Journal of Population Economics最新文献

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of public old-age support on individuals’ fertility decisions and on the long-term equilibrium in an overlapping generation economy with strategic bequest motives. Parents must pay their adult children at least the reservation wage to receive informal old-age support from them (individual rationality constraint). Formal old-age support is financed through wage taxes on children. The increased present value of formal old-age support tends to increase old-age utility, thereby decreasing the family support demand and decreasing savings for the old age. The increased wage tax reduces the opportunity cost of child-rearing time, thereby increasing the fertility rate. The effects of increased formal old-age support on per-worker capital and labor are indeterminate, as is the effect on the long-term lifetime utility of individuals. A strategic bequest motive might engender a higher fertility rate than that of the social optimum.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that links a public health system to a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. It relies on two assumptions. First, the health system directly finances curative health spending on the elderly. Second, public pensions partially depend on health status by introducing a component indexed to society’s average level of old-age disability. Reducing the average disability rate in the economy then lowers pension benefits as the need to finance long-term care services also drops. We study the effects of introducing such a ‘comprehensive’ Social Security system on individual decisions, capital accumulation, and welfare. We first show that health investments can boost savings and capital accumulation under certain conditions. Second, if individuals are sufficiently concerned with their health when old, it is optimal to introduce a health-dependent pension system, as this will raise social welfare compared to a system where pensions are not tied to the society’s average level of old-age disability. Our analysis thus highlights an important policy recommendation: making PAYG pension schemes partially health-dependent can be beneficial to society.

International migration increases classroom diversity around the world, but little is known about the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether foreign-origin teachers causally affect their students’ academic performance. Exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers in Germany, I find that teachers who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants significantly increase the reading comprehension of their students in secondary school, but do not affect their math skills. This study is the first to investigate bilingualism as a potential mechanism and shows that the effect on reading comprehension is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. Given their own experience in language learning, they seem exceptionally well-equipped to teach languages. This study contributes to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement in light of a large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign-origin students.

This study evaluates the labor supply behavior of US-born Hispanic youth in response to immigration enforcement. We draw on the added-worker effect and underscore immigration enforcement actions as a factor influencing labor supply decisions within immigrant families. We argue that while immigration enforcement reduces labor supply among non-citizens, the labor supply among US-born Hispanic youth in mixed-status families increases. Using the Current Population Survey and data on immigration-related arrests, we find that an unexpected surge in arrests increases labor force participation of US-born Hispanic youth by 6 percentage points and weekly hours worked by up to 20%.

This study examines the heterogeneous impacts of minimum wages, which could affect low-income workers’ earnings and employment opportunities, on crime rates across neighboring communities. Using geo-tagged reported crime incident data from 18 major U.S. cities, we find that minimum wage increases reduce violent crime rates notably more in low-income communities than in high-income ones. On average, a one-dollar real minimum wage increase narrows the disparity in quarterly violent crime rates between low- and high-income communities by 12%. The impact varies considerably across different types of cities. The income effect resulting from raising the minimum wage is the main contributing factor.

More than (18%) of US adults meet the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness. Yet, many who could benefit from mental health care do not receive any treatment, primarily due to inability to pay for care or lack of health insurance coverage. How does a change in health insurance coverage affect psychological well-being and mental health? We explore this question using age-based health insurance coverage policies in the United States as natural experiments. We provide evidence that losing health insurance coverage at the age 26 due to aging out from dependent coverage is associated with a statistically significant deterioration in certain mental health indicators and psychological well-being among young adults. On the other hand, we find no evidence of an improvement in mental health or psychological well-being among the elderly at the age 65 due to becoming eligible for Medicare. These results are robust to potential changes in risk-taking behavior and physical health at the same age cutoffs.

It is widely recognized that African Americans have a higher level of mistrust towards the medical and health sector, which results in insufficient utilization of public health services, low participation in clinical research, and vaccination hesitancy. While the Tuskegee Syphilis Study has been identified as a key factor in this mistrust, its specific influence on COVID-19 vaccination uptake among African Americans remains unexplored. Our paper fills this research gap. Our results suggest that the difference in COVID-19 vaccination rates between communities with low and high proportions of Black residents decreases during the study period, but the gap persists. Notably, counties closer to Tuskegee exhibit a slower rate of progress in reducing the racial disparity in COVID-19 vaccination, indicating that the lingering mistrust stemming from the Tuskegee Study has contributed to unequal vaccination rates between African Americans and the rest of America.

In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the “NBA Bubble”, a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-à-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. We control for player, team, and game fixed effects, and dispel alternative mechanisms. Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.

This paper examines the impact of exposure to violence during pregnancy on anthropometric and cognitive outcomes of children in the medium run. I combine detailed household-level data on more than 36,000 children with geo-coded information on civilian casualties in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq between 2003 and 2009 and exploit within-mother differences in prenatal exposure to violence. I find that one violent incident during pregnancy decreases height- and weight-for-age z-scores by 0.13 standard deviations and lowers cognitive and behavioral skills of children. Leveraging information on the severity, type and perpetrator of violence, I isolate the effect of stress from access to prenatal care. The analysis reveals that stressful events, particularly those involving direct threats to personal safety (violence directed at the civilian population and involving execution and torture), exert an even larger negative impact on child health than those incidents that disrupt health infrastructure and access to prenatal care.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of comprehensive and universal early childhood development programs on educational outcomes during middle childhood. I exploit the birth eligibility cutoff of a pioneer intervention of this type in Chile and use administrative data on grade point averages and standardized test scores. Program exposure raises standardized math scores by 1.8% of a standard deviation, standardized reading scores by 4.0% of a standard deviation, and grade point averages by 0.03% of a standard deviation. I find that socioeconomically vulnerable children benefit less from program exposure. The educational marginal value of public funds indicates that the program is beneficial overall and pays for itself.