Research

I am a labor and urban economist with a wide range of interests, including low-income housing, labor and housing mobility, illegal behavior, fertility and female labor force participation, and the gender earnings gap.

Click here for my complete Curriculum Vita.

Publications

Graetz, Nick, Peter Hepburn, Carl Gershenson, Sonya R. Porter, Danielle H. Sandler, Emily Lemmerman, and Matthew Desmond. 2024. “Examining Excess Mortality Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic for Renters Threatened With Eviction.” JAMA 331 (7): 592–600.

Graetz, Nick, Carl Gershenson, Sonya R Porter, Danielle H Sandler, Emily Lemmerman, Matthew Desmond. 2023. "The impacts of rent burden and eviction on mortality in the United States, 2000–2019." Social Science & Medicine. 340 (116398).

Foster, Lucia, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler. 2023. "Early Career Paths of Economists inside and outside of Academia." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 37 (4): 231-50.

Graetz, Nick, Carl Gershenson, Peter Hepburn, Sonya R. Porter, Danielle H. Sandler, and Matthew Desmond. 2023. “A Comprehensive Demographic Profile of the US Evicted Population.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (41).

Murray, Seth, Danielle H. Sandler, and Matthew Staiger. Forthcoming. "Female Executives and the Motherhood Penalty " Journal of Human Resources

Foster, Lucia, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler. 2023. "Diversity and Equity in Labor Market Outcomes for Economists". Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, 1-12.

Foster, Lucia, Julia Manzella, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler. 2020. "Employment and Earnings for Federal Government Economists: Empirical Evidence by Gender and Race." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 110: 210-14. 

Schulkind, Lisa and Danielle H. Sandler. 2019. "The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later Life Outcomes," Demography, 56: 345–365.

Sandler, Danielle H. 2017. "Externalities of public housing: The effect of public housing demolitions on local crime," Regional Science and Urban Economics, 62: 24-35.

Phillips, David C. and Danielle H. Sandler. 2015. "Does public transit spread crime? Evidence from temporary rail station closures," Regional Science and Urban Economics, 52: 13-26. 

Sandler, Danielle H. and Ryan Sandler. 2014. "Multiple event studies in public finance and labor economics: A simulation study with applications," Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, 39(1-2): 31-57. 

Working Papers/Reports

"The Long-Run Effects of Residential Racial Desegregation Programs: Evidence from Gautreaux" with Eric Chyn and Robert Collinson

This paper provides new evidence on the long-run effects of residential racial desegregation policies by studying the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. From the late 1970s until the 1990s, Gautreaux assisted thousands of Black families to move to predominately white, mostly suburban neighborhoods. We link historical program records to administrative data and use plausibly exogenous variation in neighborhood placements to estimate the effects of Gautreaux on the long-run outcomes of children. Being placed in a white neighborhood significantly increases children’s future lifetime earnings, employment, and wealth. Gautreaux children placed in a white neighborhood are also significantly more likely to be married and twice as likely to be married to a white spouse. Moreover, placements through Gautreaux impact the neighborhood choices of children in adulthood. Children placed in white neighborhoods during childhood live in more racially diverse neighborhoods with higher rates of upward mobility nearly 40 years later.


"Same-Sex Couples and the Child Earnings Penalty" with Lucia Foster, Barbara Downs, and Rachel Nesbit

Existing work has shown that the entry of a child into a household results in a large and sustained increase in the earnings gap between male and female partners in opposite-sex couples. Potential reasons for this include work-life preferences, comparative advantage over earnings, and gender norms. We expand this analysis of the child penalty to examine earnings of individuals in same-sex couples in the U.S. around the time their first child enters the household. Using linked survey and administrative data and event-study methodology, we confirm earlier work finding a child penalty for women in opposite-sex couples. We find this is true even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while on average the earnings of primary and equal earners remain relatively constant. While this finding seems supportive of a norm related to equality within same-sex couples, transition analysis suggests a more complicated story.


"Real-Time 2020 Administrative Record Census Simulation" with J. David Brown, Samuel R. Cohen, Genevieve Denoeux, Suzanne Dorinski, Misty L. Heggeness, Carl Lieberman, Linden McBride, Marta Murray-Close, Hongxun Qin, Allen E. Ross, Lawrence Warren, and Moises Yi

This experiment combined 31 types of administrative record and third-party sources to produce 2020 population estimates with the same reference date, April 1, 2020, and within the same timeframe as the 2020 Census of Population and Housing. The sources and methodology are designed to improve coverage of historically undercounted population groups.

The administrative census national population estimates are 1.1 and 2.5 percent higher than the 2020 Demographic Analysis high and low estimates, respectively, 2.3 percent higher than the 2020 Census count, and 2.9 percent higher than the vintage-2020 Population Estimates Program estimate. Our analysis suggests that the higher administrative record census estimate can be explained by inclusion of more non-U.S. citizens, especially those with unknown legal status.

The report identifies several improvements critical to developing the Census Bureau’s administrative record infrastructure to facilitate higher-quality administrative record-based population estimates, especially regarding locational accuracy.


