Erdal Tekin

Body composition and wages

This paper examines the relationship between body composition and wages in the United States. We develop measures of body composition--body fat (BF) and fat-free mass (FFM)--using data on bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) that are available in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III and estimate wage models for respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Previous research uses body size or BMI as measures of obesity despite a growing concern that they do not distinguish between body fat and fat-free body mass or adequately control for non-homogeneity inside the human body. Therefore, measures presented in this paper represent a useful alternative to BMI-based proxies of obesity. Our results indicate that BF is associated with decreased wages for both males and females among whites and blacks. We also present evidence suggesting that FFM is associated with increased wages. We show that these results are not the artifacts of unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, our findings are robust to numerous specification checks and to a large number of alternative BIA prediction equations from which the body composition measures are derived.

Child care subsidy receipt, employment, and child care choices of single mothers

This paper examines the impact of actual subsidy receipt of single mothers on their joint employment and child care mode decisions in the post-welfare reform environment, which places a high priority on parental choice with the quality and type of care chosen. Results indicate that single mothers are highly responsive to child care subsidies by increasing their employment while moving from parental and relative care to center care in the process.

Childcare Subsidies, Wages, and Employment of Single Mothers

This paper develops and estimates a model for the choice of part-time and full-time employment and the decision to pay for childcare among single mothers. The results indicate that a lower childcare price and a higher full-time wage rate both lead to an increase in overall employment and the use of paid childcare. The part-time wage effects are found to be too small to have significant behavioral implications. An analysis of cost-effectiveness indicates that the additional hours of work generated per dollar of government expenditure is larger for a childcare subsidy than a wage subsidy.

Does Child Abuse Cause Crime

Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem. This paper focuses on measuring the effects of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of the most socially costly potential outcomes of maltreatment, and because the proposed mechanisms linking maltreatment and crime are relatively well elucidated in the literature. Our work addresses many limitations of the existing literature on child maltreatment. First, we use a large national sample, and investigate different types of abuse in a similar framework. Second, we pay careful attention to identifying the causal impact of abuse, by using a variety of statistical methods that make differing assumptions. These methods include: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), propensity score matching estimators, and twin fixed effects. Finally, we examine the extent to which the effects of maltreatment vary with socio-economic status (SES), gender, and the severity of the maltreatment. We find that maltreatment approximately doubles the probability of engaging in many types of crime. Low SES children are both more likely to be mistreated and suffer more damaging effects. Boys are at greater risk than girls, at least in terms of increased propensity to commit crime. Sexual abuse appears to have the largest negative effects, perhaps justifying the emphasis on this type of abuse in the literature. Finally, the probability of engaging in crime increases with the experience of multiple forms of maltreatment as well as the experience of Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation.

Employment, Wages, and Alcohol Consumption in Russia

This article investigates the association between alcohol consumption and labor market outcomes in Russia, using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS). It estimates cross-sectional and fixed effects models of the impacts of alcohol consumption on employment and wages for males and females using three different measures of drinking. The cross-sectional findings indicate that alcohol consumption has an inverse U-shaped impact on employment and wages for females. The impact on males appears to be positive but the inverse-U shape is less pronounced. Once the unobserved individual heterogeneity is accounted for using fixed effects, alcohol consumption is found to have no significant effect on employment for either males or females. The fixed effect wage models indicate that alcohol consumption has a small, positive, but linear impact on the wage rate for both males and females. Models including fixed effects generate estimates that are smaller in magnitude compared with those of cross-sectional models. The findings are robust to several diagnostic checks.

Child care subsidies, maternal health, and child-parent interactions: evidence from three nationally representative datasets.

A complete account of the US child care subsidy system requires an understanding of its implications for both parental and child well-being. Although the effects of child care subsidies on maternal employment and child development have been recently studied, many other dimensions of family well-being have received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining the impact of child care subsidy receipt on maternal health and the quality of child-parent interactions. The empirical analyses use data from three nationally representative surveys, providing access to numerous measures of family well-being. In addition, we attempt to handle the possibility of non-random selection into subsidy receipt by using several identification strategies both within and across the surveys. Our results consistently indicate that child care subsidies are associated with worse maternal health and poorer interactions between parents and their children. In particular, subsidized mothers report lower levels of overall health and are more likely to show symptoms consistent with anxiety, depression, and parenting stress. Such mothers also reveal more psychological and physical aggression toward their children and are more likely to utilize spanking as a disciplinary tool. Together, these findings suggest that work-based public policies aimed at economically disadvantaged mothers may ultimately undermine family well-being.

Guns and Juvenile Crime

Using a nationally representative panel data set of U.S. high school students, this paper investigates the effect of gun availability at home on robbery, burglary, theft, and property damage for juveniles. Controlling for a very large number of personal and family characteristics and exploiting the time variation in criminal activity and gun availability, we show that gun availability at home is positively related to the propensity to commit crime for juveniles. It is unlikely that gun availability is merely a measure of the unobserved home environment because it does not influence other behaviors of juveniles such as drinking and fighting, being expelled from school, and having sex. No support is found for the hypothesis that gun availability decreases the propensity for being victimized.

Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: Evidence from the Expansion of Natural Gas Infrastructure

Natural gas has emerged as an increasingly attractive source of energy since it is highly efficient, abundant, and cleaner than any other fossil fuel. In this paper, we examine the impact of widespread adoption of natural gas as a source of fuel on infant mortality in Turkey, using variation across provinces and over time in the intensity of natural gas utilization. Our estimates indicate that the expansion of natural gas infrastructure has resulted in a significant decrease in the rate of infant mortality. Specifically, a one-percentage point increase in natural gas intensity - measured by the rate of subscriptions to natural gas services - would cause the infant mortality rate to decrease by 3.9 percent, which would translate into approximately 340 infant lives saved in 2011 alone.

Fathers and youths’ delinquent behavior

This paper analyzes the relationship between having one or more father figures and the likelihood that young people engage in delinquent behavior. We pay particular attention to distinguishing the roles of residential and non-residential, biological fathers as well as stepfathers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that adolescent boys engage in more delinquent behavior if there is no father figure in their lives. However, adolescent girls’ behavior is largely independent of the presence (or absence) of their fathers. The strong effect of family structure is not explained by the lack of paternal involvement that generally comes with fathers’ absence, even though adolescents, especially boys, who spend time doing things with their fathers usually have better outcomes. There is also a link between adult delinquent behavior and adolescent family structure that cannot be explained by fathers’ involvement with their adolescent sons and is only partially explained by fathers’ involvement with their adolescent daughters. Finally, the strong link between adolescent family structure and delinquent behavior is not accounted for by the income differentials associated with fathers’ absence. Our results suggest that the presence of a father figure during adolescence is likely to have protective effects, particularly for males, in both adolescence and young adulthood.

Food Prices and Body Fatness Among Youths

We examine the effect of food prices on clinical measures of obesity, including body mass index (BMI) and percentage body fat (PBF) measures derived from bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) and dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), among youths ages 12 through 18 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This is the first study to consider clinically measured levels of body composition rather than BMI to investigate the effects of food prices on obesity outcomes among youths classified by gender and race/ethnicity. Our findings suggest that increases in the real price per calorie of food for home consumption and the real price of fast-food restaurant food lead to improvements in obesity outcomes among youths. We also find that a rise in the real price of fruits and vegetables leads to increased obesity. Finally, our results indicate that measures of PBF derived from BIA and DXA are no less sensitive and in some cases more sensitive to the prices just mentioned than BMI, and serve an important role in demonstrating that rising food prices (except fruit and vegetable prices) are indeed associated with reductions in obesity rather than with reductions in body size proportions alone.