Janet Currie's research while affiliated with Princeton University and other places
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Publications (202)
We use natality microdata covering the universe of US. births for 2015 to 2021 and California births from 2015 through February 2023 to examine childbearing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that 60% of the 2020 decline in US fertility rates was driven by sharp reductions in births to foreign-born mothers although births to this group com...
Background and objectives:
Children with asthma who have depressed caregivers are known to be less adherent to medication regimes. However, it is less clear how adherence responds to a caregiver's new diagnosis of severe depression or whether there is a similar relationship with other serious caregiver diagnoses. The hypothesis is that adherence w...
We ask how urgent care centers (UCCs) impact healthcare costs and utilization among nearby Medicare beneficiaries. When residents of a zip code are first served by a UCC, total Medicare spending rises while mortality remains flat. In the sixth year after entry, 4.2% of the Medicare beneficiaries in a zip code that is served use a UCC, and the avera...
We use data from the Veterans Administration to examine the efficacy of primary care providers (PCPs). Leveraging quasi-random assignment of veterans to PCPs, we measure effectiveness using ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC) and hospitalizations/emergency department (ED) visits for mental health or circulatory conditions. PCPs variation al...
This project links administrative census microdata to spatially continuous measures of particulate pollution (PM2.5) to first document and then decompose the key drivers of convergence in black-white pollution exposure differences. We use quantile regression to show that a significant portion of the convergence in Black-White exposure is attributab...
Importance:
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a large decrease in US life expectancy in 2020, but whether a similar decrease occurred in 2021 and whether the relationship between income and life expectancy intensified during the pandemic are unclear.
Objective:
To measure changes in life expectancy in 2020 and 2021 and the relationship between income...
The continuing drug overdose crisis in the U.S. has highlighted the urgent need for greater access to treatment. This paper examines the impact of openings and closings of substance use disorder treatment facilities in New Jersey on emergency room visits for substance use disorder issues among nearby residents. We find that drug-related ER visits i...
Over the past 20 years, the United States greatly expanded eligibility for public health insurance under the Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Program programs. This expansion improved children's access to health care and their health, ultimately lowering preventable hospitalizations, chronic conditions, and mortality rates in the most vulnerable...
Significance
From 1990 to 2018, the Black–White American life expectancy gap fell 48.9% and mortality inequality decreased, although progress stalled after 2012 as life expectancy plateaued. Had improvements continued at the 1990 to 2012 rate, the racial gap in life expectancy would have closed by 2036. Despite decreasing mortality inequality, inco...
Without the opioid epidemic, American life expectancy would not have declined prior to 2020. The epidemic was sparked by the development and marketing of a new generation of prescription opioids, and the behavior of opioid providers is still helping to drive it. Little relationship exists between the opioid crisis and contemporaneous measures of la...
This cross-sectional study uses data from the Ohio Department of Health to evaluate trends in drug overdose mortality in that state by type of drug and user age during the first 7 months of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Importance:
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted medical care, impacting prescribing of opioid analgesics and buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. Understanding these patterns can help address barriers to care.
Objective:
To evaluate how prescribing of opioid analgesics and buprenorphine for opioid use disorder changed throughout the COVID-19 pande...
This study provides comparisons of inequalities in mortality between the United States, Canada and France using the most recent available data. The period between 2010 and 2018 saw increases in mortality and in inequality in mortality for most age and gender groups in the United States. The main exceptions were children under 5 and adults over 65....
We use data from the German Federal Statistical Office on population counts, births, deaths and income to study the development of socio‐economic inequality in mortality rates from 1990 to 2015 for different age groups and both genders. Ranking the 401 German districts by average disposable income per capita, we observe large inequalities in distri...
Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9%between 1990 and 2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in high- and low-income US areas and with reference to six European countries. Inequalities in...
Significance
This study uses a large national database of insured adolescent children who have an initial insurance claim for a mental illness. Many of these children either fail to receive follow-up care within 3 mo, or receive care that appears to fall short of standard guidelines for the initial treatment of mental illness in children. The major...