"Estimating the U.S. Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) Using Blended Survey Data, Administrative Record Data, and Modeling: Technical Report" with J.David Brown, Genevieve Denoeux, Misty L. Heggeness, Carl Lieberman, Lauren Medina, Marta Murray-Close, Joseph L. Schafer, Matthew Spence Lawrence Warren, Moises Yi 

This report develops a method using administrative records (AR) to fill in responses for nonresponding American Community Survey (ACS) housing units rather than adjusting survey weights to account for selection of a subset of nonresponding housing units for follow-up interviews and for nonresponse bias. The method also inserts AR and modeling in place of edits and imputations for ACS survey citizenship item nonresponses. We produce Citizen Voting-Age Population (CVAP) tabulations using this enhanced CVAP method and compare them to published estimates. The enhanced CVAP method produces a 0.74 percentage point lower citizen share, and it is 3.05 percentage points lower for voting-age Hispanics. The latter result can be partly explained by omissions of voting-age Hispanic noncitizens with unknown legal status from ACS household responses. Weight adjustments may be less effective at addressing nonresponse bias under those conditions.


"Employment of Persons Released from Federal Prison in 2010" with E. Ann Carson, Renuka Bhaskar, Leticia E. Fernandez, and Sonya R. Porter

This report fulfills a congressional mandate in the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act, part of the 2019 Defense Reauthorization Act (P.L. 116–92, Title XI, Subtitle B, Section 1124). Congress tasked BJS and the U.S. Census Bureau with reporting on post-prison employment of persons released from federal prison. The records of persons released from federal prison in 2010 (collected by BJS in the Federal Justice Statistics Program) were linked with employment and earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program (collected by the Census Bureau) to estimate the percentage of persons who were employed in the 4 years (16 quarters) after release, as well as their earnings and employment sector. The report presents statistics on both pre-prison and post-prison employment and median earnings, differentiated by age, sex, race and ethnicity, most serious offense, and amount of time served. The report also discusses the industry sectors that employed persons before and after imprisonment.


"Maternal Labor Dynamics: Participation, Earnings, and Employer Changes" with Nichole Szembrot

This paper describes the labor dynamics of U.S. women after they have had their first and subsequent children. We build on the child penalty literature by showing the heterogeneity of the size and pattern of labor force participation and earnings losses by demographic characteristics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers. The analysis uses longitudinal administrative earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics database combined with the Survey of Income and Program Participation survey data to identify women, their fertility timing, and employment. We find that women experience a large and persistent decrease in earnings and labor force participation after having their first child. The penalty grows over time, driven by the birth of subsequent children. Non-white mothers, unmarried mothers, and mothers with more education are more likely to return to work following the birth of their first child. Conditional on returning to the labor force, women who change employers earn more after the birth of their first child than women who return to their pre-birth employers. The probability of returning to the pre-birth employer and industry is heterogeneous over both the demographics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers. 

"The Parental Gender Wage Gap in the United States" with Yoonkyung Chung, Barbara Downs, and Robert Sienkiewicz

This paper examines the parental gender earnings gap, the within-couple differences in earnings over time, before and after the birth of a child. The presence and timing of children are important components of the gender wage gap, but there is selection in both decisions. We estimate the earnings gap between male and female spouses over time, which allows us to control for this timing choice as well as other shared external earnings shifters, such as the local labor market. We use Social Security Administration Detail Earnings Records (SSA-DER) data linked to the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine a panel of earnings from 1978 to 2011 for the individuals in the SIPP sample. Our main results show that the spousal earnings gap doubles between two years before the birth of the first child and the year after that child is born. After the child's first year of life the gap continues to grow for the next five years, but at a much slower rate, then tapers off and even begins to fall once the child reaches school-age. 

Press: The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women's Pay Gap (New York Times), The 10-year baby window intensifying the gender pay gap (World Economic Forum), Having Kids Widens the Wage Gap, But These Women Are More Likely to Bounce Back (Fortune) U.S. Fertility Rate Fell to a Record Low for a Second Straight Year (New York Times), Pregnancy Discrimination is Rampant Inside America's Biggest Companies (New York Times), 10-Year Baby Window May Be Key to Women's Pay Gap (Bloomberg) Mom-Dad Pay Gap Grows After First Child (Center for Retirement Research)

"Developing a Residence Candidate File for Use With Employer-Employee Matched Data" with Matthew Graham and Mark Kutzbach

This paper describes the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program’s ongoing efforts to use administrative records in a predictive model that describes residence locations for workers. This project was motivated by the discontinuation of a residence file produced elsewhere at the U.S. Census Bureau. The goal of the Residence Candidate File (RCF) process is to provide the LEHD Infrastructure Files with residence information that maintains currency with the changing state of administrative sources and represents uncertainty in location as a probability distribution. The discontinued file provided only a single residence per person/year, even when contributing administrative data may have contained multiple residences. This paper describes the motivation for the project, our methodology, the administrative data sources, the model estimation and validation results, and the file specifications. We find that the best prediction of the person-place model provides similar, but superior, accuracy compared with previous methods and performs well for workers in the LEHD jobs frame. We outline possibilities for further improvement in sources and modeling as well as recommendations on how to use the preference weights in downstream processing. 

Works in progress

"Employment and Earnings among Former Prisoners: 2010--2016 NCRP--LEHD Cohort'' with Sonya Porter, Renuka Bhaskar, Leticia Fernandez, Ann Carson, and Danielle Kaeble

"Survey of Prison Inmates: An Assessment of Linkage Rates from Self-Reported Data Matched to Administrative Records from Socioeconomic Sources" with Lauren G. Beatty, Melissa Nadel, Miranda Hines, Claudia Masters, Sonya R. Porter, and David Pritchard

"Assessing the Quality and Coverage of Pre-prison Address Information for Federal and State Prisoners" with Eric English, Sonya R. Porter, David Pritchard, and Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej 

"The impact of childcare costs on mothers’ labor force participation" with Valeska Araujo and Linden McBride