Publications
Reexamining the Consumption Smoothing Benefits of Unemployment Insurance, with Elira Kuka
Journal of Public Economics, 2015, Vol. 132, pp. 32-50
Abstract: The Great Recession spurred renewed interest in the moral hazard effects of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, however little research has focused on determining its benefits. This paper examines the consumption smoothing benefit of the UI program over the last 40 years, finding strong evidence of heterogeneity in this effect over time. In particular, the effects of UI are smaller in the 1990s compared with the 1970s. The 1990s were unique because of the long period of low unemployment rates as well as relatively low UI program generosity, thus we test whether the consumption smoothing effects vary by the state unemployment rate and average program generosity. We find suggestive evidence that the effects are larger when the state unemployment rate and average generosity are high. Together, these two dimensions can explain around 30-46% of the differential effect that we find in the 1990s.
Immigrants' Labor Supply Response to Food Stamp Access
Labour Economics, 2018, Vol. 51, pp. 202-226
Abstract: Welfare reform in 1996 created a new, large disparity in Food Stamp eligibility between documented non-citizen immigrants and natives. Subsequent policies restored eligibility for most of these immigrants at different times in different states, and I use these changes to estimate the effect of program access on the labor supply of immigrants–a policy-relevant population. The Food Stamp program is one of the largest safety net programs today, and my analysis provides one of the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of the modern Food Stamp program on adult labor supply. I find strong evidence of labor supply disincentives, and the magnitude and margin of this response varies across demographic groups. Access to the program reduces the employment rates of single women by about 6%, whereas married men continue to work but reduce their hours of work by 5%. These findings confirm the predictions of traditional labor supply theory regarding the response to a means-tested program.
The Effect of Food Stamps on Children's Health: Evidence from Immigrants' Changing Eligibility
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2020, vol. 55, no.2, pp. 387-427
Media Coverage: The Council of Economic Advisers, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (a) and (b), The Conversation, The Alton Telegraph
Abstract: The Food Stamp program is currently one of the largest safety net programs in the United States and is especially important for families with children: 25% of all children received Food Stamp benefits in 2011. The existing evidence on the effects of Food Stamps on children’s and families’ outcomes is limited, however, because it is a federal program with little quasi-experimental variation. I utilize a large, recent source of quasi-experimental variation–changes in documented immigrants’ eligibility across states and over time from 1996 to 2003–to estimate the effect of Food Stamps on children’s health. I study the medium-run health effects of these policy changes on U.S.-born children of immigrants, whose parents were subject to the changes in eligibility. I find loss of parental eligibility has large effects on contemporaneous program receipt, and an additional year of parental eligibility, between the time children are in utero to age 4, leads to improvements in health outcomes at ages 6-16. This provides some of the first evidence that early-life resource shocks impact later-life health as early as school age.
How do Early Life Health Experiences Affect Future Generations' Equality of Opportunity?, with Marianne Page
"An Equal Start: Policy and Practice to Promote Equality of Opportunity for Children." American Psychological Association edited volume.
Abstract: A large literature documents that early life health environments can have long lasting impacts on individuals’ well-being. Existing literatures in biology, epidemiology, psychology, child development and economics also predict that the effects of early environments should persist beyond the exposed generation. This article considers what is known about the extent to which “first generation” effects persist to later generations, with a focus on studies that use randomized experiments and “natural experiment” research designs that can help isolate causal effects from correlations. In addition to documenting persistent effects of early life environments from one generation to the next, we argue that the presence and magnitude of multi-generational linkages has important implications for the evaluation of public policies intended to promote equality of opportunity. The emerging evidence on positive interventions’ multi-generational impacts suggests that existing cost-benefit analyses typically underestimate programs’ true value.
An Apple a Day? Adult Food Stamp Eligibility and Health Care Utilization, with Andrew Friedson, Revised February 2020,
American Journal of Health Economics, Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2020
Older Version: IZA DP No. 11445, Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 19-295
Upjohn Institute Featured Research (nontechnical)
Abstract: In this study, we document the effect of Food Stamp access on adult health care utilization. While Food Stamps is one of the largest safety net programs in the U.S. today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental analysis. To circumvent this, we use variation in documented immigrants’ eligibility for Food Stamps across states and over time due to welfare reform in 1996. Our estimates indicate that access to Food Stamps reduced physician visits. Additionally, we find that for single women, Food Stamps increased the affordability of specialty health care. These findings have important implications for cost-benefit analyses of the Food Stamp program, as reductions in health care utilization due to Food Stamps may offset some of the program’s impact on the overall government budget due to the existence of government-provided health insurance programs such as Medicaid.
