Coady Wing

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Indiana University Bloomington

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 d...

Mask mandates were controversial policies during the pandemic. Although there is considerable research on the benefits of masks, there has been no research on the distribution of perceived costs of compliance with mask mandates. This article presents the results from a hypothetical set of questions related to mask-wearing behavior and opinions that...

Regulations that restrict the tasks that credentialed workers are allowed to perform may affect a firm's input choices, output, and which part of the market the firm serves. Using dental practice survey data from 1989 to 2014 and a stacked difference‐in‐differences design, this paper examines the effects of state‐level scope of practice regulations...

Difference-in-difference (DID) estimators are a valuable method for identifying causal effects in the public health researcher's toolkit. A growing methods literature points out potential problems with DID estimators when treatment is staggered in adoption and varies with time. Despite this, no practical guide exists for addressing these new critiq...

Modern policies are commonly evaluated not with randomized experiments but with repeated measures designs like difference-in-differences (DID) and the comparative interrupted time series (CITS). The key benefit of these designs is that they control for unobserved confounders that are fixed over time. However, DID and CITS designs only result in unb...

US workers receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job, but not for reduced working hours. In alignment with the benefits incentives, we find that the labor market responded to COVID‐19 and related closure‐policies mostly on the extensive (12 pp outright job loss) margin. Exploiting timing variation in state closure‐policies, difference‐in...

On December 1, 2021, FSSA and DMHA commissioned a cost-analysis of untreated mental illness, in alignment with a 2020 state statute for the Indiana Behavioral Health Commission (Indiana Code 12-21-7). The completed summary report is in the Appendices (Appendix F), with the following excerpts from the report noted below: The burden of mental illness...

This study examines the sociodemographic divide in early labor market responses to the U.S. COVID-19 epidemic and associated policies, benchmarked against two previous recessions. Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data show greater declines in employment in April and May 2020 (relative to February) for Hispanic individuals, younger workers, a...

Measuring the prevalence of active SARS-CoV-2 infections in the general population is difficult because tests are conducted on a small and non-random segment of the population. However, hospitalized patients are tested at very high rates, even those admitted for non-COVID reasons. We show how to use information on testing of non-COVID hospitalized...

Environments that make it easier for people to incorporate physical activity into their daily life may help to reduce high rates of cardiometabolic conditions. Local zoning codes are a policy and planning tool to create more walkable and bikeable environments. This study evaluated relationships between active living-oriented zoning code environment...

This study quantifies the effect of the 2020 state COVID economic activity reopening policies on daily mobility and mixing behavior, adding to the economic literature on individual responses to public health policy that addresses public contagion risks. We harness cellular device signal data and the timing of reopening plans to provide an assessmen...

COVID-19 vaccination campaigns continue in the United States, with the expectation that vaccines will slow transmission of the virus, save lives, and enable a return to normal life in due course. However, the extent to which faster vaccine administration has affected COVID-19-related deaths is unknown. We assessed the association between US state-l...

Measuring the prevalence of active SARS-CoV-2 infections is difficult because tests are conducted on a small and non-random segment of the population. But people admitted to the hospital for non-COVID reasons are tested at very high rates, even though they do not appear to be at elevated risk of infection. This sub-population may provide valuable e...

The COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic with community circulation in many countries, including the United States, with confirmed cases in all states. The course of this pandemic will be shaped by how governments enact timely policies and disseminate information and by how the public reacts to policies and information. Here, we examine informati...

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is a global pandemic with community circulation in many countries, including the U.S. where every state is reporting confirmed cases. The course of this pandemic will be largely shaped by how governments enact timely policies, disseminate the information, and most importantly, how the public reacts to them....

Objective: Improving neighborhood walkability has been proposed as a policy intervention to reduce obesity. The objective of this study was to evaluate longitudinal relationships between neighborhood walkability and body weight among adults living in large urban areas. Methods: In this retrospective longitudinal study of United States military v...

