Bio
I’m a PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. I also work as a Graduate Student Assistant at the State of California’s Employment Development Department for the California Policy Lab.
My primary research interests are related to the design of social insurance and safety net programs. I am also interested in the economics of health behaviors. My recent work on the US Unemployment Insurance program has been funded by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Bilinski Educational Foundation.
Fields: Public, Labor, Health
Curriculum Vitae (Updated October 2020)
Email: gcschnorr@ucdavis.edu
Job Market Paper
Claim Timing and Unemployment Insurance Benefit Generosity
Draft coming soon
Abstract (click to expand): Unemployment Insurance replaces a percentage of prior earnings while a claimant is out of work. To implement the program, policymakers must define a base period from which prior earnings are measured. I analyze two implications of this previously unexamined policy choice. First, for claimants with volatile enough earnings, a commonly used base period structure creates ''benefit risk''---a job loss at the wrong time implies lower benefit amounts. Second, since base periods are determined by the claim filing date, claimants can partially avoid the negative effects of this risk by strategically timing their claims. Using several new sources of administrative data from California’s Unemployment Insurance program, I make three contributions. First, I use a simple dynamic model of job search and Unemployment Insurance to show that the private welfare costs of benefit risk are large. The average claimant would trade 5% of their expected Unemployment Insurance benefits to eliminate exposure to benefit risk and this number rises substantially among young and especially low-income claimants. Second, I demonstrate that claim-timing responses can act as an effective solution to this problem. Some claimants strategically delay their claims after a job loss in order to receive higher benefits. Third, I provide suggestive evidence that information frictions are a key barrier to this mitigating behavior.
Working Papers
(with Lester Lusher and Rebecca Taylor)
Current Version: October 2020
Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Abstract (click to expand): We provide causal evidence of an ex-ante moral hazard effect of Unemployment Insurance (UI) by matching plausibly exogenous changes in UI benefit duration across state-weeks during the Great Recession to high-frequency productivity measures from individual supermarket cashiers. Estimating models with day and cashier-register fixed effects, we identify a modest but statistically significant negative relationship between UI benefits and worker productivity. This effect is strongest for more experienced and less productive cashiers, for whom UI expansions are especially relevant. Additional analyses from the American Time Use Survey reveal a similar increase in shirking during periods with increased UI benefit durations.
Am I my Brother's Barkeeper? Sibling Spillovers in Alcohol Consumption at the Minimum Legal Drinking Age
(with Eunju Lee)
Draft coming soon
Abstract (click to expand): We exploit a unique group of adolescent peers which allows for the estimation of causally interpretable peer effects in alcohol consumption, sibling pairs close to the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) in the United States. Using a regression discontinuity design and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth we are consistently able to rule out meaningfully large positive peer effects between siblings. We also find suggestive evidence that younger siblings reduce their alcohol consumption in response to an increase in their older sibling's alcohol consumption. These negative effects are concentrated among siblings of the same gender, siblings that reside in the same household, and especially younger siblings with less prior drinking experience.
Work in Progress
Unemployment Insurance and Labor Supply During the Coronavirus Crisis
(with Alex Bell and Till von Wachter)
Abstract (click to expand): Using close to real-time administrative data from California’s Unemployment Insurance program and two research designs we estimate the causal effect of Unemployment Insurance benefit levels on unemployment duration during the Coronavirus crisis. First, we follow prior work to implement a regression kink design at the maximum weekly benefit amount. The size and comprehensiveness of our data---which includes all UI claims filed in California in the past two decades and is updated regularly with a lag of only one week---allows us to carry out this approach for claims filed during the crisis. Second, we directly estimate the effect of the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation payments---which temporarily added $600 to all weekly benefit amounts---by exploiting the program’s differential effect on replacement rates across prior earnings groups (lower earners saw larger increases). Our results will contribute to a critical ongoing debate about the policy response to the crisis.
Selected Pre-PhD Publications
Overspending driven by oversized single dose vials of cancer drugs
(with Peter Bach, Rena Conti, Raymond Muller, and Leonard Saltz)
British Medical Journal, 2016
Policy Work
California Unemployment Insurance Claims During the COVID-19 Pandemic
(with Alex Bell, Thomas J. Hedin, and Till von Wachter)
California Policy Lab Policy Brief, 2020 (updated frequently)
I am part of a team of researchers at the California Policy Lab working with the State of California’s Employment Development Department to analyze nearly real-time administrative Unemployment Insurance claims data during the Coronavirus crisis. Our findings have been released in a series of Policy Briefs, which you can find at the link above. This work has received media coverage from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, among others.
Employment and Earnings Among LA County Residents Experiencing Homelessness
(with Nefara Riesch and Till von Wachter)
California Policy Lab Policy Brief, February 2020
Website: Thanks to Gautam Rao and Xinyue Lin for making their code publicly available.
