Other Research

Knowledge of Future Job Loss and Implications for Unemployment Insurance

This paper studies the implications of individuals' knowledge of future job loss for the existence of an unemployment insurance (UI) market. Learning about job loss leads to consumption decreases and spousal labor supply increases. This suggests existing willingness to pay estimates for UI understate its value. But it yields new estimation methodologies that account for and exploit responses to learning about future job loss. Although the new willingness to pay estimates exceed previous estimates, I estimate much larger frictions imposed by private information.

Is It Who You Are or Where You Live? Residential Segregation and Racial Gaps in Childhood Asthma

Higher asthma rates are one of the more obvious ways that health inequalities between African American and other children are manifested beginning in early childhood. In 2010, black asthma rates were double non-black rates. Some but not all of this difference can be explained by factors such as a higher incidence of low birth weight (LBW) among blacks; however, even conditional on LBW, blacks have a higher incidence of asthma than others.

Desire for and to Avoid Pregnancy During the Transition to Adulthood

Unintended pregnancies disproportionately occur among teenage women, yet little is known about the determinants of pregnancy desire among this group. The authors use a comprehensive baseline survey and data on pregnancy desires to investigate which unmarried 18- to 20-year-old women want a pregnancy, want to avoid pregnancy, and report consistent pregnancy desire and disinclination. Variables that positively predict pregnancy desire generally negatively predict desire to avoid pregnancy.

An Analysis of the Memphis Nurse-Family Partnership Program

This paper evaluates a randomized controlled trial of the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program conducted in Memphis, TN in 1990. NFP offers home visits conducted by nurses for disadvantaged first-time mothers during pregnancy and early childhood. We test NFP treatment effects using permutation-based inference that accounts for the NFP randomization protocol. Our methodology is valid for small samples and corrects for multiple-hypothesis testing. We also analyze the underlying mechanisms generating these treatment effects.

Women’s Progress for Men’s Gain? Gender-Specific Changes in the Return to Education as Measured by Family Standard of Living, 1990 to 2009–2011

This study investigates gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among persons of prime working ages (35–44 years) using U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000, and the 2009–2011 American Community Survey. We define the total financial return to education as the family standard of living as measured by family income adjusted for family size. Our results indicate that women experienced significant progress in educational attainment and labor market outcomes over this time period.

The Effect of Fertility on Mothers' Labor Supply over the Last Two Centuries

This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers.

Subsidizing Health Insurance for Low-Income Adults: Evidence from Massachusetts

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts’ subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule to estimate willingness to pay and costs of insurance among low-income adults. As subsidies decline, insurance take-up falls rapidly, dropping about 25% for each $40 increase in monthly enrollee premiums. Marginal enrollees tend to be lower-cost, consistent with adverse selection into insurance.

People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs

We study the effect of minimum wage increases on employment in automatable jobs – jobs in which employers may find it easier to substitute machines for people – focusing on low-skilled workers from whom such substitution may be spurred by minimum wage increases. Based on CPS data from 1980-2015, we find that increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers, and increases the likelihood that low-skilled workers in automatable jobs become unemployed.

Indirect Inference with Importance Sampling: An Application to Women's Wage Growth

This paper has two main parts. In the first, we describe a method that smooths the objective function in a general class of indirect inference models. Our smoothing procedure makes use of importance sampling weights in estimation of the auxiliary model on simulated data. The importance sampling weights are constructed from likelihood contributions implied by the structural model.

Consumption and Income Inequality in the U.S. Since the 1960s

Official income inequality statistics indicate a sharp rise in inequality over the past five decades. These statistics do not accurately reflect inequality because income is poorly measured, particularly in the tails of the distribution, and current income differs from permanent income, failing to capture the consumption paid for through borrowing and dissaving and the consumption of durables such as houses and cars. We examine income inequality between 1963 and 2014 using the Current Population Survey and consumption inequality between 1960 and 2014 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

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