Jessamyn Schaller

Booms, Busts, and Fertility: Testing the Becker Model Using Gender-Specific Labor Demand

In this paper, I present estimates of the effect of local labor demand shocks on birth rates. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-education composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men’s labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women’s labor market conditions have smaller negative effects. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small decreases in birth rates at the state level.

Short-Run Effects of Job Loss on Health Conditions, Health Insurance, and Health Care Utilization

Job loss in the United States is associated with reductions in income and long-term increases in mortality rates. This paper examines the short-run changes in health, health care access, and health care utilization after job loss that lead to these long-term effects. Using a sample with more than 10,000 individual job losses and longitudinal data on a wide variety of health-related outcomes, we show that job loss results in worse self-reported health, activity limitations, and worse mental health, but is not associated with statistically significant increases in a variety of specific chronic conditions. Among the full sample of workers, we see reductions in insurance coverage, but little evidence of reductions in health care utilization after job loss. Among the subset of displaced workers with chronic conditions and those for whom the lost job was their primary source of insurance we do see reductions in doctors visits and prescription drug usage.

Short-Run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Child Health

Recent research suggests that parental job loss has negative effects on childrens outcomes, including their academic achievement and long-run educational and labor market outcomes. In this paper we turn our attention to the effects of parental job loss on childrens health. We combine health data from 16 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which allows us to use a fixed-effects specification and still have a large sample of parental job displacements. We find that paternal job loss is harmful to childrens physical and mental health, particularly among children in low–socioeconomic status families. By contrast, we find that maternal job loss does not have detrimental effects on child health. Increases in public health insurance coverage compensate for close to half of the loss in private coverage that follows parental displacement, and we find no significant changes in medical-care utilization.