University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor of Public Affairs Ross Milton will present for the Seminar Series.
About Ross Milton
Ross Milton was an assistant professor of economics at Kansas State University. His research focuses on the political economy and public finance of state and local taxes and includes studies of tax limitation policies and the effects of local taxes on alternative revenue sources. He holds a PhD and MA in economics from Cornell University and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Macalester College. His research has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, and he has several other papers under review, including two on local education funding.
About the presentation
This presentation examines monthly earnings volatility and its transmission to household earnings volatility using data from Norway on the universe of monthly employment and pay histories linked to household members. In the first part of the presentation, we document substantial month-to-month changes in earnings: within a job, while a quarter of months have no earnings changes, another quarter have at least a 23% change in earnings. Accounting for multiple-job holdings and spells of non-employment increases volatility, while further aggregating from the individual to the household level reduces volatility by 19-30%. In the second part of the presentation, we explore the roles of spousal insurance, assortative matching, and income pooling through event study analyses of job loss and couple formation as well as decomposition and bounding exercises. We show that virtually all of the decrease in volatility at the household level can be attributed to earnings pooling rather than to who marries whom or to behavioral responses to shocks.
Please note that this event may be photographed. Images and other content may be published on Flickr and/or used to promote the La Follette School of Public Affairs in the future.
Organizer
La Follette School of Public Affairs,
Contact
Mindy Walker, mindy.walker@wisc.edu
