Download Free Essays On Health And Labor Economics Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Essays On Health And Labor Economics and write the review.

This dissertation research contributes to the areas of health and labor economics. In the first essay, Melanie Guldi (University of Central Florida), David Simon (University of Connecticut), and I attempt to explain and understand the growth in obesity in the United States using the expansion of broadband Internet providers in the U.S in the early 2000s. Our results suggest 1.2 million white women became overweight due to the expansion in broadband Internet access. Possible mechanisms include increased sedentary time and binge drinking. The second and third essays focus on effects of public health insurance programs. In the second essay, I examine effects of public health insurance programs for low-income childless adults, a group with a high rate of uninsurance. Using the expansion of public health insurance coverage to low-income childless adults across states in the early 2000s, I estimate effects on public and private health insurance coverage and, because individuals may decrease their labor supply to qualify for coverage. My estimates suggest these programs increased low-educated childless women's public health insurance coverage by 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points. Effects on labor supply are small, positive, and not statistically significant, suggesting little change in labor supply to qualify for insurance coverage. The third essay examines the effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions on the labor market for nurses. Using the Medicaid expansions as a plausibly exogenous increase in the demand for nurses, I find a 1.5 percent increase in hours worked per week (30 minutes). The increase in hours is larger in rural areas, consistent with a larger increase in insurance coverage in these areas. For licensed practical nurses, employment increased by 11 percent and hours worked per week increased by 2.4 percent (nearly 1 hour). Registered nurses' hours increased by 1.2 percent (nearly 30 minutes). I do not find any consistent negative effects on patient ratings of nursing care and hospital-acquired infection rates. The increase in hours is driven by a shift from part-time to full-time work, likely ruling out fatigue as a mechanism for changes in quality.
The second chapter is the first attempt to study the long-term effects of Medicaid on children's health outcomes by looking at the effects of the same Medicaid expansions that took place in the later 1980s and early 1990s. These expansions significantly increased the percentage of pregnant women and children eligible for Medicaid but did so at very differential rates across the states. The substantial variation in Medicaid eligibility thresholds by state, and year, and the age of the child provide the identifying variation for the analysis. By using restricted access data, containing state of birth and state of residence of children, I match children to the Medicaid eligibility rules in their year of birth and currently. The results suggest that the expansions were effective in improving the health of children from low-income families in the long run. Increased Medicaid eligibility at birth is associated with better health outcomes in the future. But interestingly eligibility at older ages (conditional on eligibility at birth) is not.
The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.
This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay analyzes the causal effect of HIV education and incentives (home-based HIV testing and conditional cash transfer) on HIV testing decision. The second essay analyzes the short- and medium-term causal effects of HIV testing on HIV infection expectations and sexual behavior. These two essays are based on data from a randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia. The third essay examines effects of wrongful discharge protections adopted by U.S. state courts on employment and job loss for workers with different ethnicity, race, and education level.
The dissertation examines empirical issues related to health and labor economics. It has long been debated whether breastfeeding leads to a higher intelligence quotient (IQ) and greater scholastic achievement. The first study empirically examines the issue. Many past studies fail to take into account the possible endogeneity of the breastfeeding decision and thus falsely identify the correlation between breastfeeding and IQ as a causal relationship. We attempt to distinguish the causation and correlation between the two variables. Our results show that, after controlling for possible endogeneity, breastfeeding has no significant impact on IQ or scholastic achievement. The second essay examines the link between breastfeeding and childhood obesity. Heath economics researchers view breastfeeding as a determining factor as to whether a child becomes obese. There are many theories, involving both biological and psychological factors, as to why breastfeeding is negatively linked to childhood obesity. This essay argues that the breastfeeding decision is not an exogenous one, so estimation technique such as ordinary least squares is not the correct way to estimate the relationship between breastfeeding and childhood obesity. Instruments are used to generate exogenous variations in the breastfeeding variable. After correcting for any estimation bias due to the breastfeeding variable being endogenous, this study documents the benefits of breastfeeding. The third essay analyzes 19 semesters of student evaluations at Kansas State University. Faculty fixed effects are sizable and indicate that, as assessed by students, the best principles teachers also tend to be the best non-principles teachers. OLS estimates are biased because principles teachers are drawn from the top of the distribution and because unmeasured faculty characteristics are correlated with such variables as the response rate and student effort. Student ratings are lowest for new faculty but stabilize quickly. Expected GPA of the class is not an important determinant of student ratings, but equitable grading is; and the rewards for equitable grading appear larger for principles classes. The lower ratings in principles classes are fully accounted for by greater class size.