Working Papers
Multi-generational Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net: Early Life Exposure to Medicaid and the Next Generation’s Health, with Sarah Miller, Marianne Page, and Laura Wherry, NBER Working Paper 23810, Revised February 2019
Reject and Resubmit at the American Economic Review
Media Coverage: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, NBER Digest, VOX, Brookings
Abstract: We examine multi-generational impacts of positive in utero and early life health interventions using state-year variation in public health insurance expansions that targeted low-income pregnant women and children. We use restricted use Vital Statistics Natality files to create a unique dataset linking individuals’ childhood Medicaid exposure to the next generation’s health outcomes at birth. We find robust evidence that the health benefits associated with treated generations’ early life access to Medicaid extend to later offspring’s birth outcomes. Our results imply that the return on investment is larger than suggested by evaluations of the program that focus only on treated cohorts.
The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement, with Annie Hines, Philip Luck, Hani Mansour, and Andrea Velasquez, Revised July 2020
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Labor Economics
Older Version: IZA DP No. 11486
Media Coverage: The Economist ("The perverse side effects of America’s harsh immigration policies")
Abstract: This paper examines the effects of reducing the supply of low-skilled immigrant workers on the labor market outcomes of domestic workers. We use temporal and geographic variation in the introduction of Secure Communities (SC), a county-based immigration enforcement policy, combined with data over 2005-2014 from the American Community Survey to estimate a difference-in-difference model with geographic and time fixed effects. We find evidence that SC had a negative impact on the employment of low-skilled non-citizen workers, who are likely to be directly affected by the policy. Importantly, we also find that SC negatively impacted the employment of citizens working in middle to high-skill occupations. This is the first paper to provide quasi-experimental evidence on the labor market effects of immigration enforcement policies on citizens across the occupational skill distribution, which is of paramount importance given the current immigration policy debates.
Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement: Household Services and High-Skilled Women's Work, with Andrea Velasquez, Revised September 2020
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Human Resources
Older Version: IZA DP No. 12029
Media Coverage: The Economist ("How immigration-law enforcement can affect high-skilled American women")
Abstract: Immigration enforcement has intensified in the U.S., however, there is little evidence on its effect on citizen’s labor outcomes. Exploiting the staggered rollout of a large, federal enforcement policy–Secure Communities (SC)–across local areas, we estimate a difference-in-differences model with time and location fixed effects. We find that SC reduced the labor supply of high-skilled citizen mothers. This effect is larger for mothers with young children, and there are persistent negative effects following the birth of a child. The increased cost of outsourcing household production, due to reduced undocumented immigrant women’s labor supply, is an important mechanism.
How Well Insured are Job Losers? Efficacy of the Public Safety Net, with David Simon, December 2020, NBER Working Paper 28218
Media Coverage: Denver Business Journal, CNBC
Abstract: An extensive literature in economics documents large and persistent declines in earnings following involuntary job loss. We study whether the public safety net mitigates this loss in resources using the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 1996-2013. With an individual fixed effects model, we document which public safety net programs provide the most insurance, and how this varies by pre-job-loss characteristics. We find that Unemployment Insurance provides the largest buffer against lost income, but that due to the structure of the program, the neediest are less-well insured (in terms of dollars transferred and percentage of lost earnings replaced), compared to middle and higher income job losers. This has important implications for the progressivity of the safety net, and how best to support displaced workers, which is crucial to understand for job losers at any time, and especially now, in light of the historic number of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal of Public Economics, 2015, Vol. 132, pp. 32-50
Abstract: The Great Recession spurred renewed interest in the moral hazard effects of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, however little research has focused on determining its benefits. This paper examines the consumption smoothing benefit of the UI program over the last 40 years, finding strong evidence of heterogeneity in this effect over time. In particular, the effects of UI are smaller in the 1990s compared with the 1970s. The 1990s were unique because of the long period of low unemployment rates as well as relatively low UI program generosity, thus we test whether the consumption smoothing effects vary by the state unemployment rate and average program generosity. We find suggestive evidence that the effects are larger when the state unemployment rate and average generosity are high. Together, these two dimensions can explain around 30-46% of the differential effect that we find in the 1990s.
Immigrants' Labor Supply Response to Food Stamp Access
Labour Economics, 2018, Vol. 51, pp. 202-226
Abstract: Welfare reform in 1996 created a new, large disparity in Food Stamp eligibility between documented non-citizen immigrants and natives. Subsequent policies restored eligibility for most of these immigrants at different times in different states, and I use these changes to estimate the effect of program access on the labor supply of immigrants–a policy-relevant population. The Food Stamp program is one of the largest safety net programs today, and my analysis provides one of the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of the modern Food Stamp program on adult labor supply. I find strong evidence of labor supply disincentives, and the magnitude and margin of this response varies across demographic groups. Access to the program reduces the employment rates of single women by about 6%, whereas married men continue to work but reduce their hours of work by 5%. These findings confirm the predictions of traditional labor supply theory regarding the response to a means-tested program.
