The Effect of Parental Layoff on Children’s Academic Performance (JMP)
Using administrative data from British Columbia, Canada, I study the short-term ef- fect of parental layoff on children’s academic performance in grades 4, 7, and 10. I construct a difference-in-difference (DiD) estimator that uses propensity score matching to find an appropriate control group of children whose parents did not suffer a layoff and also exploits the timing of the layoff relative to the test period to relax the selection on observables only assumption. The second source of variation is important because I find that cross-sectional comparisons of children whose parents are laid off against a matched control group are susceptible to selection bias. I find that households where a parent suffers a layoff, earn approximately $8,000 - $10,000 less in after- tax income in the year after the layoff. In spite of such a large loss in financial resources, I find no significant short-term effects on children’s test scores due to parental job loss. My estimates for grade 4 and grade 10 rule out negative treatment effects larger than 3.5% of a standard deviation at the 95% confidence level, and the estimates for grade 7 rule out negative treatment effects larger than 5.3% of a standard deviation.
Majority Reaction to Minority Representation in Local Government
This paper studies the racial dynamics of local American politics in a setting with non-partisan elections. I exploit close city council elections in California from 1996 to 2017 to implement a regression discontinuity design, which allows me to study the causal effects of a nonwhite candidate’s victory against a white candidate. I find that in cities where the nonwhite candidate won (“treatment”), compared to cities where the nonwhite candidate lost (“control”), more white candidates run in the next election. While this effect is partly driven by the presence of more white runners-up in the treatment group, the electoral success of the nonwhite candidate also leads to the entry of new white candidates in the next election. This effect is driven by cities that have gone through bigger demographic changes over the past few decades, which suggests that changes in the racial composition of the city and the associated perception of threat to the dominant status of whites within the city (e.g. Jardina, 2014) are the likely mechanism behind the observed effect.