Recent publications
Ways of leaving the labor force have been an understudied aspect of labor market outcomes. Labor market institutions such as occupational licensing may influence how individuals transition to retirement. When and how workers transition from career jobs to full retirement may contribute to pre‐ and post‐retirement well‐being. Previous investigations of retirement pathways focused on the patterns and outcomes of retirement transitions, yet the influence of occupational licensing on retirement transition has not been analyzed. In this study, we use the Current Population Survey to investigate how occupational licensing influences American later‐career workers' choice of retirement pathways. Our results show that older licensed workers are less likely to choose to make career transitions but more likely to reduce work hours in transitioning out of the labor force. These results are consistent with the findings that licensed workers receive more benefits in the form of preferable retirement options, suggesting that these workers tend to have higher wages, benefits, and flexibility even toward the end of their careers.
Do jobs and income-transfer programs affect crime? The answer depends on why one is asking the question, which shapes what one means by “crime.” Many studies focus on understanding why overall crime rates vary across people, places, and time; because 80% of all crimes are property offenses, that is what this type of research typically explains. But if the goal is to understand what to do about the crime problem, the focus should instead be on serious violent crimes, which the best available estimates suggest seem to account for the majority of the social costs of crime. The best available evidence suggests that policies that reduce economic desperation reduce property crime (and, hence, overall crime rates) but have little systematic relationship to violent crime. The difference in impacts arguably stems in large part from the fact that most violent crimes, including murder, are not crimes of profit but rather crimes of passion, including rage. Policies to alleviate material hardship, as important and useful as those are for improving people's lives and well-being, are not by themselves sufficient to also substantially alleviate the burden of violent crime on society.
I review the empirical literature on the effects of police staffing, police deployment, and styles of police enforcement. When cities put more police officers on the street, crime and violence have declined without a corresponding increase in arrests for the types of serious offenses that are most likely to lead to imprisonment. Investments in police therefore have the potential to generate a double dividend for society, reducing serious crime without driving up incarceration rates. At the same time, when cities have hired more police, those officers have ended up making many more quality-of-life arrests for minor crimes, thus widening the net of the justice system. The benefits of policing can be maximized and the costs can be minimized when police eschew strategies that revolve explicitly around making large numbers of stops and arrests and instead focus their efforts on more precise and problem-oriented approaches.
We study the dynamic properties of the wealth distribution in an overlapping generations model with warm-glow bequests and heterogeneous attitudes towards risk. Some dynasties of agents are risk averters, and others are risk lovers. Agents can invest in two types of Lucas trees. The two types of trees are symmetric in the sense that one type has a high return in states where the other has a return of zero. This symmetry allows risk averters to perfectly ensure their future income and eliminates aggregate uncertainty in the model. Furthermore, risk lovers take extreme portfolio positions, which make it easy for us to characterize the evolution of their wealth holdings over time. We show that the model has an equilibrium in which the aggregate wealth distribution converges to a unique invariant distribution. The invariant distribution of wealth of the risk lovers has fat tails for high bequest rates. The existence of fat tails is endogenously generated by the behavior of risk lovers rather than by the exogenous existence of fat tails in the endowments or in the returns of the assets.
Purpose: Recent theoretical advances focus on the configuration and crises of the International Monetary System (IMS) and International Financial System (IFS) rather than their regime switchings. We argue that viewing the evolution of the IMS and IFS in the past several hundred years through the lens of the Copernican heliocentric system developed over five hundred years ago is insightful. Methods: The network representations used today for the study of the IMS and IFS can be directly transposed into the langage of stellar systems. We connect literatures in economic history and the theory of complex networks with some resonant concepts from astrophysics. We trace out the evolution across regimes of the IMS and IFS in terms of network representations of the Copernican system. Results: We provide a simple, fully testable theoretical model completed by a calibration exercise that does generate the observed historical dynamics. The IMS and IFS are described by a two-layer multiplex graph whose three key features (hub, core and distances) are affected by non-linear joint regime changes linked to a technological, institutional, geopolitical and regulatory environment variable. Conclusion: We conclude with a discussion of some perspectives of the future of the international monetary and financial systems, particularly with regard to the inertia of eras of monetary and financial dominance.
