About

Pauline Leung is an assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. Her research focuses on social and labor market policy for economically vulnerable populations. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in May 2016 and holds a B.A. from the University of California - Berkeley, earned in May 2009. Her academic interests include Labor Economics and Public Economics. She teaches courses such as Economics of the U.S. Social Safety Net, and her work involves analyzing policies that impact vulnerable groups within society, contributing to the understanding of social safety nets and labor market dynamics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Demography
• Geography
• Economic growth
• Labour economics
• Accounting
• Demographic economics
• Economics
• Business

Selected publications

• Replication package: Supercompliers

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package for the paper "Supercompliers" by Matthew Comey, Amanda Eng, Pauline Leung, and Zhuan Pei.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package: Supercompliers

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package for the paper "Supercompliers" by Matthew Comey, Amanda Eng, Pauline Leung, and Zhuan Pei.

  PublisherDOI

• Further Education During Unemployment

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-12-28 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Evidence on the effectiveness of retraining U.S. unemployed workers primarily comes from evaluations of training programs, which represent one narrow avenue for skill acquisition. We use high-quality records from Ohio and a matching method to estimate the effects of retraining, broadly defined as enrollment in postsecondary institutions. Our simple method bridges two strands of the dynamic treatment effect literature that estimate the treatment-now-versus-later and treatment-versus-no-treatment effects. We find that enrollees experience earnings gains of six percent three to four years after enrolling, after depressed earnings during the first two years. The earnings effects are driven by industry-switchers, particularly to healthcare.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• State responses to federal matching grants: The case of medicaid

  Journal of Public Economics · 2022-10-22 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Are Sufficient Statistics Necessary? Nonparametric Measurement of Deadweight Loss from Unemployment Insurance

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2021-04-01

  preprintOpen access

  Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary "decomposition" approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy's total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program's implicit earnings tax.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Long Run Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments

  Open Science Framework · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This project is a long term follow-up of two Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) of welfare reform experiments. This includes the Portland NEWWS project with 5,547 welfare recipients assigned to a treatment (welfare reform) and control (pre-existing AFDC program) group and Connecticut Jobs First project of about 4,800 applicants and recipients assigned to a treatment (Jobs First) and control (AFDC) group. This project is part of the MDRC Learning from Administrative Data (LAD) Project and uses administrative data available through the Census to examine long run impacts on the original participants and their children.

  PublisherDOI

• Unemployment Insurance and Means-Tested Program Interactions: Evidence from Administrative Data

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2020 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Demographic economics

  We study the ways in which unemployment insurance (UI) benefits interact with other elements of the social safety net around job losses. We exploit a cutoff for UI eligibility, based on a workers’ highest quarterly earnings in the past year, to generate quasi-experimental variation in UI receipt. We find that UI receipt cuts welfare (TANF) receipt by half among low-earning UI applicants but has no impact on SNAP or Medicaid usage. However, because welfare participation is low in this population, overall crowdout is small. In the quarter following layoff, UI increases total income by 55 percent (including labor earnings and transfers) (JEL E24, H53, I18, I38, J64, J65).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effect of Unemployment Benefits on the Duration of Unemployment Insurance Receipt: New Evidence from a Regression Kink Design in Missouri, 2003-2013

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Are Sufficient Statistics Necessary? Nonparametric Measurement of Deadweight Loss from Unemployment Insurance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Are Sufficient Statistics Necessary? Nonparametric Measurement of Deadweight Loss from Unemployment Insurance

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-02-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access

  Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary "decomposition" approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy's total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program's implicit earnings tax.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zhuan Pei

  Xiangya Hospital Central South University

  11 shared

• Christopher J. O’Leary

  W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

  9 shared

• Alexandre Mas

  University of California, Berkeley

  6 shared

• David S. Lee

  Manchester Metropolitan University

  4 shared

• David Card

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Simon Quach

  4 shared

• Andrew C. Johnston

  University of California, Merced

  2 shared

• Royal D. Hathaway

  Research Triangle Park Foundation

  1 shared