Stephen G. Bronars

Biography

 Dr. Bronars joined the UT faculty in 1992 and is the current Chair of the Department of Economics. He previously held positions at The University of California at Santa Barbara and Texas A and M University. He has studied the impact of labor unions on the behavior and performance of firms, the relationship between firm profitability and workers' wages, the incentive effects of the welfare system, and the labor market effects of immigration and internal migration.

In collaboration with Jeff Grogger at the University of California-Los Angeles, Bronars recently published a very important and timely paper (Journal of Political Economy, 2001) analyzing the relationship between welfare payments and the marriage and fertility behavior of unmarried black and white women. By combining the A, B, and C sub-samples of the 1980 PUMS, they created an innovative data set from which they were able to identify 785 initially unmarried mothers of twins, along with a much larger sample of 89,000 initially unmarried mothers of singletons. The use of twin births allowed for the effective control of unobservable characteristics that may confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior. The results showed that higher base welfare benefits lead unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage, and lead unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth. However, the magnitudes of these effects were fairly modest. Moreover, the paper showed no evidence that the marginal benefit paid at the birth of an additional child, which is the key focus of the family cap debate--affects fertility. This study built on the earlier work of Bronars and Grogger, published in the American Economic Review, that advanced the use of twin births as a natural experiment to study the economic consequences of births to unmarried women.

Dr. Bronars has also recently worked on projects examining the determination of wages for white-collar workers, also recently published in the Journal of Political Economy (with Melissa Famulari at UT). This paper demonstrated that for each $10 increase in shareholder wealth, the firm's white-collar wage bill increases by $1, providing substantial evidence that the wages of white-collar workers are significantly higher in firms with high equity returns.

NIH Biosketch