December 29, 2025
Upjohn Institute researchers are participating in the 2026 Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) annual meeting as paper authors and discussants in nine different sessions. The Upjohn researchers and their sessions are listed below. The conference runs January 3–5 in Philadelphia.
Held jointly by the American Economic Association and the 66 academic and professional organizations that make up the ASSA, the meeting is the largest economics conference of its kind. Upjohn Institute staff will present research each day of the conference.
Full details and links to sessions are found below.
Saturday, January 3
8:00 a.m.
Aaron Sojourner is coauthor on the presented paper “Just Cause Protection under Manager Discrimination.”
- Synopsis: “Just cause” policies seek to prevent employees from arbitrarily being fired. Joseph Pickens and Aaron Sojourner examine the effects of just cause when managers engage in taste-based discrimination. Biased managers would logically move against disfavored workers during the initial probationary period, before just cause protections take effect. The authors test whether this is true using New York City’s 2021 just cause law for fast-food employees. They do not find results consistent with taste-based discrimination against Black or Hispanic workers, women, or older workers, though lack of enforcement or data issues could lead to these results. However, their analysis suggests another mechanism: screening discrimination against younger workers.
- Read the working paper here
- Read the policy brief here
2:30 p.m.
Michael Horrigan is part of a panel on the state of the U.S. labor market. Along with Jason Faberman (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago), William Beach (Economic Policy Innovation Center), Lisa Kahn (University of Rochester), and Laura Ulrich (Indeed), he will be discussing questions about the overall strength of the labor market, how policies and structural factors have affected the labor market over the past year, and what to look for in the coming year.
Sunday, January 4
8:00 a.m.
Stephen A. Woodbury will present his paper "Race, Ethnicity, and Nonpayment of Unemployment Insurance: The Role of the Employer." Marta Lachowska, previously of the Upjohn Institute and currently a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, is coauthor.
- Sybiosis: Are unemployment insurance (UI) claimants who are Black, Hispanic, or Asian more likely than Whites to have their claims disputed by their employer or ultimately not receive UI? Authors Lachowska and Woodbury, relying on UI administrative wage and claim records from Washington State from 2005 to 2013, look at workers who had filed multiple claims with different employers, thus isolating the influence of individual employer behavior on UI disputes and nonpayment. They find strong evidence of employer-specific effects on the likelihood that a worker’s UI claim will be disputed, but relatively weak evidence that a dispute will result in nonpayment of benefits. And they find only weak evidence that employers dispute claims of non-White workers more than those of White workers, and no evidence of disparities in nonpayment.
10:15 a.m
Alfonso Flores-Lagunes is a discussant in the session “Immigration Policy, Border Crossing, and Integration.”
Aaron Sojourner will present the paper “Growing Up in a Union Household: Impacts of Adult Union Status on Children’s Life Course.”
- Synopsis: Labor unions might have broader effects beyond the workplace. Aaron Sojourner, John Budd, Ben Zipperer, and Tom VanHeuvelen link data on mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to data on their children from the NLSY79 Child Survey to analyze whether a mother’s unionization history during a child’s growing-up years affects two childhood outcomes (cognitive skill and behavior) and two adult outcomes (educational attainment and earnings). They also use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to look at the effect of the unionization history of the head of household on similar childhood and adult outcomes. The authors do not find a strong pattern of results that would indicate a significant union influence on these measures of the quality of a child’s life course.
Monique Davis presents her paper “Safety for Whom? How Law Enforcement and School Resource Officer Training Impacts Racial Gaps in School Exclusionary Discipline.”
- Synopsis: Do race-neutral school safety policies have race-neutral impacts? Monique Davis examines the effects of statewide law enforcement credential and special training requirements for school resource officers (SROs) on Black-White gaps in suspensions, expulsions, law-enforcement referrals, and school-related arrests, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ 2013–2014 through 2020–2021 Civil Rights Data Collection school-level surveys and other sources. Her results indicate that requiring SROs to hold sworn law-enforcement credentials more than doubles racial gaps in suspensions and law-enforcement referrals in majority-Black schools but not in minority-Black schools. Her findings suggest the need for structural, race-conscious policy changes to address racial disparities in school discipline.
12:30 p.m.
Aaron Sojourner is coauthor on the presented paper “Effects of Fair Workweek Laws on Labor Market Outcomes.”
- Synopsis: Joseph Pickens and Aaron Sojourner model fair workweek regulations that require employers to provide employees with two things. The first is schedule predictability, through advance notice of their work schedule and premium payments for scheduling changes on short notice. The second is access to hours, meaning the employer must offer open hours to existing employees before hiring new workers. The authors develop a theoretical model of employers’ responses to these provisions and how such responses would impact employment. Using a difference-in-differences design, they estimate the effects of recently adopted fair workweek regulation in New York City’s fast-food sector and find a null effect.
- Read the working paper here
- Read the policy brief here
2:30 p.m.
- Chloe Gibbs presents “Preschool as Child Care: Head Start Duration Expansions and Maternal Employment.”
- Synopsis: Early childhood care and education has two purposes: supporting children’s development and making it easier for parents to work for pay. Leveraging a 2016 funding eligibility rule that expanded the duration of Head Start programs, Chloe Gibbs, Esra Kose, and Maria Rosales-Rueda examine how access to full-day Head Start programs affects maternal labor supply. The authors’ analysis combines data on Head Start enrollment and center locations with parents’ employment data from the annual American Community Survey from 2008 to 2020. They show that the 2016 funding availability significantly bolstered Head Start enrollment and that single mothers of preschool-aged children increased their labor force participation and work hours per week.
Monday, January 5
8:00 a.m.
Ethan Jenkins is coauthor on the presented paper “Dynamic Individuals, Static Neighborhoods: Migration, Earnings Changes, and Concentrated Poverty.”
- Synopsis: How does neighborhood quality change across an individual’s life cycle, and what does this mean for exposure to concentrated poverty? Using administrative data, Andrew Garin, Ethan Jenkins, Evan Mast, and Bryan Stuart show a high level of migration in neighborhoods defined by poverty rate and median income. Over an individual’s lifetime, neighborhood quality improves as people respond to earnings increases by moving to better neighborhoods. The implications for high-poverty neighborhoods are several: First, these areas have rapid turnover. Second, among residents, future concentrated poverty exposure is bimodal—i.e., young people, renters, and those with children tend to spend less than half of the next ten years in poor neighborhoods, while elderly and homeowners are unlikely to exit concentrated poverty. Third, poor neighborhoods tend to stay poor because initial residents out-migrate when earnings improve. This contrasts with the pure “poverty trap” image of persistent concentrated poverty.
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