Orgul Demet Ozturk

Minimum Wages, Labor Market Institutions, and Female Employment: A Cross-Country Analysis

The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation for women in 16 OECD countries during 1970 to 2008. The treatment follows that of Neumark and Waschers (2004) cross-country study using panel methods to estimate minimum wage effects among teenagers and young adults, although they focus on prime-age females—a group often neglected in the minimum wage literature. Moreover, their analysis covers a longer time interval and deploys time-varying policy and institutional regressors. They report average effects consistent with minimum wages causing material employment losses among the target group and, less conclusively, elevated joblessness as well. Their cross-country findings agree with Neumark and Wascher on the role of some individual labor market institutions and policies, but the authors do not observe the same patterns in the institutional data: specifically, prime-age females do not exhibit stronger employment losses in countries with the least regulated markets.

Inpatient and Emergency Room Visits for Adolescents and Young Adults With Spina Bifida Living in South Carolina

To compare emergency room (ER) and inpatient hospital (IP) use rates for persons with spina bifida (SB) to peers without SB, when transition from pediatric to adult health care is likely to occur; and to analyze those ER and IP rates by age, race, socioeconomic status, gender, and type of residential area.

The Role of Gender in Promotion and Pay over a Career

Using data from the NLSY79, this paper considers the role of gender in promotion and promotion-related earnings development over the course of a career. The raw data suggest reasonably favorable promotion outcomes for females over a career, but any such advantages are found to be confined to less educated females. Further, the strong returns to education in later career stemming from promotion-related earnings growth accrue solely to males. While consistent with fertility timing and choice on the part of educated females, this earnings result is not inconsistent with discrimination as well, reminiscent of findings from an earlier human capital literature.

Job Promotion in Mid-Career: Gender, Recession and ‘Crowding’

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 indicate that between 1996 and 2010 females on average lost some of the promotion momentum they had achieved at the beginning of mid-career, although they outperformed males in this regard. For both genders economic downturn has contributed to reduced promotion probabilities. In the case of women, however, cohort effects rather than the cycle seem to explain the promotion experience during the Great Recession. Promotions translate into higher real wage increases, and typically more so where job responsibilities increase. Crowding effects, if not necessarily a thing of the past, are no longer manifested in reduced female promotion rates or earnings.

Disparities in Health Care Utilization by Race Among Teenagers and Young Adults With Muscular Dystrophy

Background:For people with muscular dystrophy (MD) health care access is crucial and utilization is expected to be high. A multidisciplinary approach is needed for optimal management of symptoms of this rare condition. Regular primary care, specialty care, therapy, and medicine use can improve quality of care and reduce need for emergency treatment and hospitalization. We analyzed health insurance and administrative data to test for racial disparities in regular care use among teenagers and young adults with MD. Methods:We used South Carolina Medicaid and other administrative data for individuals aged 15–24 years to determine annual health care utilization patterns for individuals with MD by race. We studied adolescents and young adults with MD because this age group represents a time when the condition is typically intensifying and the transition from pediatric to adult care is expected. We used Generalized Estimating Equation models to analyze longitudinal utilization data conditional on other factors that may lead to utilization differences. Results:Race is correlated with health care utilization among adolescents and young adults with MD. Blacks have lower overall utilization, and less primary care, therapy, and specialist care use but higher incidence of hospitalization and emergency treatment use compared with whites and also to other races. The most striking disparity was the use of outpatient services. Blacks utilized these services 50% less compared with whites and 70% less compared with others. Even in regression analysis, where we take into account individual unobserved factors and allow clustering at the individual level, these differences remained and were in most cases statistically significant. Conclusions:Our results indicate that there are differences in health care utilization by race even when individuals have access to the same health care benefits. This means simply offering coverage to individuals with MD may not be sufficient in eliminating health disparities. Future studies will be needed to examine other possible sources of these racial disparities, such as resource awareness, health knowledge, or access barriers such as transportation.

