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Working Paper
Termination of SNAP Emergency Allotments, Food Sufficiency, and Economic Hardships
To meet the rising need for food and nutrition assistance during the pandemic in the United States, all states were approved to provide Emergency Allotments (EA) to households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In this analysis, we use the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Surveys and exploit staggered state-level variation in dissolution of the SNAP EA payments to study whether the end of EA is associated with food-related challenges and economic hardships. Our findings indicate that EA termination is followed by a decrease in the likelihood that adult ...
Working Paper
Social Distancing and Supply Disruptions in a Pandemic
Drastic public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns can reduce the loss of human life by keeping the number of infected individuals from exceeding the capacity of the health care system but are often criticized because of the social and the economic cost they entail. We question this view by combining an epidemiological model, calibrated to capture the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with a multisector model, designed to capture key characteristics of the U.S. Input Output Tables. Our two-sector model features a core sector that produces intermediate inputs not easily replaced ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Car Pollution on Infant and Child Health: Evidence from Emissions Cheating
Car exhaust is a major source of air pollution, but little is known about its impacts on population health. We exploit the dispersion of emissions-cheating diesel cars?which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars?across the United States from 2008-2015 as a natural experiment to measure the health impact of car pollution. Using the universe of vehicle registrations, we demonstrate that a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent, respectively. These health impacts ...
Working Paper
Health-care reform or labor market reform? A quantitative analysis of the affordable care act
An equilibrium model with firm and worker heterogeneity is constructed to analyze labor market and welfare implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The authors? model implies a significant reduction in the uninsured rate from 22.6 percent to 5.6 percent. The model predicts a moderate positive welfare gain from the ACA because of the redistribution of income through health insurance subsidies at the exchange as well as the Medicaid expansion. About 2.1 million more part-time jobs are created under the ACA at the expense of ...
Working Paper
Opioids and the Labor Market
This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes for prime-age men and women between 2006 and 2016. We estimate the relationship at the most disaggregated level feasible in the American Community Survey in order to provide estimates that include rural areas that have, in some cases, seen particularly high prescription rates. Given the limited time period, it is particularly important to account for geographic variation in both short-term and long-term economic conditions. We estimate three panel models to control for evolving local economic ...
Working Paper
How do Doctors Respond to Incentives? Unintended Consequences of Paying Doctors to Reduce Costs
Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce healthcare costs. I study one such program, where hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients (a ?bundled payment?). Doctors respond to the bonuses by becoming more likely to admit patients whose treatment can generate high bonuses, and sorting healthier patients into participating hospitals. Conditional on patient health, however, doctors do not reduce costs or change procedure use. These results highlight the ability of doctors to game incentive schemes, ...
Working Paper
Opioids and the Labor Market
This paper finds evidence that opioid availability decreases labor force participation while a large labor market shock does not influence the share of opioid abusers. We first identify the effect of availability on participation using the geographic variation in opioid prescription rates. We use a combination of the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) county-level prescription data to examine labor market patterns across both rural and metropolitan areas of the United States from 2007 to 2016. Individuals in areas with higher prescription ...
Working Paper
Health Inequality and Health Types
While health affects many economic outcomes, its dynamics are still poorly understood. We use k-means clustering, a machine learning technique, and data from the Health and Retirement Study to identify health types during middle and old age. We identify five health types: the vigorous resilient, the fair-health resilient, the fair-health vulnerable, the frail resilient, and the frail vulnerable. They are characterized by different starting health and health and mortality trajectories. Our five health types account for 84% of the variation in health trajectories and are not explained by ...
Working Paper
Losing insurance and psychiatric hospitalizations
We study the effect of losing insurance on psychiatric – mental health disorder (MHD) and substance use disorder (SUD) – hospital-based care. Psychiatric disorders cost the U.S. over $1T each year and hospitalizations provide important and valuable care for patients with these disorders. We use variation in public insurance coverage (Medicaid) eligibility offered by a large-scale and unexpected disenrollment in the state of Tennessee in 2005 that lead to 190,000 individuals losing their insurance. Medicaid enrollees are at elevated risk for psychiatric disorders. Following the ...
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Financial life after the death of a spouse
The death of a spouse results in a considerable decline in average income for the surviving spouse. The Social Security survivors benefits program compensates the surviving spouse, most often a woman, for almost all of the lost income, allowing them to work less, but many widows who are not yet eligible for the program struggle to meet their financial needs.