In the United States, health insurance is often necessary for access to regular, affordable health care. With only eight of every hundred Americans buying private insurance plans on the individual market, the main sources for health insurance traditionally have been employers and the government. As new laws are being debated and introduced to reform an expensive health care industry in which nearly one-sixth of the population is uninsured, research is needed in order to evaluate the costs and benefits of these policy changes and to predict their success. To this end, in addition to understanding how likely individuals are to adopt new health insurance policies, we also should be interested in knowing how the demand for health insurance and changes in its accessibility will affect non-medical decisions. Specifically, labor market choices have been theorized to be directly related to decisions involving insurance coverage. If the availability of health insurance distorts a workers' job-related decisions, then the changing the landscape for how to access insurance may reverberate in employment outcomes. My dissertation focuses on understanding the factors that influence the demand for health insurance and the role that health insurance plays in an individual's decision to work, where to work, and how much to work. Specifically, I focus on the following three related questions: how does the demand for insurance affect labor market decisions such as when to exit unemployment? what drives insurance demand, and in particular, what motivators work best to increase demand for health coverage among the uninsured? and lastly, what are the supply-side employment responses to the provision of free or reduced-cost public health insurance? My first chapter explores how the demand for health insurance can change re-employment decisions among the unemployed, as well as the speed at which individuals return to work. Past research on this issue focuses on job-to-job switches and "job lock" but has yet to focus on individuals looking for work. This chapter uses data on laid-off individuals from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to compare the job search behavior and outcomes of individuals who differ in their demand for health insurance. I use three proxies for demand, based on spousal health and past insurance offer take-up decisions. Although each is potentially confounded by unobserved determinants of job search, I use a difference-in-differences and propensity score designs to isolate plausibly causal effects. I find consistent patterns across all three proxies (despite different potential omitted variables biases). Overall unemployment durations do not vary with demand for insurance, but this masks variation in the types of jobs taken. Individuals with higher demand for insurance have higher hazards for exiting unemployment into a job with insurance, but lower hazards for exiting to a job without insurance. This points to effects of insurance demand on both search effort and reservation wages, and to potentially important distorting effects of employer-linked health insurance. Whereas the first chapter takes variation in demand for insurance as a given, my second chapter digs deeper into the basis for this variation and whether it can be affected. In this chapter, I investigate the reasons the uninsured choose to forego insurance coverage and the impact of different messages on their insurance demand. Working with Enroll America, a large non-profit dedicated to decreasing the number of uninsured Americans, I conducted a stratified experiment to determine the best communication strategies to encourage participation in the healthcare exchanges. We test a combination of the following behavioral and information treatments: a risk treatment that emphasizes the average financial risk for someone without health insurance; a norms treatment that alerts our participants that staying uninsured will be against the law; a savings treatment that highlights the average savings available at the exchanges; a wording treatment where we refer to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as "Obamacare"; and lastly, a cost-calculator treatment that allows individuals to explore the likely cost of insurance based on their own characteristics. Among the uninsured, we find that the cost-calculator treatment, the risk treatment, and the mandate are most effective in increasing intention to purchase insurance. The cost-calculator and the risk treatment increase informedness among this population, but the cost-calculator (when paired with the savings treatment) is the only treatment that increases willingness to pay for insurance. We use the information on willingness to pay to construct sub-group price elasticities of demand to compare to previous work interested in the demand for health insurance. Overall, the results of this chapter highlight the importance of informational campaigns to increase awareness of the costs and benefits of health coverage, particularly after large changes such as those implemented by the ACA. My third chapter continues by looking at the changes that have been introduced as a result of the ACA. Specifically, it explores whether expanding access to government-provided insurance affects individuals' decisions regarding employment and overall hours of work. Recent findings have suggested that increasing access to health insurance outside of employment has a sizable, negative impact on labor force participation. Along these lines, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance will cause a 1.5 to 2% reduction in hours worked in the first ten years. Comparing states by whether they chose to expand Medicaid under reforms introduced by the ACA, I look at changes in the probability a childless adult receives Medicaid, as well as changes in this group's employment likelihood and hours of work. Using household survey data from the CPS monthly survey and ASEC Supplement, I confirm a marked increase in the percent of childless adults insured by Medicaid but find no statistically significant changes in employment outcomes. I compare these results to other estimates of "employment lock" in recent literature. These results, though imprecise, align with the findings in Chapter 1 which suggest that overall employment is not drastically affected by insurance demand.