Objective
This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the U.S. on positive parenting‐related outcomes and potential pathways.
Background
The 1996 welfare reform legislation sharply restricted eligibility for benefits with a strong emphasis on employment over cash assistance. The legislation led to dramatic declines in welfare caseloads and increases in employment. Much less is known about the effects of welfare reform on dynamics within families that affect children.
Method
Using data on low‐educated unmarried mothers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 linked to information on their 10‐ to 14‐year‐old children, we exploit variations in welfare reform implementation across states, over time, and between treatment and comparison groups to identify plausibly causal effects of the legislation on children's reports of activities with parents and closeness of the maternal‐child relationship. The analytic sample includes 3,172–3,737 observations for boys and 3,089–3,619 for girls, depending on outcome.
Results
We find modestly negative effects of welfare reform on children's reports of activities with parents and closeness of the maternal‐child relationship, with stronger effects for boys than girls. We find no evidence that the effects operated through employment. However, we found suggestive evidence that decreases in income play a role.
Conclusion
Welfare reform compromised maternal involvement and engagement with adolescents, particularly boys, which could adversely affect their development and long‐run success.
Poor ambient air quality poses a substantial global health threat. However, accurate measurement remains challenging, particularly in countries such as India where ground monitors are scarce despite high expected exposure and health burdens. This lack of precise measurements impedes understanding of changes in pollution exposure over time and across populations. Here, we develop open-source daily fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) datasets at a 10-kilometer resolution for India from 2005 to 2023 using a two-stage machine learning model validated on held-out monitor data. Analyzing long-term air quality trends, we find that PM 2.5 concentrations increased across most of the country until around 2016 and then declined partly due to favorable meteorology in southern India. Recent reductions in PM 2.5 were substantially larger in wealthier areas, highlighting the urgency of air quality control policies addressing all socioeconomic communities. To advance equitable air quality monitoring, we propose additional monitor locations in India and examine the adaptability of our method to other countries with scarce monitoring data.
Background
The July effect in US teaching hospitals has been studied with conflicting results. We aimed to evaluate the effect of physician turnover in July on the clinical outcomes of patients hospitalized with cirrhosis.
Methods
We utilized the Nationwide Inpatient Sample database (2016–2019) to identify patients hospitalized with cirrhosis and liver-related complications (variceal bleeding, hepatorenal syndrome, acute-on-chronic liver failure). We used difference-in-differences analysis to compare teaching and non-teaching hospital differences in mortality and length of stay (LOS) in May and July, and trends in outcomes in other months before and after July.
Results
We included 78,371 hospitalizations in teaching and 23,518 in non-teaching hospitals in May and July. Teaching hospital admissions had overall higher complication rates and mortality compared to non-teaching hospitals. We did not find a difference in mortality between teaching and non-teaching hospitals in all cirrhotic patients (adjusted odds ratio 1.01, 95%CI [0.88–1.16]) or in those with severe complications (0.87, [0.72–1.06]). There was greater LOS in July vs. May in teaching hospitals relative to non-teaching hospitals for all patients with cirrhosis (adjusted rate ratio 1.03, 95%CI [1.02–1.05]) and for those with severe complications (1.19, [1.17–1.21]). The months after July were associated with longer LOS in teaching hospitals, with the effect gradually diminishing over the subsequent months.
Conclusions
Our study suggests trainee turnover in July did not affect mortality, but lengthened hospital stays for patients with cirrhosis, highlighting the need for effective supervision of new trainees and strategies to mitigate operational disruptions for improved clinical management.
