ILRie

CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research. Title: Government Mandates, Manager Anticipatory Compliance, and a Partisan Filter in Enforcement Expectation Abstract: Government mandates (e.g., laws, executive orders) are often initially change-prone and subject to legal contestation. Yet, some managers promptly comply despite uncertainty regarding mandate legality and scope. Less is known about the drivers of managers’ anticipatory compliance decisions. Studying this, we examine U.S. President Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban” executive order, which sought to ban U.S. entry for immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. Leveraging government administrative records on employer-sponsored immigrant work authorization applications, we analyze managers’ response to the ban through anticipatory compliance (voluntary application withdrawal). Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find withdrawal rates increased from 0.3 to 8.5 percent for immigrants from targeted majority Muslim countries in the year after the ban, relative to the year before, peaking at 29 percent. We find that this withdrawal increase is not driven by broad anti-Muslim bias, or a partisan imperative to demonstrate timely responsiveness. Rather, analyses indicate the presence of a partisan filter in enforcement expectation: Manager withdrawals from Republican-leaning employers increased gradually and peaked with the U.S. Supreme Court’s willingness to consider the Muslim Ban’s legality, which occurred in the 5-6 months after the Ban’s announcement. Findings emphasize the capacity of government to shape labor market dynamics through (even legally-contested) mandates, and the importance of accounting for employer ideology in anticipatory compliance decisions.

The 23rd Annual ILR Labor Roundtable brings a wide range of representatives in labor leadership, unions, and social justice organizations to engage in dynamic, in-depth conversations with students. Join us to learn about current trends and roles in the labor movement, as well as the fundamental role it plays in bringing about social change. Register on Handshake This event is sponsored by the ILR Worker Institute and is open to all Cornell students. Please contact the planning committee at laborroundtable2@cornell.edu with any questions.

Senan Hogan Hennessy Causal Mediation in Natural Experiments Abstract: Natural experiments are a cornerstone of applied economics, providing settings for estimating causal effects with a compelling argument for treatment randomisation, but give little indication of the mechanisms behind causal effects. Causal Mediation (CM) is a framework for sufficiently identifying a mechanism behind the treatment effect, decomposing it into an indirect effect channel through a mediator mechanism and a remaining direct effect. By contrast, a suggestive analysis of mechanisms gives necessary but not sufficient evidence. Conventional CM methods require that the relevant mediator mechanism is as-good-as-randomly assigned; when people choose the mediator based on costs and benefits (whether to visit a doctor, to attend university, etc.), this assumption fails and conventional CM analyses are at risk of bias. I propose an alternative strategy that delivers unbiased estimates of CM effects despite unobserved selection, using instrumental variation in mediator take-up costs. The method identifies CM effects via the marginal effect of the mediator, with parametric or semi-parametric estimation that is simple to implement in two stages. Applying these methods to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment reveals a substantial portion of the Medicaid lottery's effect on subjective health and well-being flows through increased healthcare usage --- an effect that a conventional CM analysis would mistake. This approach gives applied researchers an alternative method to estimate CM effects when an initial treatment is quasi-randomly assigned, but a mediator mechanism is not, as is common in natural experiments.

Panelists: Samira Rafaela, Former Member of European Parliament, Visiting Scholar, Cornell Law School Chiara Cristofolini, Associate Professor of Labor Law, University of Trento, Visiting Scholar, Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations Sarosh Kuruvilla, Andrew J. Nathanson Family Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations, Global Labor and Work, Academic Director, Global Labor Institute Moderator: Chantal Thomas, Radice Family Professor of Law and Director, Cornell Center for Global Economic Justice Cornell Law School