Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses and People: Lessons from the Census Bureau’s Experience

We provide an overview of Census Bureau activities to enhance the consistency, timeliness, and relevance of our data products in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight new data products designed to provide timely and granular information on the pandemic's impact: the Small Business Pulse Survey, weekly Business Formation Statistics, the Household Pulse Survey, and Community Resilience Estimates. We describe pandemic-related content introduced to existing surveys such as the Annual Business Survey and the Current Population Survey. We discuss adaptations to ensure the continuity and consistency of existing data products such as principal economic indicators and the American Community Survey.

Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s

The 1960s witnessed landmark legislation that aimed to increase women's wages, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Although the gender gap in pay changed little at the mean/median during the decade, our distributional analysis shows that women's wages converged sharply on men's below but diverged above the median. However, the bulk of women's relative pay gains are not explained by changes in observed attributes. Our findings suggest an important role for legislation in narrowing the gender gap in the 1960s.

Who Gets Their First Job at a Large Firm? The Distinct Roles of Education and Skills

Young workers' early years in the labor market are a key and formative time. Using data from 31 countries, this article documents the selection of labor market entrants into large firms, which existing literature associates with propitious environments for young workers. The young and inexperienced are underrepresented at large firms compared to experienced and older workers. Entrants who do get their first job at large firms are positively selected in terms of education and cognitive skills. The patterns of large-firm selection (i.e., importance of education vs. skills) somewhat differ between Europe, East and Southeast Asia, and North America.

Changing Population Exposure to Pollution in China’s Special Economic Zones

Martin and Zhang (2020) show that the increase in manufacturing output in China's special economic zones significantly increased air pollution. In this complementary paper, we document that widespread migration into these industrial clusters between 2000 and 2010 did little to change overall population exposure to pollution. We show using satellite air pollution data that there is much heterogeneity across zones and that most population growth occurred in relatively cleaner zones, supporting recent literature that documents local willingness to make location decisions based on environmental quality (Chen et al. 2019, Khanna et al. 2020).

Inference for Support Vector Regression under ℓ1 Regularization

We provide large-sample distribution theory for support vector regression (SVR) with l1-norm along with error bars for the SVR regression coefficients. Although a classical Wald confidence interval obtains from our theory, its implementation inherently depends on the choice of a tuning parameter that scales the variance estimate and thus the width of the error bars. We address this shortcoming by further proposing an alternative large-sample inference method based on the inversion of a novel test statistic that displays competitive power properties and does not depend on the choice of a tuning parameter.

The Common Application and Student Choice

We study the effects of the Common Application (CA) platform, which allows students to submit a single application to multiple institutions, on student choice. Using individual-level data from freshman surveys over the period 1982-2014, we develop two proxies for student choice, one based upon the number of applications submitted and another based upon students attending non-first-choice institutions. Using these proxies, we first document sharp increases in student choice over time. Linking these outcomes to the timing of CA membership, we provide evidence of a link between CA entry and increased student choice.

Microcommitments: The Effect of Small Commitments on Student Success

We conducted a randomized control trial with nearly 1,000 students to test whether using a text-message-based tool that provides small commitments with social accountability helps students procrastinate less and maintain engagement with course material, yielding improved academic performance. All students received identical content via text message, but the treatment group engaged with an online platform encouraging commitments and featuring a social feed with rankings. The analysis reveals that microcommitments with social accountability improved academic performance relative to students who received simple nudges. The increase is equivalent to 3 percentage points on an exam, driven by online and hybrid classes.