Opportunity Research 6/28 - Childcare and the Job Market, Frontline Worker Burnout, Airbnb and Housing Prices
By Andrew and Mario
From NBER - a working paper suggests that, “despite the widespread challenges that parents—mothers in particular—have faced from ongoing school and daycare closures, excess employment declines among mothers of young children were not a quantitatively important driver of continuing low employment levels through the beginning of 2021.”
As the authors point out, the critical question is how the career trajectory of working mothers who navigated the pandemic will be impacted.
From the University of California - a working paper highlights a multi-city field experiment that aimed to affirm social belonging among 911 dispatchers using a six-week intervention that prompted dispatchers to share advice anonymously and asynchronously with their peers in other cities. The intervention “reduced burnout by 8 points and cut resignations by more than half (3.6 percentage points) four months after the intervention ended. These findings suggest that low-cost belonging affirmation techniques can reduce frontline worker burnout and help government agencies retain workers, saving a mid-sized city at least $400,000 in personnel costs.”
This is highly relevant to frontline workers such as teachers, social workers, and nurses, who report feeling emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and low personal accomplishment, particularly on the heels of the pandemic. For instance, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that 66.3% of professionals surveyed reported burnout. Those with more experience or working in academic settings were more likely to report burnout with 23.6% fewer respondents planning to remain in the public health workforce for three or more years. In K-12 education, though it appears that the massive wave of teacher retirements many predicted because of the pandemic aren’t happening, a third of teachers are at or near retirement age, and a wave may be coming in the near future. Federal funds used to implement evidence-based interventions that address burnout will be well spent.
From the Journal of Urban Economics - a study details how home sharing ordinances - those that restricted short-term Airbnb rentals - impacted housing prices and rent in 18 Los Angeles County cities. The analysis concludes that home sharing ordinances reduce Airbnb listings by about 50% and reduce house prices by 2% on average with essentially the same effects for rents. The authors conclude, “regulation creates losses for homeowners that are very substantial in areas that are popular for tourists. The opposite holds for households who typically rent and who can only gain from regulation as it increases rental housing supply and therefore reduces rents.”
We wonder if, when Airbnb was founded, they paused to ask themselves, “and then what?” Based on this study, it doesn’t appear that there is a first-order positive, second/third-order negative scenario. Good news for Airbnb.