We study the effects of prenatal exposure to violent crime on infant health, using New York City crime records linked to mothers' addresses in birth records data. We address endogeneity of assault exposure with three strategies and find that in utero assault exposure significantly increases the incidence of adverse birth outcomes. We calculate that...
Treatment for depression is complex, requiring decisions that may involve trade‐offs between exploiting treatments with the highest expected value and experimenting with treatments with higher possible payoffs. Using patient claims data, we show that among skilled doctors, using a broader portfolio of drugs predicts better patient outcomes, except...
The last 40 years have seen huge innovations in computing and in the availability of data. Data derived from millions of administrative records or by using (as we do) new methods of data generation such as text mining are now common. New data often requires new methods, which in turn can inspire new data collection. If history is any guide, some me...
Women continue to be underrepresented in academic ranks in the economics profession. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association established the CeMENT mentoring workshop to support women in research careers. The program was designed as a randomized controlled trial. This study evaluates dif...
Child health is increasingly understood to be a critical form of human capital, but only recently have we begun to understand how valuable it is and how its development could be better supported. This article provides an overview of recent work that demonstrates the key role of public insurance in supporting longer term human capital development an...
We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States,...
A large body of literature documents positive effects of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on birth outcomes, and separately connects health at birth and future outcomes. But little research investigates the link between prenatal WIC participation and childhood outcomes. We explore this question using...
Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 50 years in large part due to the introduction of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it. This article is a reflection on the 50-year anniversary of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, describing what economic...
This article provides an overview of the Medicaid program and summarizes the evidence about its effectiveness in terms of providing insurance and promoting health. The evidence shows that Medicaid has improved the lives of low-income people since its creation in 1965. Expansions in Medicaid have led to increases in coverage and access to medical ca...
Given concern about inefficient use of the emergency room (ER) increasing health care costs, we use all ER visits in New Jersey from 2006 to 2014 to examine the impacts of retail clinics on ER use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that among people residing close to an open retail clinic, the rate of ER use falls by 3.3–13.4% for pre...
Exploiting geological variation and timing in the initiation of hydraulic fracturing, we find that fracking leads to sharp increases in oil and gas recovery and improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. There is also evidence of deterioration in local amenities, which may include increases in crime, noise, and traffic and declines in healt...
Teenagers under 18 could legally purchase e-cigarettes until states passed minimum legal sale age laws. These laws may have curtailed teenagers' use of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. We investigate the effect of e-cigarette minimum legal sale age laws on prenatal cigarette smoking and birth outcomes for underage rural teenagers using data on a...
That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established. Nevertheless, research on the fetal origins hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to include the early childhood (postnatal) environment. Why does this literature have a "second act?" We summarize the major themes and contributions driving the empirical literature si...
In the U.S., nearly 11% of school-age children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and approximately 10% of children suffer from asthma. In the last decade, the number of children diagnosed with these conditions has inexplicably been on the rise. This increase has been concentrated in the Medicaid caseload nationwide. One of the most striking changes in...
Latinos have the highest US childhood uninsurance rate of any race/ethnicity, but little is known about effective ways to eliminate this disparity. We evaluated the effects of parent mentors-Latino parents with children covered by Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program-on insuring Latino children in a randomized, controlled, community-...
Recent research shows increasing inequality in mortality among middle-aged and older adults. But this is only part of the story. Inequality in mortality among young people has fallen dramatically in the United States converging to almost Canadian rates. Increases in public health insurance for U.S. children, beginning in the late 1980s, are likely...
Inequality in mortality over the life course: Why things are not as bad as you think. (JEL D63, I18, I38, J1, J3, J18)
The development of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is considered the biggest change to the global energy production system in the last half-century. However, several communities have banned fracking because of unresolved concerns about the impact of this process on human health. To evaluate the potential health impacts of fracking, we analyzed re...
