Ian Michael Schmutte

• Ph.D. Economics, Cornell Univ.
• Associate Professor at University of Georgia

The use of formal privacy to protect the confidentiality of responses in the 2020 Decennial Census of Population and Housing has triggered renewed interest and debate over how to measure the disclosure risks and societal benefits of the published data products. We argue that any proposal for quantifying disclosure risk should be based on prespecifi...

We use Brazilian matched employer–employee data to provide new evidence on gender disparities in labor market sorting on wages and workplace safety. We show that women and men sort in highly disparate, but systematic, ways on the basis of physical risk, despite sorting almost identically on financial risk. To understand what factors might explain t...

US workers receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job, but not for reduced working hours. In alignment with the benefits incentives, we find that the labor market responded to COVID‐19 and related closure‐policies mostly on the extensive (12 pp outright job loss) margin. Exploiting timing variation in state closure‐policies, difference‐in...

This study examines the sociodemographic divide in early labor market responses to the U.S. COVID-19 epidemic and associated policies, benchmarked against two previous recessions. Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data show greater declines in employment in April and May 2020 (relative to February) for Hispanic individuals, younger workers, a...

Firms and statistical agencies that publish aggregate data face practical and legal requirements to protect the privacy of individuals. Increasingly, these organizations meet these standards by using publication mechanisms which satisfy differential privacy. We consider the problem of choosing such a mechanism so as to maximize the value of its out...

John M. Abowd is the Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology, US Census Bureau. He completed his AB in Economics at Notre Dame in 1973 and his PhD in Economics at University of Chicago in 1977 under Arnold Zellner. During his academic career, John has held faculty positions at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and, s...

In an influential study, Bender et al. [Bender S, Bloom N, Card D, Van Reenen J, Wolter S (2018) Management practices, workforce selection, and productivity. J. Labor Econom. 36(S1):S371–S409] document consistent relationships between management practices, productivity, and workforce composition using administrative data from German firms matched t...

We use Texas's constitutional amendment in 1997 that expanded the scope of home equity loans as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the effects of relaxing credit constraints on small businesses. We find, using standard panel data methods and restricted-use microdata from the US Census Bureau, that the Texas amendment increased the use of h...

This chapter provides an overview of the methods that have been developed and implemented to safeguard privacy, while providing researchers the means to draw valid conclusions from protected data. It focuses on the protections that pertain to the linked nature of the data. The protection mechanisms are both physical and statistical, but exist becau...

Et spørgeskema udsendt til danske virksomheder under nedlukningen under den første bølge af coronavirus viser at hjælpepakkerne gik til de mest udsatte virksomheder og var med til at redde 81.000 jobs.

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government policies on firms' aid take-up, layoff and furlough decisions. We collect new survey data for 10,642 small, medium and large Danish firms, and match to government records of all aid-supported furloughed workers during the pandemic as well as administrative accounting data. This is the fi...

In the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic labor markets exhibited considerable churn, which we relate to three primary findings. First, reopening policies generated asymmetrically large increases in reemployment of those out of work, compared to modest decreases in job loss among those employed. Second, most people who were reemployed appear to...

We make several contributions to understanding how the COVID-19 epidemic and policy responses have affected U.S. labor markets, benchmarked against two previous recessions. First, monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data show greater declines in employment in April 2020 (relative to February) for Hispanics, workers aged 20 to 24, and those with...

With vast databases at their disposal, private tech companies can compete with public statistical agencies to provide population statistics. However, private companies face different incentives to provide high-quality statistics and to protect the privacy of the people whose data are used. When both privacy protection and statistical accuracy are p...

When Google or the US Census Bureau publishes detailed statistics on browsing habits or neighborhood characteristics, some privacy is lost for everybody while supplying public information. To date, economists have not focused on the privacy loss inherent in data publication. In their stead, these issues have been advanced almost exclusively by comp...

Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: operate where the marginal cost of increasing privacy equals the marginal benefit. Our model of pr...

Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: operate where the marginal cost of increasing privacy equals the marginal benefit. Our model of pr...

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer-employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to un...

In Brazil, different employers report different racial classifications for the same worker. We use the variation in race across employers to estimate the relationship between race and wages. Workers whose reported race changes from nonwhite to white receive a wage increase; those who change from white to nonwhite realize a symmetric wage decrease....

Theoretical work on minimum wage policy emphasizes labor market dynamics, but the resulting implications for worker mobility remain largely untested. The authors show that in the teenage labor market, higher minimum wage standards reduce worker flows and increase job stability. Furthermore, they find that the employment effects of a relatively high...

This paper develops a model of frictional job search in which job referral networks evolve endogenously in response to local labor market conditions. An intuitive “Network Balance” condition characterizes the equilibrium density of the job referral network. The model helps explain observed counter-cyclical movements in referral-based search, and sh...

We develop a method for estimating compensating wage differentials for non-pecuniary job characteristics using matched longitudinal employer-employee data. Building on the he-donic search literature showing that search frictions cause compensating differentials to differ from workers' preferences, we demonstrate that under certain testable conditio...

Brazil, like many countries, is reluctant to publish business-level data, because of legitimate concerns about the estab- lishments' confidentiality. A trusted data curator can increase the utility of data, while managing the risk to establishments, either by releasing synthetic data, or by infusing noise into published statistics. This paper evalu...

Even though information technology is expanding and becoming more sophisticated and accessible to an increasing number of people, social interactions nevertheless still play a key role in matching workers to jobs throughout the developed and developing world. Employee referral is a recruitment method used by firms to identify potential employees fr...

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer-employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to un...

This paper explores the consequences for economic research of methods used by data publishers to protect the privacy of their respondents. We review the concept of statistical disclosure limitation for an audience of economists who may be unfamiliar with these methods. We characterize what it means for statistical disclosure limitation to be ignora...

Job mobility has many overlapping determinants that are hard to characterize solely on the basis of industry or occupation transitions. Workers may match with, and move to, particular jobs on the basis of match quality, preferences, human capital, and mobility costs. This paper implements a novel method based on complex network analysis to describe...

We test for sorting of workers between and within industrial sectors in a directed search model with coordination frictions. We fit the model to sector-specific vacancy and output data along with publicly-available statistics that characterize the distribution of worker and employer wage heterogeneity across sectors. Our empirical method is general...

This paper studies the emergence of job referral networks as an endogenous response to local labor market conditions. I build a frictional matching model in which workers directly exchange information about job opportunities. The model determines general equilibrium in the density of the job referral network workers use to share job information, jo...

In Brazil, different employers often report different racial classifications for the same worker. We use this variation in employer-reported race to identify wage discrimination. Workers whose reported race changes from non-white to white receive a wage increase; those who change from white to non-white realize a symmetric wage decrease. As much as...

Theoretical work on minimum wage policy emphasizes labor market dynamics, but the resulting implications for worker mobility remain largely untested. We show that minimum wages reduce worker flows and increase job stability. Furthermore, worker flows mediate the employment effects of the minimum wage. In markets with low turnover, an increase in th...

We study the effects of endogenous mobility on the linear decomposition of log wage rates into observable, personal, and employer heterogeneity. The Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) method for estimating such models under the assumption of exogenous mobility produces residuals that can be used to produce tests for the validity of the assumption....

Referral networks may affect the efficiency and equity of labor market outcomes, but few studies have been able to identify earnings effects empirically. To make progress, I set up a model of on-the-job search in which referral networks channel information about high-paying jobs. I evaluate the model using employer-employee matched data for the U.S...

Parker and Van Praag (2009) showed, based on theory, that the group status of the profession ‘entrepreneurship’ shapes people’s occupational preferences and thus their choice behavior. The current study focuses on the determinants and consequences of the group status of a profession, entrepreneurship in particular. If the group status of entreprene...

This paper reviews several statistical models for network data with the aim of analyzing the relational structure of matched employer-employee data.