics Education Choices

By Lenka Fiala, John Eric Humphries, Juanna Schrøter Joensen, Uditi Karna, John A. List, and Gregory F. Veramendi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Leveraging data from Sweden and Chicago, we study the educational pipeline for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and economics majors to better understand the determinants of the gender gap and when these determinants arise. We pres...

Online Tutoring by College Volunteers: Experimental Evidence from a Pilot Program

By Matthew A. Kraft, John A. List, Jeffrey A. Livingston, and Sally Sadoff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In-person tutoring programs can have large impacts on K-12 student achievement, but high program costs and limited local supply of tutors have hampered scale-up. Online tutoring provided by volunteers can potentially reach more students in need. We implem...

The Effect of Teaching Economics with Classroom Experiments: Estimates from a Within-Subject Experiment

By Sacha Gelfer, Jeffrey A. Livingston, and Sutanuka Roy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Classroom experiments are a popular tool among economics instructors. A rich experimental literature studies their impact on student learning with between-subject designs that randomize classroom experiment use across course sections. Such designs are dif...

Fixing Errors in a SNAP: Addressing SNAP Underreporting to Evaluate Poverty

By Liana Fox, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Kathryn Shantz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Since 1969, the official poverty measure has remained largely unchanged, despite substantial changes in the social safety net. This paper proposes a methodology for creating a buildable replacement to the official poverty measure, starting with market-bas...

Building a Consumption Poverty Measure: Initial Results Following Recommendations of a Federal Interagency Working Group

By Grayson Armstrong, Caleb Cho, Thesia I. Garner, Brett Matsumoto, Juan Munoz, and Jake Schild

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Consumption is a well-being measure that is determined by a combination of resources (e.g., income, in-kind benefits, assets, debt, time) available to households, their circumstances, and their preferences. In this study, we derive consumption poverty sta...

Income Declines during COVID-19

By Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 recession caused regressive market income changes in the United States, with large losses more frequent than during the Great Recession and more concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. Progressive taxes and transfers, especially from ...

The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 among Single-Parent Families

By Kevin Corinth, Bruce D. Meyer, and Derek Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing the recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. ...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Imperfect Identifying Information

By Christiane Baumeister and James D. Hamilton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The problem of identification is often the core challenge of empirical economic research. The traditional approach to identification is to bring in additional information in the form of identifying assumptions, such as restrictions that certain magnitudes...

What Can We Learn from Sign-Restricted VARs?

By Christian K. Wolf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I use a simple business cycle model to illustrate the workings and limitations of sign restrictions in structural vector autoregressions. Three lessons emerge. First, such sign-based identification is vulnerable to "shock masquerading": linear combination...

Signing Out Confounding Shocks in Variance-Maximizing Identification Methods

By Neville Francis and Gene Kindberg-Hanlon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Recent papers have examined the dominant drivers of business cycles using variance-maximizing techniques for identification. However, identification is poor when shocks other than the target of interest play large roles in driving volatility at the target...

SVAR Identification from Higher Moments: Has the Simultaneous Causality Problem Been Solved?

By José Luis Montiel Olea, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, and Eric Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Two recent strands of the structural vector autoregression literature use higher moments for identification, exploiting either non-Gaussianity or heteroskedasticity. These approaches achieve point identification without exclusion or sign restrictions. We ...

The Trade Reform Wave of 1985−1995

By Douglas A. Irwin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late...

The Dismantling of Capital Controls after Bretton Woods and Latin American Productivity

By Diana Van Patten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The recent economic history of global integration has been characterized by a dismantling of capital controls and increased foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explores the role of impediments to international capital mobility, foreign direct inve...