Background
Dementia impacts a large and growing number of older adults in the US, and the total impact of disease is costly to individuals and society. Though many risk factors have been identified, accurately predicting future dementia remains difficult. This study aims to identify early predictors of cognitive impairment and dementia using a large US sample.
Method
We evaluated the predictive power of 181 dementia risk factors using a recently developed and validated probabilistic measure of dementia and cognitive impairment, available on 97,629 person‐year observations in the nationally representative longitudinal Health and Retirement Study in the US (Table 1). The project predicted two types of outcomes: the two‐year or four‐year incidence of dementia or cognitive impairment; and the prevalence of dementia or cognitive impairment at age 80 based on the characteristics of individuals at age 60.
Result
In line with prior literature, physical health, a prior stroke, cognitive abilities, ADL and IADL functional limitations, and genes strongly predicted future incidence and prevalence of cognitive impairment and dementia. Our statistical models identified additional predictors that have received less attention. For example, dementia prevalence at age 80 was 9.9 percentage points higher (20.5% vs. 10.6%) among those with a BMI above 35 (vs. BMI 0‐25) at age 60, and this differential reduced to 4.2 ppts but remained statistically significant when all other predictors were controlled. Other factors associated with a higher chance of having cognitive impairment or dementia in the future were: being born in the South, not having a private health insurance plan at age 60, working fewer years, diabetes at age 60, never exercising, scoring lower on various physical performance measures (e.g. pulmonary function, grip strength, walking speed, balance tests), being less conscientious, and lower engagement in hobbies and novel information activities (Figures 1 and 2).
Conclusion
The sharpened list of dementia risk factors can be used to raise awareness and target resources for prevention and early detection in the presence of health system capacity constraints. These results are suggestive that some behavioral changes and interventions might slow cognitive decline.
When mortality risks of a job increase, economic theory predicts that wages will rise to compensate workers. COVID-19 became a new source of mortality risk from close contact with other workers and customers. Real wages have risen during the COVID-19 era, but research to date has been sparse on how much of this increase reflects compensating wage differentials for COVID-19 risk on the job. We use 2020–2021 death certificate data which for the first time includes the decedent’s occupation and industry, together with other occupational and industry mortality for previous years from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) and wage data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine whether compensating wage differentials for COVID-19 occupational risks are in line with prior estimates of Values of Statistical Life (VSL). First, we find that there are substantial differences in the compensating differentials associated with COVID-19 vs other sources of job-related mortality risk. Full time workers’ pay is higher by per week in jobs with a 1 in 1,000 higher risk of COVID-19 mortality, but their pay is higher in jobs with 1 in 1,000 higher risk of non-COVID-19 workplace mortality. The non-COVID-19 mortality wage premiums imply that workers trade off money and mortality risk using a VSL of about million, which is near the upper range of the most cited VSL estimates in the literature. In contrast, the COVID-19 wage premium implies that workers make decisions using a VSL of the range – million, much lower than standard VSL measures. The results are consistent with workers substantially underestimating or undervaluing the risk of COVID-19 mortality.
Driven by the need to reduce emissions and transition to sustainable electricity systems, many European countries have substantially increased their share of carbon-free electricity over recent decades. However, the dramatic 2021–2022 surge in natural gas prices—stemming from geopolitical tensions and supply constraints—has sharply elevated electricity prices, highlighting the continued vulnerability of electricity markets to natural gas price shocks and suggesting a persistent dependency on volatile fossil fuel prices. Here we develop a country-specific vulnerability metric and apply it to estimate how natural gas price shocks are transmitted to electricity prices across European markets. We find that countries that pursued more aggressive electricity decarbonization are not more vulnerable to natural gas price shocks. However, countries with a higher share of intermittent renewable energy generation (wind and solar) are slightly more vulnerable, potentially due to the complementarity of these technologies with natural gas generation. We show that heterogeneity in vulnerability implies that country-specific policies would be needed to avoid extreme electricity prices, in contrast to the existing uniform EU price cap. Our results emphasize that decarbonization goals can still be achieved without risking vulnerability, which is critical for maintaining stable electricity prices, energy security and public trust in the energy transition.
