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Publications in Journals and Books
The Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming. Joint with Krishna Regmi and Isaac Swensen. [Pre-publication version]
We document the effect of unemployment insurance generosity on divorce and fertility using an identification strategy that leverages state-level changes in maximum benefits over time and comparisons across workers who have been laid off and those that have not been laid off. The results indicate that higher maximum benefit levels mitigate the effects of layoffs. In particular, they mitigate increases in divorce associated with men's layoffs; increases in separations associated with women's layoffs; reductions in fertility associated with men's layoffs; and increases in fertility associated with women's layoffs.
Can Social Media Rhetoric Incite Hate Incidents? Evidence from Trump's "Chinese Virus" Tweets
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming. Joint with Andy Cao and Jiee Zhong. [Pre-publication version]
We investigate whether Donald Trump's "Chinese Virus" tweets contributed to the rise of anti-Asian incidents. We find that the number of incidents spiked following Trump's initial "Chinese Virus" tweets and the subsequent dramatic rise in internet search activity for the phrase. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses leveraging spatial variation indicate that this spike in anti-Asian incidents was significantly more pronounced in counties that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election relative to those that supported Hillary Clinton. We estimate that anti-Asian incidents spiked by approximately 4200 percent in Trump-supported counties compared to an increase of approximately 200 percent in Clinton-supported counties.
Effects of Violent Media Content: Evidence from the Rise of the UFC
Journal of Health Economics 83, 2022. Joint with Isaac Swensen and Glen Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
We document the effect of violent media on crime. Specifically, we evaluate the effects of The Ultimate Fighter, a hit TV show featuring fighters competing in violent mixed martial arts and which brought Ultimate Fighting Championship into the mainstream. We estimate the effect of exposure to the show's earliest episodes using panel data from police agencies across the United States and a strategy using network ratings prior to the show's premier as an instrumental variable. We show that this exposure reduced crime: these effects are particularly evident for assault, began the month the show premiered, and persisted for many years. These estimates do not reflect systematic differences across geographic areas in their trends in crime rates prior to 2005. To complement our main results, we also investigate the effects of "UFC Main Events," which air in bars and on Pay-Per-View. This analysis additionally suggests reductions in violence caused by viewership.
New Evidence on The Effects of Mandatory Delay Laws for Abortion
Journal of Health Economics, 80, 2021. Joint with Mayra Pineda-Torres. [Pre-publication version]
Beyond a handful of studies examining early-adopting states in the early 1990s, little is known about the causal effects of mandatory waiting periods for abortion. In this study we evaluate the effects of a Tennessee law enacted in 2015 that requires women to make an additional trip to abortion providers for state-directed counseling at least 48 hours before they can obtain an abortion. Our difference-in-differences and synthetic-control estimates indicate that the introduction of the mandatory waiting period caused a 53-69 percent increase in the share of abortions obtained during the second trimester. Our analysis examining overall abortion rates is less conclusive but suggests a reduction caused by the waiting period. To put these estimates into context, we provide back-of-the-envelope calculations on the additional monetary costs that Tennessee's MWP imposes on women seeking abortions.
Economic Determinants of Child Maltreatment
Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, 2021. Joint with Lindsey Rose Bullinger and Jessamyn Schaller. [Pre-publication version]
The Power of the IUD: Effects of Expanding Access to Contraception Through Title X Clinics
Journal of Public Economics, 192, 2020. Joint with Andrea Kelly and Analisa Packham. [Pre-publication Version]
We estimate the effect of Colorado's Family Planning Initiative, which provided fundsto Title X clinics to offer long-acting reversible contraceptives to low-income women. We find substantial effects on childbearing, concentrated among women in zip codes within 7 miles of clinics: the initiative reduced births by approximately 20 percent for 15-19 year olds. We also estimate effects of extensive media coverage in 2014 and 2015, and find a substantial increase in LARC insertions, extended effects on births among 15-17 year olds living greater than 7 miles from clinics, and significant reductions in births among 20-24 and 25-29 year olds.
AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2020. Joint with Mayra Pineda-Torres, David Pritchard, and Hedieh Tajali. [Pre-publication Version]
What do historical changes in legal access to reproductive health care technology tell us about the long-run effects of such changes? We investigate this question using data from the Health and Retirement Study and an identification strategy leveraging variation in exposure to legal changes in access across cohorts born in the same states. We find positive effects on educational attainment that align with prior work but which are not statistically significant. We also find positive effects on working in a Social-Security-covered job in women's 20s and 30s, but no evidence of positive effects on women's earnings in their 50s.
