Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Author:Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. 

Discussion Paper
Does the BCG Vaccine Protect Against Coronavirus? Applying an Economist’s Toolkit to a Medical Question

As COVID-19 has spread across the globe, there is an intense search for treatments and vaccines, with numerous trials running in multiple countries. Several observers and prominent news outlets have noticed that countries still administering an old vaccine against tuberculosis—the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine—have had fewer coronavirus cases and fewer deaths per capita in the early stages of the outbreak. But is that correlation really strong evidence that the BCG vaccine provides some defense against COVID-19? In this post, we look at the incidence of coronavirus cases along ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20200511

Discussion Paper
How Equitable Has the COVID Labor Market Recovery Been?

One of the two monetary policy goals of the Federal Reserve System— one-half of our dual mandate—is to aim for “maximum employment.” However, labor market outcomes are not monolithic, and different demographic and economic groups experience different labor market outcomes. In this post, we analyze heterogeneity in employment rates by race and ethnicity, focusing on the COVID-19 recession of March-April 2020 and its aftermath. We find that the demographic employment gaps temporarily increased during the onset of the pandemic but narrowed back by spring 2022 to close to where they were ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220630a

Discussion Paper
Was the 2021-22 Rise in Inflation Equitable?

In our previous post, we discussed how the labor market recovery—the “maximum employment” half of the Federal Reserve System’s dual mandate—featured not only a return of overall employment rates to pre-pandemic levels, but also a narrowing of racial and ethnic gaps in employment rates. In this post, we take up the second half of the dual mandate—price stability—and discuss heterogeneity in inflation rates faced by different demographic groups during the rise in inflation in2021-22. We find that, in contrast to inequalities in employment rates, disparities in inflation rates have ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220630b

Discussion Paper
The “Cadillac Tax”: Driving Firms to Change Their Plans?

Since the 1940s, employers that provide health insurance for their employees can deduct the cost as a business expense, but the government does not treat the value of that coverage as taxable income. This exclusion of employer-provided health insurance from taxable income?$248 billion in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office?is a huge subsidy for health spending. Many economists cite the distortionary effects of this tax subsidy as an important reason for why U.S. health care spending accounts for such a large share of the economy and why spending historically has grown so ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20160229

Discussion Paper
Do Veterans Face Disparities in the Labor Market—And What Accounts for Them?

We continue our series on military service and consider veterans’ earnings and labor market outcomes. We find that veterans earn more than 12 percent less and are 4 percentage points (18 percent) more likely to be out of the labor force than comparable nonveterans. Interestingly, accounting for veterans’ differences from comparable nonveterans in terms of education and disability status largely explains these labor market differences.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20230525b

Report
The Affordable Care Act and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across the Medicaid expansion frontier. We find that (1) health insurance changes discontinuously at the frontier, (2) COVID-19 testing is discontinuously larger in Medicaid-expanding states, and (3) the fraction of beds occupied in ICUs is discontinuously smaller in Medicaid-expanding states. We also find ...
Staff Reports , Paper 948

Discussion Paper
Do Veterans Face Disparities in Higher Education, Health, and Housing?

Veterans are an understudied group that forms an important part of the fabric of American society and that constitutes a significant segment of the population. In the first post of this two-part series, we will investigate how the outcomes of veteran men–in educational attainment, health, and housing–differ from those of comparable men who did not serve in the military. Looking only at men, for reasons described below, we find that relative to nonveteran men with a high school degree and a similar distribution of demographic and geographic characteristics, veterans are 7 percentage points ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20230525a

Discussion Paper
Does U.S. Health Inequality Reflect Income Inequality—or Something Else?

Health is an integral part of well-being. The United Nations Human Development Index uses life expectancy (together with GDP per capita and literacy) as one of three key indicators of human welfare across the world. In this post, I discuss the state of life expectancy inequality in the United States and examine some of the underlying factors in its evolution over the past several decades.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20191015

Discussion Paper
A Discussion of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: By How Much Is r Greater than g?

Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century may have been a greater sensation upon publication than Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century Das Kapital. It made the New York Times bestseller list, generated myriad reviews and responses from economists at top institutions, and was the subject of a standing-room-only session at the recent American Economic Association annual meeting. In Capital, Piketty argues that wealth inequality is set to rise from its relatively low levels in the 1950s through the 1970s to the very high levels it once occupied at the dawn of the Industrial ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20150713b

Report
Africa is on time

We present evidence that the recent African growth renaissance has reached Africa?s poor. Using survey data on African income distributions and national accounts GDP, we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality indices for African countries for the period 1990-2011. Our findings are as follows. First, African poverty is falling rapidly. Second, the African countries for which good inequality data exist are set to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) poverty reduction target on time. The entire continent except for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will reach ...
Staff Reports , Paper 686

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Bank

FILTER BY Series

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

FILTER BY Jel Classification

D63 10 items

I14 9 items

I18 6 items

E2 5 items

E31 5 items

I13 5 items

show more (60)

FILTER BY Keywords

COVID-19 19 items

inequality 14 items

race 8 items

Affordable Care Act 6 items

employment 6 items

income 5 items

show more (134)

PREVIOUS / NEXT