Research Papers

We find COVID rises in states with higher re-employment rates due to UI cuts: case, hospitalization, and death rates more than double. Additional wages of $1.1B offset only one-eighth of UI losses, while UI savings are offset by $14.8B in hospitalization costs. Illness-related work time losses are valued at $1.5B. Beyond monetary and morbidity costs, UI cuts are estimated to cause an additional 27,000 deaths.

No previous research has addressed the possibility that, during a pandemic, unemployment insurance (UI) may have externalities for health.

The results suggest an important role for UI during infectious stages of pandemics that should be considered for future policy design.

In the context of Health and Human Resource outcomes, we developed and exemplified comparison instruments for ordered categorical data that don’t require artificial Cantril or Likert scaling of outcomes to facilitate level and variation comparisons.

Artificial cardinal scaling of ordered categorical data has been heavily criticized recently because of the inherent ambiguity it engenders (different, equally valid scales can result in substantially different conclusions). These new instruments resolve the issue by providing scale independent comparators that have an unambiguous probabilistic basis.

The generation and use of ordered categorical data has proliferated in the modern era in all areas of the empirical sciences and there is a need for analysis tools which are not subject to ambiguity critiques.

We developed and tested a model explaining how growing up in a poor neighborhood impedes cognitive development, focusing on early life exposure to neurotoxic air pollution. We analyzed data from a national sample of American infants, examining their exposure to over 50 pollutants known or suspected to harm the central nervous system, using causal inference methods and supervised machine learning.

We aimed to uncover the mechanisms by which neighborhood poverty affects cognitive development. By identifying specific factors, such as neurotoxic air pollution, that mediate these effects, we sought to provide insights that could inform interventions and policies aimed at mitigating the adverse impacts of growing up in impoverished neighborhoods.

Our study shows that living in a high-poverty neighborhood increases exposure to harmful air pollutants during infancy, reducing cognitive abilities at age 4 by about one-tenth of a standard deviation. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial for developing targeted interventions to improve cognitive outcomes for children in poor neighborhoods and addressing environmental health disparities.

We followed 1,266 children in Chicago from birth through school entry, tracking their risk of lead exposure and neighborhood socioeconomic composition to estimate the joint effects on receptive vocabulary ability.

We aimed to address the gap in research on the impact of disadvantaged neighborhoods on cognitive development during early childhood, as most studies focus on school-age children or adolescents.

Our findings show that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods reduces vocabulary skills in early childhood through lead contamination. Understanding this causal pathway is crucial for developing interventions to improve cognitive outcomes for children in impoverished neighborhoods and addressing environmental health disparities, promoting better long-term educational and developmental prospects.

We conducted a 2-year randomized clinical trial involving 4834 employees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to evaluate the effects of a comprehensive workplace wellness program on health, health beliefs, and medical use.

We aimed to determine whether such programs improve employee health and reduce medical costs, as randomized evaluations of workplace wellness program efficacy are rare.

Our study provides evidence that while the program did not significantly impact clinical health outcomes or medical use, it positively influenced health beliefs and increased the number of employees reporting having a primary care physician, offering insights for employers considering similar initiatives.

We designed and implemented a comprehensive workplace wellness program for a large employer with over 12,000 employees, randomly assigning program eligibility and financial incentives at the individual level.

We sought to determine whether workplace wellness programs effectively reduce medical spending, boost productivity, and improve employee well-being, addressing the gap in evidence supporting these claims.

Our results indicate that while these programs may not directly reduce costs or enhance productivity, they could still benefit employers by attracting and retaining healthier, lower-cost employees, potentially leading to net savings.

We investigated the effects of long-term exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation by following 4,154 children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measuring neighborhood context annually from age 1 to 17.

We aimed to address the gap in previous research that typically measures neighborhood context only once, failing to account for the duration of residence and understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage.

Our findings reveal that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods significantly reduces the probability of high school graduation, with impacts larger than previously reported. For black children, graduation rates drop from 96% to 76%, and for nonblack children, from 95% to 87%. These results highlight the importance of addressing long-term neighborhood disadvantage to improve educational outcomes.

We introduced demographers to the social interactions approach in economics by developing an analytical framework that shows how the rational-choice approach of neoclassical economics can be combined with social factors. We also presented models to provide qualitative insights into fertility transitions.

We wanted to add to the strand of demography literature based on contextual effects in fertility by emphasizing how the existing approaches can be embedded in a structural model of choices that embodies both contextual effects as well as feedback from the actual decisions of group members.

No topic in demography has received as much theoretical and empirical attention as the study of fertility transitions. Yet, no single theory explains the historical record of transitions in a sufficiently comprehensive way to dominate its competitors.