How Far Is Too Far? New Evidence on Abortion Clinic Closures, Access, and Abortions
Journal of Human Resources, 55(4), 2020. Joint with Caitlin Myers, Andrea Schlosser, and Scott Cunningham. [Pre-publication Version with Appendices]
We document the effects of abortion-clinic closures on clinic access, abortions, and births using variation generated by a law that shuttered nearly half of Texas' clinics. Increases in distance have significant effects for women initially living within 200 miles of a clinic. The largest effect is for those nearest to clinics for whom a 25-mile increase reduces abortion 10%. We also demonstrate the importance of congestion with a proxy capturing effects of closures which have little impact on distance but which reduce clinics per-capita. These effects account for 59% of the effects of clinic closures on abortion.
Weighing the Evidence on the Likely Effects of Expanding Access to LARCs on Poverty
American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 222(4), 2020.
Any Press is Good Press? The Unanticipated Effects of Title IX Investigations on University Outcomes
Economics of Education Review, 73, 2019. Joint with Dave E. Marcotte, Jane E. Palmer, and Isaac D. Swensen. [Pre-publication Version]
Since 2011, when the landmark "Dear Colleague" letter declared that the Department of Education (DoE) would use equal-access requirements of federal law to remediate sexual assault on college campuses, 458 investigations have been opened. This letter was withdrawn in 2017 and it remains uncertain how the DoE will handle the issue in the future. We examine the effects of the investigations arising from the 2011 policy change on university outcomes. We find that applications and enrollment increase in response to Title IX investigations, for both males and females. We find little evidence of effects on degree completion or donations.
Caution! Men Not At Work: Gender-Specific Labor Market Conditions and Child Maltreatment
Journal of Public Economics, 163, 2018. Joint with Jessamyn Schaller and Ben Hansen. [Pre-publication Version] [Replication Files]
This paper examines the effect of labor market conditions—measured through unemployment, mass layoffs and predicted employment—on child abuse and neglect using county-level data from California. Using these indicators we separately estimate the effects of overall and gender-specific economic shocks. We find only modest evidence of a link between overall economic conditions and child maltreatment. However, analysis by gender reveals robust evidence that maltreatment decreases with indicators for male employment and increases with indicators for female employment. These opposite-signed effects are consistent with a theoretical framework that builds on family-time-use models and is supported by analysis of time-use data.
Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War
Journal of Health Economics, 58, 2018. Joint with María Padilla-Romo. [Pre-publication Version]
This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations' areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures cause large and sustained increases to the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence. We also find reductions in homicides in municipalities surrounding the municipality where kingpins are captured.
Substance Abuse Treatment Centers and Local Crime
Journal of Urban Economics, 104, 2018. Joint with Samuel R. Bondurant and Isaac D. Swensen. [Pre-publication Version]
In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-abuse-treatment facility openings and closings measured at the county level. The results indicate that substance-abuse-treatment facilities reduce both violent and financially motivated crimes in an area, and that the effects are particularly pronounced for relatively serious crimes. The effects on homicides are documented in two sources of homicide data and are concentrated in highly populated areas.
Access and Use of Contraception and its Effects on Women's Outcomes in the U.S.
In Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Women, ed. Susan L. Averett, Laura M. Argys, and Saul D. Hoffman, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Joint with Martha J. Bailey. [Pre-publication version]
Changes in childbearing affect almost every aspect of human existence. Over the last fifty years, American women have experienced dramatic changes in the ease and convenience of timing and limiting childbearing, ranging from the introduction of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion to more recent availability of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). This chapter chronicles these changes, provides descriptive evidence regarding trends in the use of contraception and abortion, and reviews the literature linking them to changes in childbearing and women's economic outcomes. It concludes by discussing the recent surge in LARC use, which seems to be one of the most pressing areas in need of further research.
College Party Culture and Sexual Assault
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10(1), 2018. Joint with Peter Siminski and Isaac D. Swensen. [Pre-publication version]
This paper considers the degree to which events that intensify partying increase sexual assault. Estimates are based on panel data from campus and local law-enforcement agencies and an identification strategy that exploits plausibly random variation in the timing of Division 1 football games. The estimates indicate that these events increase daily reports of rape with 17-24 year old victims by 28 percent. The effects are driven largely by 17-24 year old offenders and by offenders unknown to the victim, but we also find significant effects on incidents involving offenders of other ages and on incidents involving offenders known to the victim.
How Much Can Expanding Access to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives Reduce Teen Birth Rates?
