Biography
Patrick Button (they/he) is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Executive Director of the Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science (CAIDS) at Tulane University. They are also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and an invited researcher at J-PAL.
Button primarily researches discrimination, especially in employment, and especially based on age and disability, although current projects focus on queer people. They research discrimination in two ways:
quantifying discrimination using audit field experiments.
Button previously studied hiring discrimination against older workers using audit correspondence studies (resume field experiments), they applied for jobs as younger and older workers to study age discrimination in hiring. They are also using audit field experiments to quantify sexual orientation and racial discrimination in access to mortgages and discrimination against Black, Hispanic, and/or trans people in access to mental health care.
- determining the effects of discrimination laws.
Button uses variation in time and across states in discrimination laws to see if these laws improve employment and hiring. They also study how discrimination laws affect Social Security Disability Insurance applications for older workers and individuals with disabilities.
In other research, they quantified the (lack of) economic impacts of tax incentives for the film industry, by comparing filming location choice, employment, and business growth in the film industry and related industries after states adopted these aggressive subsidies.
Interests
- Economics of discrimination image
- Audit field experiments
- Economics of aging
- Disability employment and policy
- LGBTQIA+ economics
- Causal inference
- Data science education
- Scholarship of teaching and learning
Contributions
Selected Publications
Fumarco, Luca, Benjamin Harrell, Patrick Button, David J. Schwegman, and E Dils. 2023. “Gender Identity-, Race-, and Ethnicity-based Discrimination in Access to Mental Health Care: Evidence from an Audit Correspondence Field Experiment.” American Journal of Health Economics, 10(2): 182-214. https://doi.org/10.1086/728931. (Open-Access Version)
Burn, Ian, Patrick Button, Luis Munguia Corella, and David Neumark. 2022. “Does Ageist Language in Job Ads Predict Age Discrimination in Hiring?” Journal of Labor Economics, 40(3): 613-67. https://doi.org/10.1086/717730. (Open-Access Version)
Bui, Truc T. M., Patrick Button, and Elyce G. Picciotti. 2020. "Early Evidence on the Impacts of COVID-19 and the Recession on Older Workers." Public Policy & Aging Report. 59. https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/praa029.
Neumark, David, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button. 2019. “Is it Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Journal of Political Economy, 127(2): 922-970. (Open-Access Version)
Button, Patrick. 2019. “Do Tax Incentives Affect Business Location and Economic Development? Evidence from State Film Incentives.” Regional Science and Urban Economics, 77: 315-339. (Open-Access Version)
Button, Patrick. 2018. “Expanding Employment Discrimination Protections for Individuals with Disabilities: Evidence from California.” ILR Review, 71(2): 365-93. (Open-Access Version)