- Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children / David R. Just and Joseph Price
There is growing interest in the situations in which incentives have a significant effect on positive behaviors, particularly in children. Using a randomized field experiment, we find that incentives increase the fraction of children eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch by 80 percent and reduce the amount of waste by 33 percent. At schools with a larger fraction of low-income children, the increase in the fraction of children who eat a serving of fruits or vegetables is even larger, indicating that incentives successfully target the children who are likely to benefit the most from the increased consumption.
- Long-Term and Spillover Effects of Health Shocks on Employment and Income / Pilar García-Gómez, Hans van Kippersluis, Owen O’Donnell, and Eddy van Doorslaer
We use matching combined with difference-in-differences to identify the causal effects of sudden illness, represented by acute hospitalizations, on employment and income up to six years after the health shock using linked Dutch hospital and tax register data. An acute hospital admission lowers the employment probability by seven percentage points and results in a 5 percent loss of personal income two years after the shock. There is no subsequent recovery in either employment or income. There are large spillover effects: Household income falls by 50 percent more than the income of the disabled person.
- Native Competition and Low-Skilled Immigrant Inflows / Brian C. Cadena
This paper demonstrates that immigration decisions depend on local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low-skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the US-born. Using prereform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrants competing with native entrants systematically prefer cities with smaller supply shocks. The extent of the response is substantial: for each native woman working due to reform, 0.5 fewer female immigrants enter the local labor force. These results provide direct evidence that international migration flows tend to equilibrate returns across US local labor markets.
- Can Intensive Early Childhood Intervention Programs Eliminate Income-Based Cognitive and Achievement Gaps? / Greg J. Duncan and Aaron J. Sojourner
How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low-birth-weight children from both higher- and low-income families between ages one and three, shows much larger impacts among low- than higher-income children. Projecting IHDP impacts to the U.S. population’s IQ and achievement trajectories suggests that such a program offered to low-income children would essentially eliminate the income-based gap at age three and between a third and three-quarters of the age five and age eight gaps.
- How Responsive are Quits to Benefits? / Harley Frazis and Mark A. Loewenstein
Economists have argued that one function of fringe benefits is to reduce turnover. However, the effect on quits of the marginal dollar of benefits relative to wages is underresearched. We use the benefit incidence data in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the cost information in the National Compensation Survey to impute benefit costs and estimate quit regressions. The quit rate is much more responsive to benefits than to wages, and total turnover even more so; benefit costs are also correlated with training provision. We cannot disentangle the effects of individual benefits due to their high correlation.
- Gender Wage Gaps Reconsidered: A Structural Approach Using Matched Employer-Employee Data / Cristian Bartolucci
In this paper, we study the extent to which wage differentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity, disparities in friction patterns, segregation, and wage discrimination. For this purpose, we propose an equilibrium search model that features rent-splitting, on-the-job search, and two-sided heterogeneity in productivity. The model is estimated using German matched employer-employee data. Overall, the results reveal that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males. In addition, female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts.
- Parental Loss and Children’s Well-Being / Lea Gimenez, Shin-Yi Chou, Jin-Tan Liu, and Jin-Long Liu
This paper identifies the effects of parental death on children’s well-being using six administrative data sets from Taiwan. Information collected at different points in children’s lives and detailed parental mortality records are used to show that parental death has significant long-term implications for human capital accumulation: the quality of education of high income children is significantly reduced; the impact of a father’s death on his son’s probability of acquiring higher education increases with income; children are more likely to substitute an income earning occupation in place of higher education; low-income girls are also more likely to marry during their teenage years.
Popularity / Gabriella Conti, Andrea Galeotti, Gerrit Müller, and Stephen Pudney
What makes you popular at school? What are the labor market returns to popularity? We investigate these questions using an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nominations received from schoolmates, interpreted as a measure of early accumulation of personal social capital. Our econometric model of friendship formation and labor market outcomes allows for partial observation of networks, and provides new evidence on the impact of early family environment on popularity. We estimate that moving from the 20th to 80th percentile of the high school popularity distribution yields a 10 percent wage premium 40 years later.