Eat (and Drink) Better Tonight: Food Stamp Benefit Timing and Drunk Driving Fatalities

This paper examines the relationship between the timing of food stamp benefits and daily alcohol-related fatal accidents. We exploit substantial exogenous variation in state food stamp distribution dates and enrollment numbers to estimate the relationship using binary outcome and count data frameworks. Our main result is that, in contrast to previous work on income receipt and mortality, alcohol-related accidents with fatalities are substantially lower on the date of food stamp receipt, and the result is largely driven by a same-day effect. Further, this effect is only present on weekdays. We find no effect of receipt on non-alcohol-related accidents. We hypothesize that this is possibly driven by families being more likely to eat at home on distribution days.

Emergency Department and Inpatient Hospitalizations for Young People With Fragile X Syndrome

We compared hospital encounters between adolescents and young adults with fragile X syndrome (FXS) to peers with intellectual disability (ID) from other causes, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and a comparison group without these conditions matched by gender, age, and insurance coverage. Those with FXS, ASD, or ID were more likely to have had hospital encounters. In terms of age groups, we found mental illness hospitalizations decreased during adulthood as compared to adolescence for those with FXS, and we found that for conditions unrelated to FXS (e.g., respiratory, genitourinary, gastroenteritis, and pneumonia) adolescents had higher rates of hospitalization compared to their peers with FXS, ID, or ASD. We analyzed epilepsy, common among people with FXS and designated as an ambulatory care sensitive condition that can be treated outside the hospital, and found that people with FXS, ID, and ASD had higher odds of hospitalization due to epilepsy in both age groups than did the comparison group.

Development of a tool to describe overall health, social independence and activity limitation of adolescents and young adults with disability

There is a need for research that focuses on the correlation between self-perceived quality of life (QoL) and the health outcomes of adolescents with disability transitioning to adulthood. To better understand the transition experience of adolescents and young adults with disability, we developed a questionnaire to assess the impact of disability on QoL. We recruited 174 participants who were 15-24 years old and diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome (FXS), spina bifida (SB) or muscular dystrophy (MD) and conducted an exploratory factor analysis to identify factors that characterize QoL. Five factors emerged: emotional health, physical health, independence, activity limitation, and community participation. To validate the tool, we linked medical claims and other administrative data records and examined the association of the factor scores with health care utilization and found the questionnaire can be utilized among diverse groups of young people with disability.

Hospitalizations and Emergency Room Visits for Adolescents and Young Adults with Muscular Dystrophy Living in South Carolina

Introduction: Transitioning from adolescence to adulthood can be problematic for individuals with rare disabilities such as muscular dystrophy (MD). Methods: We identified a cohort of 220 individuals with MD and 440 matched comparison individuals and measured emergency room (ER) and inpatient (IP) encounters for the years 2000 through 2010, using all‐payer hospital discharge uniform billing data. We compared ER and IP use rates for people with and without MD, and for 15–19‐year‐olds with MD to 20–24‐year‐olds with MD. Results: ER and IP use rates were significantly higher among individuals with MD than the comparison group. In addition, ER and IP use rates were significantly higher in the 20–24‐year age group than in the 15–19‐year group. Conclusions: Additional research is needed to determine whether increased ER and IP use in young adults is attributable to difficulties in healthcare transition versus increased disease severity. Muscle Nerve 52: 714–721, 2015

Does Job Coaching Work?: Evidence from South Carolina

Providing employment-related services, including supported employment through job coaches, to individuals with developmental disabilities has been a priority in federal policy for the past twenty years starting with the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act in 1984. We take advantage of a unique panel data set of all clients served by the SC Department of Disabilities and Special Needs between 1999 and 2005 to investigate whether job coaching leads to stable employment in community settings. The data contain information on individual characteristics, such as IQ and the presence of emotional and behavioral problems, that are likely to affect both employment propensity and likelihood of receiving job coaching. We control for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity using fixed effects and instrumental variable models. Our results show that unobserved individual characteristics and endogeneity strongly bias naive estimates of the effects of job coaching. However, even after controlling for these, an economically and statistically significant effect remains.