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 9(3), 2017. Joint with Analisa Packham. [Pre-publication version]
We estimate the degree to which expanding access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) can reduce teen birth rates by analyzing Colorado's Family Planning Initiative, the first large-scale policy intervention to expand access to LARCs in the United States. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the $23M program reduced the teen birth rate in counties with clinics receiving funding by 6.4 percent over five years. These effects were concentrated in the second through fifth years of the program and in counties with relatively high poverty rates. State-level synthetic control estimates offer supporting evidence but suffer from a lack of power.
Heaping-Induced Bias in Regression-Discontinuity Designs
Economic Inquiry, 54(1), 2016. Joint with Alan I. Barreca and Glen R. Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that regression-discontinuity designs arrive at biased estimates when attributes related to outcomes predict heaping in the running variable. After showing that our usual diagnostics may not be well suited to identifying this type of problem, we provide alternatives, and then discuss the usefulness of different approaches to addressing the bias. We then consider these issues in multiple non-simulated environments.
Health Economics, 2015. Joint with Peter Siminski and Oleg Yerokhin. [Pre-publication version] [Online Appendix]
A large literature has documented significant public health benefits associated with the minimum legal drinking age in the USA, particularly because of the resulting effects on motor vehicle accidents. These benefits form the primary basis for continued efforts to restrict youth access to alcohol. It is important to keep in mind that policymakers have a wide variety of alcohol-control options available to them, and understanding how these policies may complement or substitute for one another can improve policy making moving forward. Towards this end, we propose that investigating the causal effects of the minimum legal drinking age in New South Wales, Australia, provides a particularly informative case study, because Australian states are among the world leaders in their efforts against drunk driving. Using an age-based regression discontinuity design applied to restricted-use data from several sources, we find no evidence that legal access to alcohol has effects on motor vehicle accidents of any type in New South Wales, despite having large effects on drinking and on hospitalizations due to alcohol abuse.
Aggregation and The Estimated Effects of Economic Conditions on Health
Journal of Health Economics, 40, 2015. [Pre-publication version]
This paper considers the relationship between economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses, I update earlier state-level analyses of mortality and infant health and then consider how the estimated effects vary when the analysis is conducted at differing levels of geographic aggregation. This analysis reveals that the results are sensitive to the level of geographic aggregation with more-disaggregated analyses--particularly county-level analyses--routinely producing estimates that are smaller in magnitude. Further analyses suggest this is due to spillover effects of economic conditions on health outcomes across counties.
Drawn Into Violence: Evidence on 'What Makes a Criminal' from the Vietnam Draft Lotteries
Economic Inquiry, 52(1), 2014. Joint with Charles Stoecker. [Pre-publication version]
Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam Era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find that draft eligibility increases incarceration for violent crimes but decreases incarceration for non-violent crimes among whites. This is particularly evident in 1979, where two-sample instrumental variable estimates indicate that military service increases the probability of incarceration for a violent crime by 0.34 percentage points and decreases the probability of incarceration for a nonviolent crime by 0.30 percentage points. We conduct two falsification tests, one that applies each of the three binding lotteries to unaffected cohorts and another that considers the effects of lotteries that were not used to draft servicemen.
Economic Determinants of Child Maltreatment
Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, 2014. Joint with Jessamyn Schaller. [Pre-publication version]
This entry examines the economic determinants of child maltreatment. We first discuss potential mechanisms through which economic factors, including income, employment, aggregate economic conditions, and welfare receipt, might have causal effects on the rates of child abuse and neglect. We then outline the main challenges faced by researchers attempting to identify these causal effects, emphasizing the importance of data limitations and potential confounding factors at both the individual and aggregate levels. We describe two approaches used in the existing literature to address these challenges--the use of experimental variation to identify the effects of changes in family income on individual likelihood of maltreatment, and the use of area studies to identify the effects of changes in local economic conditions on aggregate rates of maltreatment.
Should the Legal Age for Buying Alcohol Be Raised to 21 Years?
Medical Journal of Australia, 201(10), 2014. Joint with Peter Siminski.
Alcohol and Student Performance: Estimating the Effect of Legal Access
Journal of Health Economics, 32(1), 2013. Joint with Isaac D. Swensen and Glen R. Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
We consider the effect of legal access to alcohol on student achievement. Our preferred approach identifies the effect through changes in one's performance after gaining legal access to alcohol, controlling flexibly for the expected evolution of grades as one makes progress towards their degree. We also report RD-based estimates but argue that an RD design is not well suited to the research question in our setting. We find that students' grades fall below their expected levels upon being able to drink legally, but by less than previously documented. We also show that there are effects on women and that the effects are persistent. Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that students drink more often after legal access but do not consume more drinks on days on which they drink.
