arXiv subjects

R. Alan Seals

Publications and source records attributed to R. Alan Seals.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Robots and the Public Finance of Disability Insurance

Automation affects public budgets through wages and the tax base, and also through inflows into social insurance. We estimate the effect of industrial robot exposure on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications using confidential commuting-zone data and a shift-share design that instruments U.S. exposure with earlier European robot diffusion. One additional robot per 1,000 workers lowers applications by about 8 per 100,000 working-age residents, with the largest declines among workers aged 55 to 64. Employment-to-population ratios do not fall in exposed commuting zones, which weighs against broad local displacement as the sole explanation. A year's flow of averted applications corresponds to about \$3.4 billion in expected SSDI and Medicare obligations, or about \$17,000 per robot-year, in present value rather than realized cash. Displacement adds to social-insurance costs, whereas robot exposure here reduces them, an offset that assessments built only on displacement leave unpriced.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Mobile Foreigners: Mortgage Lock-In and H-1B Demand

The 2022 rise in U.S. mortgage rates increased relocation costs for homeowners with low-rate mortgages. This cost varies across destinations because each draws workers from a different mix of labor markets. We build an in-migration mortgage-payment wedge from HMDA loans and pre-shock IRS migration networks. From 2017 to 2024, higher wedges reduce college-educated homeowner in-migration, leave renters unaffected, and raise H-1B sponsorship requests. The implied offset is 14 H-1B sponsorship requests per 100 deterred college-educated domestic in-migrants. We show that mortgage lock-in operates as a destination-side labor-market shock that shifts part of firms' adjustment toward employer-sponsored immigration.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Routine Work, Firm Boundaries, and the Rise of Local Supplier Entry

Between 2005 and 2019, U.S. business applications rose 40 percent while conversion to employer firms fell by nearly half. We study whether boundary redrawing helps explain this pattern. Structured routine-cognitive work can be governed through deliverables and thinner buyer and supplier interfaces. When such work remains place-bound, outsourcing creates demand for domestic specialist suppliers. Across 722 commuting zones, a one percentage-point higher baseline routine employment share raises applications by 27.8 per 100,000 residents. Realized entry concentrates in micro-establishments, with no startup quality gains. Contract and industry evidence point to local supplier entry, not routine-manual displacement.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Hiring Discrimination and the Task Content of Jobs: Evidence from a Large-Scale Resume Audit

We conducted a large-scale resume audit of 36,880 applications to 9,220 job advertisements for new college graduates across the United States. Firms express task preferences through job-advertisement text, which we link to occupation-level task measures from O*NET and the American Community Survey. We develop a model in which discrimination increases with evaluative discretion, defined as the share of hiring decisions driven by subjective rather than verifiable assessment. Callback gaps vary systematically with the task content of jobs. In management occupations, callbacks are 28 to 43 percent lower for Black men, Black women, White women, and Hispanic men than for otherwise identical White men. Broad occupation categories conceal important variation in task demands. When jobs are grouped by task intensity, discrimination concentrates in positions combining high analytical and interpersonal demands with low routine content. Decomposing task content into subjective-evaluation and objective-precision components, we find that subjective evaluation widens callback gaps while objective precision compresses them. Customer contact amplifies this divergence, widening gaps in non-routine jobs but not in routine jobs. Randomly assigned resume credentials that increase callbacks on average reduce gaps in low-discretion jobs but not in high-discretion jobs. Early-career exclusion from high-return task bundles may entrench long-run demographic gaps in employment outcomes.

econ.GN↗