RESEARCH PROJECTS
with Caleb Wroblewski
Private retirement plans are a crucial part of worker’s compensation in the U.S. and have long been thought to influence labor supply. This study uses a cohort-based regression discontinuity design to examine how a change in the retirement plan at the largest U.S. employer, the Federal Government, impacted the retention of employees over the entire life cycle. We find that workers with less valuable employer pensions but more portable retirement benefits were more likely to separate from the government around 15 and 30 years after beginning federal service. We find smaller, statistically insignificant effects in the first few years of employment. We also find evidence that the effects are driven by highly productive workers, identified through supplemental compensation or early promotions. Our results suggest that employees respond to changes in the value of retirement benefits by leaving employers for better outside options, but that employees may be inattentive or job-locked early in their careers. These findings demonstrate that non-wage compensation impacts labor supply decisions across a worker's lifecycle and the distribution of human capital over time, particularly in labor markets where employers compete through diverse compensation structures.
with B. Douglas Bernheim and Dmitry Taubinsky
R&R at the Journal of Political Economy
The standard revealed-preference approach to welfare economics encounters fundamental difficulties when the act of choosing directly affects welfare through emotions such as guilt, pride, and anxiety. We address this problem by developing an approach that redefines consumption bundles in terms of the sensations they produce, and measures welfare by blending choice-based methods with self-reported well-being techniques. In applications to classic social preferences paradigms, our approach shows that standard revealed-preference methods, including those that exploit choices over menus, mismeasure welfare because preferences depend on choice sets, while self-reported happiness and satisfaction are not sufficient statistics for welfare.
with Sarah Baker
This paper investigates the intertemporal elasticity of inherited property in California. Using San Francisco and Los Angeles counties, we find that households accelerated inter-vivos property transfers to their children by about 13 to 18 months in response to a future tax increase. Properties in the top income decile neighborhoods were more responsive than other groups. As a consequence of wealthy households retiming their transfers to avoid taxes, our results imply a significant reduction in government revenue and an exacerbation of inequality in tax liabilities.
NOTES FROM THE PHD AND UNDERGRAD (UC BERKELEY + SOME)
Links below lead to Dropbox. If you cannot access them, you can contact me, and I will send you the file.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
My research interests lie in Public and Behavioral Economics. My job market paper studies how changes in non-wage compensation (retirement benefits) affect firm-specific labor supply across the lifecycle and firm-specific workforce composition. My other research focuses on the distributional impacts on tax-preferred property inheritances and behavioral welfare measures.
Outside of research, I like to doodle.
Contact me at kristykim [at] berkeley [dot] edu.
