Greetings, thanks for visiting Matthew Pesner's website!
Matthew Pesner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and is on the 2023-2024 job market. His research interests lie in the intersection of Public, Labor, and Economic History. In August of 2022, Matt earned his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematical Economics from the Department of Economics at Colorado College in 2016. Click here for his CV.
Matthew's research revolves around understanding the causes and consequences of changes to the U.S. safety net and social insurance system throughout the 20th century. His job market paper provides evidence that public assistance ("welfare") for unemployed heads of two-parent families acted as a supplementary form of Unemployment Insurance between 1961-1996 and promoted two-parent family stability. This paper shows that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children-Unemployed Parent (AFDC-UP) program provided a large degree of protection against unemployment-associated separation for families who had access to it, informing both the potential impacts of expanding UI to new groups of workers as well as broader trends in family structure since the 1960s.
In his previous job market paper, Matthew estimates how nationalizing railroad retirement pensions in the mid-1930s affected retirement decisions, and what we can learn from this about pensions and labor supply more broadly. Other research of his focuses on significant changes to Social Security and public assistance programs between the 1930s and 1960s. These papers investigate how the state and federal governments interacted to finance these programs, how grants or expansions to Social Security affected spending on public assistance at the state and local level, and which other parties may have gained from these savings.
Please feel free to contact Matthew by email at mpesner@umich.edu or by phone at (973)-747-6480
Matthew Pesner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and is on the 2023-2024 job market. His research interests lie in the intersection of Public, Labor, and Economic History. In August of 2022, Matt earned his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematical Economics from the Department of Economics at Colorado College in 2016. Click here for his CV.
Matthew's research revolves around understanding the causes and consequences of changes to the U.S. safety net and social insurance system throughout the 20th century. His job market paper provides evidence that public assistance ("welfare") for unemployed heads of two-parent families acted as a supplementary form of Unemployment Insurance between 1961-1996 and promoted two-parent family stability. This paper shows that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children-Unemployed Parent (AFDC-UP) program provided a large degree of protection against unemployment-associated separation for families who had access to it, informing both the potential impacts of expanding UI to new groups of workers as well as broader trends in family structure since the 1960s.
In his previous job market paper, Matthew estimates how nationalizing railroad retirement pensions in the mid-1930s affected retirement decisions, and what we can learn from this about pensions and labor supply more broadly. Other research of his focuses on significant changes to Social Security and public assistance programs between the 1930s and 1960s. These papers investigate how the state and federal governments interacted to finance these programs, how grants or expansions to Social Security affected spending on public assistance at the state and local level, and which other parties may have gained from these savings.
Please feel free to contact Matthew by email at mpesner@umich.edu or by phone at (973)-747-6480