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are frequent users of health services. We examined how their service utilization of emergency department (ED), inpatient hospitalization, and primary care physicians changed as they transitioned from fee-for-service to Medicaid managed care (MMC). Our results showed that MMC reduced the...

Outcomes of behavioral lifestyle interventions for promoting weight loss vary widely across participants. The effectiveness of a weight management intervention may depend on a person's environmental context. This study compared short- and longer-term effects of a structured nationwide weight management program for people living in neighborhoods wit...

Addressing gaps in evidence on causal associations, this study tested the hypothesis that better access to recreational places close to home helps people to maintain lower body mass index (BMI) using a retrospective longitudinal study design and up to 6 years of data for the same individuals (1,522,803 men and 183,618 women). Participants were mili...

This paper introduces an instrumental variables framework for analyzing how external factors that affect survey response rates can also affect the composition of the sample of respondents. The method may be useful for studying survey representativeness, and for assessing the effectiveness of some of the conventional corrections for survey nonrespon...

Objective: We evaluated the impact of Medicaid managed care (MMC) on health service use and state costs among adults with early-acquired physical disabilities. Method: Using claims data, we tracked utilization of the emergency department (ED), inpatient admissions, outpatient physician visits, and state expenditures on enrollees who transitioned to...

Objective To estimate the causal effects of a population‐scale behavioral weight management program and to determine whether the program's effectiveness depends on participants’ geographic access to places to purchase healthy and less healthy foods. Data Sources Secondary data from U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs clinical and administrative re...

The difference in difference (DID) design is a quasi-experimental research design that researchers often use to study causal relationships in public health settings where randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are infeasible or unethical. However, causal inference poses many challenges in DID designs. In this article, we review key features of DID des...

States have increasingly transitioned Medicaid enrollees with disabilities from fee-for-service (FFS) to Medicaid Managed Care (MMC), intending to reduce state Medicaid spending and to provide better access to health services. Yet, previous studies on the impact of MMC are limited and findings are inconsistent. We analyzed the impact of MMC on cost...

Purpose To present the rationale, methods, and cohort characteristics for 2 complementary “big data” studies of residential environment contributions to body weight, metabolic risk, and weight management program participation and effectiveness. Design Retrospective cohort. Setting Continental United States. Participants A total of 3 261 115 vete...

Treatment effect estimates from a regression discontinuity design (RDD) have high internal validity. However, the arguments that support the design apply to a subpopulation that is narrower and usually different from the population of substantive interest in evaluation research. The disconnect between RDD population and the evaluation population of...

This study examined whether community food environments altered the longer-term effects of a nationwide behavioral weight management program on body mass index (BMI). The sample was comprised of 98,871 male weight management program participants and 15,385 female participants, as well as 461,302 and 37,192 inverse propensity-score weighted matched...

Background: Activities such as swimming, paddling, motor-boating, and fishing are relatively common on US surface waters. Water recreators have a higher rate of acute gastrointestinal illness, along with other illnesses including respiratory, ear, eye, and skin symptoms, compared to non-water recreators. The quantity and costs of such illnesses ar...

When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law in 2002, it was viewed as an effort to create uniform standards for students and schools across the country. More than a decade later, we know surprisingly little about how states actually implemented NCLB and the extent to which state implementation decisions managed to undo the centralizing objectives o...

Introduction Among the nearly 21 million military veterans living in the United States, 64.0% of women and 76.1% of men are overweight or obese, higher rates than in the civilian population (56.9% of women and 69.9% of men). Attributes of the residential environment are linked to obesity. The objective of this study was to characterize the resident...

In recent years, various levels of government in the United States have adopted or discussed subsidies, tax breaks, zoning laws, and other public policies that promote geographic access to healthy food. However, there is little evidence from large-scale longitudinal or quasi-experimental research to suggest that the local mix of food outlets actual...

The doubly randomized preference trial (DRPT) is a randomized experimental design with three arms: a treatment arm, a control arm, and a preference arm. The design has useful properties that have gone unnoticed in the applied and methodological literatures. This paper shows how to interpret the DRPT design using an instrumental variables (IV) frame...