The Effect of Food Stamps on Children's Health: Evidence from Immigrants' Changing Eligibility
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2020, vol. 55, no.2, pp. 387-427
Media Coverage: The Council of Economic Advisers, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (a) and (b), The Conversation, The Alton Telegraph
Abstract: The Food Stamp program is currently one of the largest safety net programs in the United States and is especially important for families with children: 25% of all children received Food Stamp benefits in 2011. The existing evidence on the effects of Food Stamps on children’s and families’ outcomes is limited, however, because it is a federal program with little quasi-experimental variation. I utilize a large, recent source of quasi-experimental variation–changes in documented immigrants’ eligibility across states and over time from 1996 to 2003–to estimate the effect of Food Stamps on children’s health. I study the medium-run health effects of these policy changes on U.S.-born children of immigrants, whose parents were subject to the changes in eligibility. I find loss of parental eligibility has large effects on contemporaneous program receipt, and an additional year of parental eligibility, between the time children are in utero to age 4, leads to improvements in health outcomes at ages 6-16. This provides some of the first evidence that early-life resource shocks impact later-life health as early as school age.
How do Early Life Health Experiences Affect Future Generations' Equality of Opportunity?, with Marianne Page
"An Equal Start: Policy and Practice to Promote Equality of Opportunity for Children." American Psychological Association edited volume.
Abstract: A large literature documents that early life health environments can have long lasting impacts on individuals’ well-being. Existing literatures in biology, epidemiology, psychology, child development and economics also predict that the effects of early environments should persist beyond the exposed generation. This article considers what is known about the extent to which “first generation” effects persist to later generations, with a focus on studies that use randomized experiments and “natural experiment” research designs that can help isolate causal effects from correlations. In addition to documenting persistent effects of early life environments from one generation to the next, we argue that the presence and magnitude of multi-generational linkages has important implications for the evaluation of public policies intended to promote equality of opportunity. The emerging evidence on positive interventions’ multi-generational impacts suggests that existing cost-benefit analyses typically underestimate programs’ true value.
An Apple a Day? Adult Food Stamp Eligibility and Health Care Utilization, with Andrew Friedson, Revised February 2020,
American Journal of Health Economics, Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2020
Older Version: IZA DP No. 11445, Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 19-295
Upjohn Institute Featured Research (nontechnical)
Abstract: In this study, we document the effect of Food Stamp access on adult health care utilization. While Food Stamps is one of the largest safety net programs in the U.S. today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental analysis. To circumvent this, we use variation in documented immigrants’ eligibility for Food Stamps across states and over time due to welfare reform in 1996. Our estimates indicate that access to Food Stamps reduced physician visits. Additionally, we find that for single women, Food Stamps increased the affordability of specialty health care. These findings have important implications for cost-benefit analyses of the Food Stamp program, as reductions in health care utilization due to Food Stamps may offset some of the program’s impact on the overall government budget due to the existence of government-provided health insurance programs such as Medicaid.
Working Papers
Multi-generational Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net: Early Life Exposure to Medicaid and the Next Generation’s Health, with Sarah Miller, Marianne Page, and Laura Wherry, NBER Working Paper 23810, Revised February 2019
Reject and Resubmit at the American Economic Review
Media Coverage: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, NBER Digest, VOX, Brookings
Abstract: We examine multi-generational impacts of positive in utero and early life health interventions using state-year variation in public health insurance expansions that targeted low-income pregnant women and children. We use restricted use Vital Statistics Natality files to create a unique dataset linking individuals’ childhood Medicaid exposure to the next generation’s health outcomes at birth. We find robust evidence that the health benefits associated with treated generations’ early life access to Medicaid extend to later offspring’s birth outcomes. Our results imply that the return on investment is larger than suggested by evaluations of the program that focus only on treated cohorts.
The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement, with Annie Hines, Philip Luck, Hani Mansour, and Andrea Velasquez, Revised July 2020
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Labor Economics
Older Version: IZA DP No. 11486
Media Coverage: The Economist ("The perverse side effects of America’s harsh immigration policies")
Abstract: This paper examines the effects of reducing the supply of low-skilled immigrant workers on the labor market outcomes of domestic workers. We use temporal and geographic variation in the introduction of Secure Communities (SC), a county-based immigration enforcement policy, combined with data over 2005-2014 from the American Community Survey to estimate a difference-in-difference model with geographic and time fixed effects. We find evidence that SC had a negative impact on the employment of low-skilled non-citizen workers, who are likely to be directly affected by the policy. Importantly, we also find that SC negatively impacted the employment of citizens working in middle to high-skill occupations. This is the first paper to provide quasi-experimental evidence on the labor market effects of immigration enforcement policies on citizens across the occupational skill distribution, which is of paramount importance given the current immigration policy debates.
Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement: Household Services and High-Skilled Women's Work, with Andrea Velasquez, Revised September 2020
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Human Resources
Older Version: IZA DP No. 12029
Media Coverage: The Economist ("How immigration-law enforcement can affect high-skilled American women")
Abstract: Immigration enforcement has intensified in the U.S., however, there is little evidence on its effect on citizen’s labor outcomes. Exploiting the staggered rollout of a large, federal enforcement policy–Secure Communities (SC)–across local areas, we estimate a difference-in-differences model with time and location fixed effects. We find that SC reduced the labor supply of high-skilled citizen mothers. This effect is larger for mothers with young children, and there are persistent negative effects following the birth of a child. The increased cost of outsourcing household production, due to reduced undocumented immigrant women’s labor supply, is an important mechanism.
How Well Insured are Job Losers? Efficacy of the Public Safety Net, with David Simon, December 2020, NBER Working Paper 28218
Media Coverage: Denver Business Journal, CNBC
Abstract: An extensive literature in economics documents large and persistent declines in earnings following involuntary job loss. We study whether the public safety net mitigates this loss in resources using the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 1996-2013. With an individual fixed effects model, we document which public safety net programs provide the most insurance, and how this varies by pre-job-loss characteristics. We find that Unemployment Insurance provides the largest buffer against lost income, but that due to the structure of the program, the neediest are less-well insured (in terms of dollars transferred and percentage of lost earnings replaced), compared to middle and higher income job losers. This has important implications for the progressivity of the safety net, and how best to support displaced workers, which is crucial to understand for job losers at any time, and especially now, in light of the historic number of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Work in Progress
Revisiting the Added Worker Effect Using Linked Survey-Administrative Data, with Danielle Sandler and David Simon
Multi-generational Effects of Prenatal and Early Life Access to SNAP, with Marianne Page
Intergenerational Economic Progress among Immigrants: Individual, Group, and Policy Influences, with Jonathan Rothbaum
The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on Immigrant Health Care Utilization and Spillovers to Native Health, with Michelle Marcus
Multi-generational Effects of Prenatal and Early Life Access to SNAP, with Marianne Page
Intergenerational Economic Progress among Immigrants: Individual, Group, and Policy Influences, with Jonathan Rothbaum
The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on Immigrant Health Care Utilization and Spillovers to Native Health, with Michelle Marcus
Policy Briefs and Opinion Pieces
The Relationship between Unemployment Insurance and SNAP during COVID-19 and Historically, with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Lauren Bauer, Brookings Institute, In Progress
Immigrants Access to the Safety Net and Consequences for Children's Well-Being, National Center for Children in Poverty, In Progress
New research reveals the importance of Unemployment Insurance for displaced worker, Niskanen Center, December 18, 2020
Job Loss and the Safety Net, with David Simon, EconoFact, December 2, 2020
Coronavirus’ Disproportionate Economic Impacts on Immigrants, with Hilary Hoynes and Tara Watson, EconoFact, June 17, 2020
Media Coverage: CNBC
Disparities in Access to Health Care During a Pandemic, with Michelle Marcus, EconoFact, May 27, 2020
Reprinted by Niskanen Center
Secure Communities: Broad Impacts of Increased Immigration Enforcement, EconoFact, January 13, 2020
Access to Food Stamps Improves Children’s Health and Reduces Medical Spending UC Davis Poverty Center Policy Brief, Volume 7, Number 4, November 2018
Immigrants Access to the Safety Net and Consequences for Children's Well-Being, National Center for Children in Poverty, In Progress
New research reveals the importance of Unemployment Insurance for displaced worker, Niskanen Center, December 18, 2020
Job Loss and the Safety Net, with David Simon, EconoFact, December 2, 2020
Coronavirus’ Disproportionate Economic Impacts on Immigrants, with Hilary Hoynes and Tara Watson, EconoFact, June 17, 2020
Media Coverage: CNBC
Disparities in Access to Health Care During a Pandemic, with Michelle Marcus, EconoFact, May 27, 2020
Reprinted by Niskanen Center
Secure Communities: Broad Impacts of Increased Immigration Enforcement, EconoFact, January 13, 2020
Access to Food Stamps Improves Children’s Health and Reduces Medical Spending UC Davis Poverty Center Policy Brief, Volume 7, Number 4, November 2018