The Medicare hospice program is intended to provide palliative care to terminal patients, but patients with long stays in hospice are highly profitable, motivating concerns about overuse among the Alzheimer's and Dementia (ADRD) population in the rapidly growing for-profit sector. We provide the first causal estimates of the effect of for-profit hospice on patient spending using the entry of for-profit hospices over 20 years. We find hospice has saved money for Medicare by offsetting other expensive care among ADRD patients. As a result, policies limiting hospice use including revenue caps and antifraud lawsuits are distortionary and deter potentially cost-saving admissions. (JEL H51, I11, I12, I18, J14, L84)
Firms posting job openings in an online labor market were randomly assigned minimum hourly wages. When facing a minimum wage, fewer firms hired, but those they did hire paid higher wages. Hoursworked fell substantially. Treated firms shifted to hiring more productive workers. Using the platform's imposition of a market-wide minimum wage after the experiment, I find that many of the experimental results also hold in equilibrium, including the substitution towards more productive workers. However, there was also a large reduction in the number of jobs posted for which the minimum wage would likely bind. (JEL J22, J23, J31, J38)
Prior research finds food expenditure decreases at retirement, which suggests households are inadequately saving. In contrast, other evidence shows that direct measures of food intake are unaffected by exiting the labor force. Using a wide array of data sources and methodologies, we find that food intake falls at retirement, including: declines in caloric and nutrient intake in cross-sectional datasets spanning 40 years, a decrease in caloric intake using longitudinal data, and a drop in a food intake index that relates diet composition to permanent income. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of life-cycle models of consumption. (JEL D15, G51, I12, J26)
We provide new evidence on the drivers of the early US COVID-19 pandemic and develop a methodology that future researchers can use to similarly analyze the outbreaks of new diseases. We combine an epidemiological model of disease transmission with quasi-random variation arising from the timing of stay-at-home-orders to estimate the causal roles of policy interventions and voluntary social distancing. We then relate the residual variation in disease transmission rates to observable features of cities. We estimate significant impacts of policy and social distancing responses, but we show that the magnitude of policy effects was modest, and most social distancing was driven by voluntary responses. Moreover, we show that neither policy nor rates of voluntary social distancing explained a meaningful share of geographic variation. The most important predictors of which cities were hardest hit by the pandemic were exogenous characteristics such as population and density.
It is widely believed that university and corporate research are complementary: companies invest in research in part to develop the capacity to absorb the knowledge emerging from universities. However, as we show in this paper, corporate research in the United States emerged when American universities were behind the world frontier in scientific research. Why, then, did for-profit businesses choose to invest in creating new knowledge, much of which could spill over to rivals, and whose conduct presented many managerial challenges? We argue that corporate research in America arose in the 1920s to compensate for weak university research, not to complement it. Using newly assembled firm-level data from the 1920s and 1930s, we find that companies invested in research because inventions increasingly relied on science but American universities were unable to meet their needs. Large firms close to the technological frontier and operating in concentrated industries were likely to invest in research, especially in scientific disciplines where American universities lagged behind the scientific frontier. Corporate science seems to have paid off, resulting in novel patents and high market valuations for firms engaged in research.
Funding: A. Arora, S. Belenzon, and J. Suh acknowledge support from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. S. Belenzon and Y. Yafeh gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant No. 963-2020]. K. Kosenko is grateful for support from the Bank of Israel. Y. Yafeh acknowledges support from the Krueger Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Business.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18053 .
Institution pages aggregate content on ResearchGate related to an institution. The members listed on this page have self-identified as being affiliated with this institution. Publications listed on this page were identified by our algorithms as relating to this institution. This page was not created or approved by the institution. If you represent an institution and have questions about these pages or wish to report inaccurate content, you can contact us here.
Information
Address
Cambridge, United States
Website