Using national data on opioid prescriptions written by physicians from 2006 to 2014, we uncover a striking relationship between opioid prescribing and medical school rank. Even within the same specialty and practice location, physicians who completed their initial training at top medical schools write significantly fewer opioid prescriptions annual...
Higher asthma rates are one of the more obvious ways that health inequalities between African American and other children are manifested beginning in early childhood. In 2010, black asthma rates were double non-black rates. Some but not all of this difference can be explained by factors such as a higher incidence of low birth weight (LBW) among bla...
Mortality is a crucial dimension of wellbeing and inequality in a population, and mortality trends have been at the core of public debates in many Western countries. In this paper, we provide the first analysis of mortality inequality in Canada and compare its development to trends in the U.S. We find strong reductions in mortality rates across bot...
Background:
Of the 4.8 million uninsured children in America, 62-72% are eligible for but not enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. Not enough is known, however, about the impact of health insurance on outcomes and costs for previously uninsured children, which has never been examined prospectively.
Methods:
This prospective observational study of unins...
There is continuing controversy about the extent to which publicly insured children are treated differently than privately insured children, and whether differences in treatment matter. We show that on average, hospitals are less likely to admit publicly insured children than privately insured children who present at the ER and the gap grows during...
The events of 9/11 released a million tons of toxic dust into lower Manhattan, an unparalleled environmental disaster. It is puzzling, then, that the literature has shown little effect of fetal exposure to the dust. However, inference is complicated by preexisting differences between the affected mothers and other NYC mothers as well as heterogenei...
Background:
Six million US children are uninsured, despite two-thirds being eligible for Medicaid/Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and minority children are at especially high risk. The most effective way to insure uninsured children, however, is unclear.
Methods:
We conducted a randomized trial of the effects of parent mentors (PMs)...
In this essay, we ask whether the distributions of life expectancy and mortality have become generally more unequal, as many seem to believe, and we report some good news. Focusing on groups of counties ranked by their poverty rates, we show that gains in life expectancy at birth have actually been relatively equally distributed between rich and po...
Narrowing of the life expectancy gap
In the United States, the rich can expect to enjoy better health and a longer life than the poor. Despite policies directed at improving the health of both the young and the poor, there is little evidence that this relationship has changed. Currie and Schwandt looked specifically at the life expectancy of presen...
On 14 January 2016, Liberia was declared Ebola-free. A new case was identified shortly after the announcement, but it is nevertheless clear that the West African epidemic has moved on to a more hopeful phase. What lessons can be drawn from the Ebola crisis to help the international community to prepare for and respond to the next global epidemic? T...
We use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study to investigate the impacts of the Great Recession on the health of mothers. We focus on a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes, as well as health behaviour. We find that increases in the unemployment rate decrease self-reported health status and increase smok...
There is a large literature suggesting that “WIC works” to improve birth outcomes. However, methodological limitations related to selection into the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program have left room for doubt about this conclusion. This article uses birth records from New York City to address some limitations of the previous literature. We...
Mounting evidence across different disciplines suggests that early-life conditions can have consequences on individual outcomes throughout the life cycle. Relative to other developed countries, the United States fares poorly on standard indicators of early-life health, and this disadvantage may have profound consequences not only for population wel...
Significance
Fertility falls when unemployment rises, but there may be no long-run effect if women simply postpone childbearing. We analyze the effects of unemployment by following fixed cohorts of US-born women defined by their own state and year of birth. We find that a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate experienced between th...
A large literature describes relationships between month of birth, birth weight, and gestation. These relationships are hypothesized to reflect the causal impact of seasonal environmental factors. However, recent work casts doubt on this interpretation by showing that mothers with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to give birth in months t...
Discussions of "big data" in medicine often revolve around gene sequencing and biosamples. It is perhaps less recognized that administrative data in the form of vital records, hospital discharge abstracts, insurance claims, and other routinely collected data also offer the potential for using information from hundreds of thousands, if not millions,...
A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples, omitted variables, endogenous mobility in response to disasters, and errors in the measurement of gestation, as well as by a mechanical correlation between longer ge...
