Phillip B. Levine

Extended benefits and the duration of UI spells: evidence from the New Jersey extended benefit program

In 1996 a political trade-off in the New Jersey legislature led to a six-month program that provided up to 13 additional weeks of exhausted their regular benefit entitlement. We use this unique episode to provide new evidence on the effect of changes in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on the behavior of UI claimants. Unlike most benefit extensions, the New Jersey Extended Benefit (NJEB) program arose during a period of stable economic conditions, allowing us to sidestep the important issue of endogenous policy adoption. We use aggregate state-level data and administrative records for individual UI claimants from before, during, and after the NJEB program to estimate its impact on unemployment spell lengths. Overall, we find that the NJEB program raised the fraction of UI claimants who exhausted their regular benefits by 1-3 percentage points. More importantly, however, we find that the short-term nature of the benefit extension substantially moderated its effect. For individuals who were receiving UI when the benefit extension was passed, we estimate that the rate of leaving UI fell by about 15 percent. Simulations suggest that if the program had run long enough to affect UI claimants from the first day of their spell, the fraction of recipients exhausting regular benefits would have risen by 7 percentage points, and the average recipient would have collected about one extra week or regular benefits.

Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the “Marginal Child”?

We examine the impact of increased abortion availability on the average living standards of children through a selection effect. Would the marginal child who was not born have grown up in different circumstances than the average child? We use variation in the timing of abortion legalization across states to answer this question. Cohorts born after legalized abortion experienced a significant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes. We find that the marginal child would have been 40–60 percent more likely to live in a single-parent family, to live in poverty, to receive welfare, and to die as an infant.

Subsidized contraception fertility and sexual behavior.

We examine the impact of recent state-level Medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher-income women and to Medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise. We show that the income-based policy change reduced overall births to non-teens by about 2 and to teens by over 4; estimates suggest a decline of 9 among newly eligible women. The reduction in fertility appears to have been accomplished via greater use of contraception. Our calculations indicate that allowing higher-income women to receive federally funded family planning cost on the order of 6,800 for each averted birth.

Unemployment Insurance Taxes and the Cyclical and Seasonal Properties of Unemployment

We combine Current Population Survey microdata for 1979-1987 with a newly assembled database of tax rates for the Unemployment Insurance system to measure the effects of imperfect experience-rating on temporary layoffs and other types of unemployment. We find a strong negative association between the degree of experience-rating and the rate of temporary layoff unemployment, with the largest effect in recessionary years and the smallest effect in expansionary years. Increases in the degree of experience-rating are also associated with dampened seasonal fluctuations in temporary layoffs, particularly in construction and durable manufacturing. The correlation between the degree of experience-rating and the unemployment rate of permanent job losers is smaller but also negative, whereas the correlation with the unemployment Me of job quitters and re-entrants is negligible. Attempts to control for the endogeneity of unemployment insurance taxes are consistent with a causal interpretation of our findings.

Roe V. Wade and American Fertility

OBJECTIVES This article examines the effect of abortion legalization on fertility rates in the United States. METHODS Fertility rates were compared over time between states that varied in the timing of abortion legalization. RESULTS States legalizing abortion experienced a 4% decline in fertility relative to states where the legal status of abortion was unchanged. The relative reductions in births to teens, women more than 35 years of age, non-White women, and unmarried women were considerably larger. If women did not travel between states to obtain an abortion, the estimated impact of abortion legalization on birth rates would be about 11%. CONCLUSIONS A complete recriminalization of abortion nationwide could result in 440,000 additional births per year. A reversal of the Roe v Wade decision leaving abortion legal in some states would substantially limit this impact because of the extent of travel between states.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR SMOKERS? THE EFFECTS OF CIGARETTE SMOKING ON WAGES

Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, the authors examine the effect of smoking on wages. Their analysis controls for differences in individual charaeteristics that may be correlated with both smoking and wages, including unobservable person-specific characteristics that are constant over time, and unobservable characteristics that are constant within a family. Estimates from alternative specifications indicate that smoking reduced wages by roughly 4–8%. Empirical tests of three potential explanations for this finding yield no conclusive results.

The effect of Medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions, pregnancies and births

This paper considers whether state Medicaid abortion funding restrictions affect the likelihood of getting pregnant, having an abortion, and bearing a child. Aggregate, state-level data and microdata from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) are applied in the empirical work. Changes in laws resulting from Supreme Court decisions create a natural experiment which is utilized to examine fertility behavior. Multivariate models controlling for state and, in the NLSY, personal characteristics are also estimated using alternative fixed effect specifications. We find that Medicaid funding restrictions are associated with a reduction in both the number of abortions and pregnancies, resulting in either no change or a reduction in births.

The Market Crash and Mass Layoffs: How the Current Economic Crisis May Affect Retirement

Abstract Recent dramatic declines in U.S. stock and housing markets have led to widespread speculation that shrinking retirement accounts and falling home equity will lead workers to delay retirement. Yet the weakness in the labor market and its impact on retirement are often overlooked. If older job seekers have difficulty finding work, they may retire earlier than expected. The net effect of the current economic crisis on retirement is thus far from clear. In this paper, we use 30 years of data from the March Current Population Survey to estimate models relating retirement decisions to fluctuations in equity, housing, and labor markets. We find that workers age 62 to 69 are responsive to the unemployment rate and to long-run fluctuations in stock market returns. Less-educated workers are more sensitive to labor market conditions and more-educated workers are more sensitive to stock market conditions. We find no evidence that workers age 55 to 61 respond to these fluctuations or that workers at any age respond to fluctuating housing markets. On net, we predict that the increase in retirement attributable to the rising unemployment rate will be almost 50 percent larger than the decrease in retirement brought about by the stock market crash.

The Benefit of Additional High-School Math and Science Classes for Young Men and Women

This article examines the effects of taking more high-school math and science classes on wages, the likelihood of entering a technical job or a job traditional for ones sex, and the likelihood of choosing a technical college major or a major traditional for ones sex. Results from two data sets show that taking more high-school math increases wages and increases the likelihood of entering technical and nontraditional fields for female college graduates. No significant impact from taking more high school math is consistently observed for other workers, and high-school science courses have little effect on these outcomes.

Spillover Effects between the Insured and Uninsured Unemployed

This paper examines the effect of changing the level of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on workers who do not receive UI. The author hypothesizes a spillover effect between insured and uninsured workers whereby an increase in UI benefits, which leads to longer durations of unemployment for insured workers, results in a reduction in the duration of unemployment for the uninsured. This prediction is supported in tests of data from several March Current Population Surveys, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and aggregate, state-level data.