Are Big-Time Sports a Threat to Student Achievement?
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 4(4), 2012. Joint with Isaac D. Swensen and Glen R. Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
We consider the relationship between collegiate-football success and non-athlete student performance. We find that the team's success significantly reduces male grades relative to female grades. This phenomenon is only present in fall quarters, which coincides with the football season. Using survey data, we find that males are more likely than females to increase alcohol consumption, decrease studying, and increase partying in response to the success of the team. Yet, females also report that their behavior is affected by athletic success, suggesting that their performance is likely impaired but that this effect is masked by the practice of grade curving.
Evidence on the Efficacy of School-Based Incentives for Healthy Living
Economics of Education Review, 31(6), 2012. Joint with Harold Cuffe, William T. Harbaugh, Giancarlo Musto, and Glen R. Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
We analyze the effects of a school-based incentive program on children's exercise habits. The program offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the impact of the prizes by comparing behavior during prize periods with behavior during non-prize periods. Variation in the timing of prize periods across different schools allows us to estimate models with calendar-date fixed effects to control for day-specific attributes, such as weather and proximity to holidays. On average, we find that being in a prize period increases the riding behavior of participating children by sixteen percent, a large impact given that the prize value is just six cents per student. We also find that winning a prize lottery has a positive impact on ridership over subsequent weeks; consider heterogeneity across prize type, gender, age, and calendar month; and explore differential effects on the intensive versus extensive margins.
Saving Babies? Revisiting the Effect of Very Low Birth Weight Classification
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 2011. Joint with Alan Barreca, Melanie Guldi, and Glen R. Waddell. [Pre-publication version]
We reconsider the effect of very low birth weight classification on infant mortality. We demonstrate that the estimates are highly sensitive to the exclusion of observations in the immediate vicinity of the 1500-gram threshold, weakening the confidence in the results originally reported in Almond, Doyle, Kowalski, and Williams (2010).
Parental Job Loss and Infant Health
Journal of Health Economics, 30(5), 2011. [Pre-publication version]
This paper is the first to explore the extent to which the health effects of job displacement extend to the children of displaced workers. Using detailed work and fertility histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, estimates are identified by comparing the outcomes of children born after a displacement to the outcomes of those born before. This analysis reveals that husbands' job losses have significant negative effects on infant health. They reduce birth weights by approximately four and a half percent with suggestive evidence that the effect is concentrated on the lower half of the birth weight distribution.
Ability, Gender, and Performance Standards: Evidence from Academic Probation
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(2), 2010. Joint with Nicholas J. Sanders and Philip Oreopoulos. [Pre-publication version]
We use a regression discontinuity design to examine students' responses to being placed on academic probation. Consistent with a model of introducing performance standards, we find that being placed on probation at the end of the first year discourages some students from returning to school while improving the GPAs of those who return. We find heterogeneous responses across prior academic performance, gender, and native language, and discuss these results within the context of the model. We also find negative effects on graduation rates, particularly for students with the highest high school grades.
Are Children Really Inferior Goods? Evidence from Displacement-driven Income Shocks
The Journal of Human Resources, 45(2), 2010. [Pre-publication version]
Although many papers have attempted to reconcile economic theory with the commonly observed negative relationship between income and fertility, little is known about the causal nature of the relationship. This paper explores the causal link by analyzing women’s fertility response to the large and permanent income shock generated by a husband’s job displacement. I find that the shock reduces total fertility, suggesting that the causal effect of income on fertility is positive. A model that incorporates the time cost of children and assortative matching of spouses can simultaneously explain this result and the negative cross-sectional relationship. I also find that the income shock accelerates childbearing. This finding is consistent with life-cycle models of fertility in which a husband’s earnings growth provides an incentive to delay having children.
Parental Income Shocks and Outcomes of Disadvantaged Youth in the United States
In Jonathan Gruber, ed., An Economic Perspective on the Problems of Disadvantaged Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Joint with Marianne E. Page and Ann Huff Stevens. [Pre-publication version]
This paper uses layoffs and business closings to identify the effect of a permanent parental income shock on children’s long-run socioeconomic outcomes. We find that estimates of the intergenerational effects of parental job loss are sensitive to our definition of job displacement. Focusing on measures of displacement that are most likely to be exogenous, we find no evidence of intergenerational effects of job loss on the average child. In contrast, among disadvantaged children (defined by family income or race), we find evidence of negative effects of parental displacement on income, earnings, and completed education.