A growing literature documents the links between long-term outcomes and health in the fetal period, infancy, and early childhood. Much of this literature focuses on rich countries, but researchers are increasingly taking advantage of new sources of data and identification to study the long reach of childhood health in developing countries. Health i...
Economic downturns lead to lost income and increased poverty. Although high unemployment almost certainly also increases material hardship, and government transfers likely decrease hardship, the first relationship has not yet been documented and the second is poorly understood. We use data from five waves of the Fragile Families and Child Well-bein...
Child maltreatment is a major social problem. This paper focuses on measuring the relationship between child maltreatment and crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of the most costly potential outcomes of maltreatment. Our work addresses two main limitations of t...
The federal Pell Grant Program provides billions of dollars in subsidies to low-income college students to increase affordability and access to higher education. I estimate the economic incidence of these subsidies using regression discontinuity (RD) and regression kink (RK) designs. I show that institutions capture 17 percent of all Pell Grant aid...
This paper examines the links between the disease environment around the time of a woman's birth, and her health at the time she delivers her own infant. Our results suggest that exposure to disease in early childhood significantly increases the incidence of diabetes in the population of future mothers. The exposed mothers are less likely to be mar...
In the epidemiological literature, the fetal origins hypothesis associated with David J. Barker posits that chronic, degenerative conditions of adult health, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes, may be triggered by circumstances decades earlier, particularly, by in utero nutrition. Economists have expanded on this hypothesis, investigating...
We investigate the relationship between foreclosures and hospital visits using data on all foreclosures and all hospital and emergency room visits from four states that were among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We find that living in a neighborhood with a spike in foreclosures is associated with significant increases in urgent unschedul...
Recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors, including maternal education, behaviors, and participation in social programs. In turn, endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes, and of the outcomes of future generations. Exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has...
The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of educational decisions in two dimensions: First, we investigate what are important determinants of schooling decisions and whether they differ for male and female youths. In particular, we are interested in the role of expectations about monetary returns to schooling, perceived risks of earni...
Recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors, including maternal education, behaviors, and participation in social programs. In turn, endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes, and of the outcomes of future generations. Exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has...
This paper explores the consequences of the expiration of charity care requirements imposed on private hospitals by the Hill-Burton Act. We examine delivery care and the health of newborns using the universe of Florida births from 1989 to 2003 combined with hospital data from the American Hospital Association. We find that charity care requirements...
Janet Currie is the Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics at Columbia University. She has taught at Princeton, MIT, and at UCLA. She has served on several National Academy of Sciences panels. She is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an affiliate of the University of Michiga...
The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of educational decisions in two dimensions: First, we investigate if determinants of schooling differ between male and female youths. In particular, we are interested in the role of expectations about monetary returns to schooling, perceived risks of earnings and unemployment for different scho...
While much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia, very little research documents its effectiveness. We present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and sponsored by the National Science Foun...
This chapter seeks to set out what Economists have learned about the effects of early childhood influences on later life outcomes, and about ameliorating the effects of negative influences. We begin with a brief overview of the theory which illustrates that evidence of a causal relationship between a shock in early childhood and a future outcome sa...
A full accounting of the excess burden of poor health in childhood must include any continuing loss of productivity over the life course. Including these costs results in a much higher estimate of the burden than focusing only on medical costs and other shorter-run costs to parents (such as lost work time). Policies designed to reduce this burden m...
Reforms to the Joint and Several Liability rule (JSL) are one of the most common tort reforms and have been implemented by most US states. JSL allows plaintiffs to claim full recovery from one of the defendants, even if that defendant is only partially responsible for the tort. We develop a theoretical model that shows that the efficiency of the JS...
We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, (E-ZPass), which greatly reduced both traffic congestion and vehicle emissions near highway toll plazas. We show that the introduction of E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers (km) of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, r...
