About

Jesse Rothstein is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy and the David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education. He is the co-director of the California Policy Lab, which he co-founded, with Till von Wachter, in 2017, and the director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He serves on the boards of the Society of Labor Economists and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He previously served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor; as Senior Economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President; and as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley.

Research topics

• Demographic economics
• Labour economics
• Economics
• Business
• Finance
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• School Choice and Segregation: Evidence from the Oakland Unified School District

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum to “The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post-Great Recession Entrants”

  The Journal of Human Resources · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I recently discovered an error in the analysis for the above paper. Specifically, I used a faulty crosswalk between state Census codes and state FIPS codes. This crosswalk permuted the state codes in the West North Central division (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South

  PublisherDOI

• Interventions to bolster benefits take-up: Assessing intensity, framing, and targeting of government outreach

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-09-09 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 542,804 low-income households), we test whether more proactive communication, varying message framing, and more precise targeting can boost take-up of tax-based benefits in California above and beyond traditional light-touch approaches. Our interventions focused on extremely vulnerable households, most with no prior-year earnings, who were at risk of missing out on two crucial benefits: the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit and pandemic-relief Economic Impact Payments. Light-touch outreach consistently increased take-up of these benefits by 0.14 to 2 percentage points-a 150% to over 500% relative increase-regardless of message, sample, timing, or modality. These light-touch approaches resulted in over $4 million disbursed, with a highly cost-effective return of $50 to over $8,000 per $1 spent. However, higher-touch proactive outreach, varying messaging, and more precise targeting yielded minimal additional benefits, with proactive outreach even showing negative returns. These findings demonstrate that light-touch outreach can effectively shift behavior among very vulnerable households in contexts with reduced compliance burdens, but also underscore an urgent need to rethink the role of higher-touch strategies in closing take-up gaps in social safety net programs.

  PublisherDOI

• Re-assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

  2025-10-31

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Re-assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-03-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access

  We use detailed location information from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database to develop new evidence on the effects of spatial mismatch on the relative earnings of Black workers in large US cities.We classify workplaces by the size of the pay premiums they offer in a two-way fixed effects model, providing a simple metric for defining "good" jobs.We show that: (a) Black workers earn nearly the same average wage premiums as whites; (b) in most cities Black workers live closer to jobs, and closer to good jobs, than do whites; (c) Black workers typically commute shorter distances than whites; and (d) people who commute further earn higher average pay premiums, but the elasticity with respect to distance traveled is slightly lower for Black workers.We conclude that geographic proximity to good jobs is unlikely to be a major source of the racial earnings gaps in major U.S. cities today.

  PublisherDOI

• Rankings without U.S. News: A revealed preference approach to evaluating law schools

  Journal of Empirical Legal Studies · 2024-04-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Since their inception in 1989, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have influenced how schools, students, and the legal profession itself think about legal education. In the Fall of 2022, however, several of the most selective law schools formally withdrew from the annual rankings. In so doing, these schools laid bare longstanding criticisms of the rankings' questionable criteria and opaque methodology. While the long‐term effect of this boycott remains to be seen, school rankings are likely here to stay. In this Article we design a more informative approach to rankings, based on actual decisions students make. Using individual‐level data provided by the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), we analyze the universe of applicants to U.S. law schools for the period 1988 through 2017. In so doing, we are the first to create a revealed preference ranking based solely on where applicants matriculate given offers of admission. Our approach relies neither on potentially faulty data collection from schools nor arbitrary decisions about which factors to emphasize in rankings, thereby minimizing the scope for manipulation. It also allows us to quantify the magnitude of differences in preferences among schools and to test their statistical significance. Matriculants reveal a strong preference for a handful of the most selective schools; outside of the top tier, however, matriculants do not appear to draw meaningful distinctions between schools ranked adjacently or even near to each other. While existing school rankings sow more confusion than clarity, our analysis provides a rigorous and transparent alternative, and a blueprint for redesigning school rankings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Household Mobility and Mortgage Rate Lock

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Rising interest rates can create "mortgage rate lock" for homeowners with fixed rate mortgages, who can hold onto their low rates as long as they stay in their homes but would have to take on new mortgages with higher rates if they moved.We show mobility rates fell in 2022 and 2023 for homeowners with mortgages, as market rates rose.We observe both absolute declines and declines relative to homeowners without mortgages, who are unaffected by mortgage rate lock.Mobility declines are not explained by changes in home values.Overall, our estimates imply that rising interest rates reduced mobility in 2022 and 2023 for households with mortgages by 16% and caused $20 billion of deadweight loss.

  PublisherDOI

• Household mobility and mortgage rate lock

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2024-12-12 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Rising interest rates can create “mortgage rate lock” for homeowners with fixed rate mortgages, who can hold onto their low rates as long as they stay in their homes but would have to take on new mortgages with higher rates if they moved. We show mobility rates fell in 2022 and 2023 for homeowners with mortgages, as market rates rose. We observe both absolute declines and declines relative to homeowners without mortgages, who are unaffected by mortgage rate lock. Mobility declines are not explained by changes in home values. Overall, our estimates imply that rising interest rates reduced mobility in 2022 and 2023 for households with mortgages by 16% and caused $20bn of deadweight loss.

  PublisherDOI

• Re-Assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Reassessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2024-05-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Using Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, we demonstrate several facts that are not consistent with the “spatial mismatch” hypothesis that residential segregation and uneven distribution of jobs limit Black workers' opportunities. We show that (a) there is no Black-White gap in the firm premium component of wages in an Abowd-Kramarz-Margolis wage decomposition; (b) there are both more jobs and more good jobs within commuting distance of Black than White workers; and (c) Black workers' commutes are shorter. We conclude that geographic proximity to good jobs is not a major source of racial earnings gaps in major US cities today.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Card

  University of California, Berkeley

  46 shared

• Eli Ben‐Michael

  33 shared

• Avi Feller

  31 shared

• Henry S. Farber

  29 shared

• Robert G. Valletta

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  26 shared

• Nathan Wozny

  22 shared

• Albert Yoon

  19 shared

• Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

  18 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Public Policy and Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2000

• M.A., Public Policy

  University of California, Berkeley

  1996

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1993

Awards & honors

• John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar by the Labor and Employme…
• Fellow of the National Education Policy Center
• Fellow of the CESifo Research Network
• Fellow of the IZA
• Fellow of the Learning Policy Institute