Background: The burden of illness can be described by addressing both incidence and illness severity attributable to water recreation. Monetized as cost, attributable disease burden estimates can be useful for environmental management decisions. Objectives: To characterize the disease burden attributable to water recreation using data from two c...

Background: A series of state-level statute changes have allowed pharmacists to provide influenza vaccinations in community pharmacies. The study aim was to estimate the effects of pharmacy-based immunization statutes changes on per capita influenza vaccine prescriptions, adult vaccination rates, and the utilization of other preventive health serv...

Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of US states to give nurse practitioners the ability to perform more tasks without the supervision of medical doctors. We investigate how these regulations affect wages, hours worked, and the prevailing transaction prices and quality levels associated with certain types of medical serv...

Background Rapid steroid withdrawal (RSW) is used increasingly in kidney transplantation but long-term outcomes in African-American (AA) recipients are not well known. We compared 1 and 5 year transplant outcomes in a large cohort of AA patients who were maintained on continued steroid therapy (CST) to those who underwent RSW. Methods Post-transpl...

To determine whether there were differential quit rates between African Americans (AA) and European Americans with the experimental treatment naltrexone, and examine the role of genetic ancestry on these outcomes among AAs. Data from a previous randomized trial of 315 smokers to naltrexone versus placebo were reanalyzed using West African (WA) gene...

Evaluate dabigatran adverse event reports with a reported bleeding event and/or reported fatal outcome compared with warfarin. Retrospective analysis of the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database. We identified reports from October 1, 2010, through December 31, 2011, in the United States listing dabigatran or warfarin as the primary su...

In the United States, occupational regulations influence the work tasks that may legally be performed by dentists and dental hygienists. Only a dentist may legally perform most dental procedures; however, a smaller list of basic procedures may be provided by either a dentist or a dental hygienist. Since dentists and hygienists possess different lev...

The sharp regression discontinuity design (RDD) has three key weaknesses compared to the randomized clinical trial (RCT). It has lower statistical power, it is more dependent on statistical modeling assumptions, and its treatment effect estimates are limited to the narrow subpopulation of cases immediately around the cutoff, which is rarely of dire...

The objective of this study was to examine the extent to which aldosterone synthase genotype (CYP11B2) and genetic ancestry correlate with atrial fibrillation (AF) and serum aldosterone in African Americans with heart failure. Clinical data, echocardiographic measurements, and a genetic sample for determination of CYP11B2 -344T>C (rs1799998) genoty...

PCR primers. (DOCX)

Using the 2008 National Study of Employers to analyze employers' compliance with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), we show that prior studies have overestimated compliance due to the treatment of missing values and incomplete definitions of the FMLA. Using partial identification methods, we estimate that FMLA compliance among firms with 50 o...

Over the past two decades, the program evaluation literature has made great advances on improving methodological approaches for establishing causal inference. The two most significant developments include establishing the primacy of design over statistical adjustment procedures for making causal inferences, and using potential outcomes to specify t...

This article examines the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration and concludes that it has limited relevance for understanding the effects of the federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8 Program) for four reasons. First, MTO focused on a group of people who lived in public housing at the outset of the study, a...

Thornton (2008) presents results from a small field experiment designed to study the impact of an HIV voluntary counseling and testing service on sexual behaviors in Malawi. The study employed a non-classical experimental design in which subjects were randomly assigned a range of different cash and non-cash incentives to participate in the program....

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the databases underlying the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) allow estimates of the extent to which immigrant and nonimmigrant children are poor across a wide range of rich nations. These data also allow estimates of the effects of social transfers that reduce poverty amongst all f...

I evaluated the effects of written informed consent requirements on HIV testing rates in New York State to determine whether such consent creates barriers that discourage HIV testing. New York streamlined its HIV testing consent procedures on June 1, 2005. If written informed consent creates barriers to HIV testing, then New York's streamlining exe...