Citations
... Families that failed to complete the forty-nine-page form, returned it late, or made errors, lost their health insurance. Almost 250,000 children lost coverage, the majority because the forms were not returned, incomplete, or late (Arbogast, Chorniy, and Currie 2022; see also Heinrich et al. 2021). Tennessee was one of many states that introduced new burdens to their Medicaid programs between 2016 and 2019. ...
... From January 2022, many European countries show a marked decline in birth rates, continuing a negative trend that may have started before Covid-19 (Sobotka et al., 2023). In the US, the pattern of birth rates was slightly different, first falling in 2020 to early 2021 (Bailey et al., 2023), and especially after the first and second waves of Covid-19 (Adelman et al., 2023), followed by a smaller than expected upswing in 2022. ...
... Recent research indicates how socioeconomic status and class are important factors that increase psychiatrists and medical practitioners' likelihood to prescribe antipsychotics and benzodiazepines to young children. These practices indicate that children who are already marginalized and disenfranchised might be more likely to be blamed for their behaviors and experiences and receive intensive, potentially unnecessary, psychiatric interventions (Currie et al., 2022). With more comprehensive forms of sexuality education curricula incorporating mental health and illness into their core competencies and learning outcomes, it is important to challenge and critique potentially pathologizing representations and discussions of mental health and illness. ...
Reference: Mad Studies and Sexuality Education
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... The aim of this research is to assess how air quality in Jordan and neighboring areas was affected by the COVID-19 lockdown measures. Researchers and environmentally conscious private and public entities commonly employ satellite-based measurements of air pollutants [6], [7]. The lack of ground stations worldwide is one of the primary reasons for the growing preference for using satellite-based estimations to monitor air quality [8], [9]. ...
... 7 Research based on data from 2011 to 2012 also found an inverse relationship between income and poor health status when considering health conditions among the children enrolled in public health insurance. 8 This relationship was particularly strong for mental health disorders. Differences between the children from families with the lowest income and those in families with higher incomes outside the range in this study are likely to be even greater. ...
... For example, one study found that life expectancy at birth in 2020 had fallen in all but three of 37 high-income and upper-middle-income countries compared with 2019, with men experiencing a greater decline [12]. Recently, several studies have estimated the changes in life expectancy at birth in 2021 compared with 2020 or 2019 in some countries [3,20,21]. One found that life expectancy at birth in the USA decreased from 77.0 years in 2020 to 76.4 in 2021, the lowest level since 1996 [20]. ...
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... El perfil de los participantes de este estudio es similar al de otros estudios sobre atención integral en CAPS AD III, hombres, en situación de calle, con baja escolaridad y consumo problemático de alcohol, tabaco y crack (2,7,10) . Este perfil difiere de otros contextos, dado que, en muchos países de América del Norte, Reino Unido y Europa, se le presta especial atención a las acciones para el manejo de crisis de las personas que consumen opioides y sus consecuencias (3,21) . (14,20) . ...
... With some examples being studies of the effectiveness of healthcare providers (Currie and Zhang, 2021), the effectiveness of bosses (Lazear et al., 2015;Bertrand and Schoar, 2003), and the impact of individuals working as part of a team (Arcidiacono et al., 2017). While the standard error estimators derived in this paper might not directly apply in those settings because the procedures used to estimate value added measures can sometimes depart from the ones described here, researchers could draw correct inference in such cases by following the general approach outlined in this paper and jointly modeling the estimation of the value-added measures and subsequent regression analysis together in a GMM framework. ...
... 5 The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted critical inequalities in American health outcomes. 6 One possible cause is the longstanding, predominant model of Fee-For-Service (FFS). In response, patient-centered medical homes ( PCMHs) and accountable care orga-Shifting the care focus: Words, acronyms, and reality The words and language used in healthcare are important as they often carry connotations and elicit an emotional response. ...
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... To deal with this difficulty, some researchers have turned to area-level measures of the propensity to prescribe. The logic behind using arealevel measures is that in areas with high levels of prescribing, individuals are more likely to end up seeing a high-prescribing provider MacLeod 2017, 2020;Cuddy and Currie 2020). ...