This paper investigates the demand-side impacts of the 2015 Home Care Rule (HCR), which extended minimum wage, overtime, and travel-pay protections to home care workers. Using a difference-in-differences approach with Health and Retirement Study data from 2008 to 2018, we find that the HCR reduced older adults’ probability of using paid home care by approximately 4.8 percentage points and reduced hours of paid home care by about 0.46 h per day, with non-users coded as zero. We find no statistically significant effect on days of paid home care per week or monthly out-of-pocket expenditures on paid home care. We also find no robust evidence that reductions in paid home care were systematically offset by increased use of home health services, institutional formal care, or care from family members or friends. These findings highlight potential unintended consequences of labor regulations in long-term care markets, particularly reduced access to paid home care for older adults.
Gender gaps in measured academic performance often influence access to selective university programs, and, consequently, educational sorting and subsequent career trajectories. Differences in the design of high-stakes evaluation methods may therefore affect these gaps by changing how students’ performance is assessed. We examine whether differences in evaluation methods contribute to gender gaps in measured performance using population-level data from a non-self-selected setting in which continuous teacher-assigned grades and a blind, standardized university entrance examination jointly determine university access. Within-student comparisons show that gender gaps in measured performance are approximately 0.46 standard deviations larger under non-blind continuous assessment than under blind, standardized testing. Our findings provide little support for explanations based on competitive pressure or systematic advantages enjoyed by female students under continuous assessment arising from teacher grading practices or differential effort. The results are instead consistent with gender differences in non-cognitive traits that are more fully captured under continuous assessment, as well as with differences in the extent to which students identify with the content being evaluated.
This work studies in-person payment trends among U.S. consumers from 2017 to 2022, a period of time centered around the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In that year, the ability to limit in-person payments, and thus avoid public outings, reduced the risk of contracting the virus, thereby linking payment flexibility to health outcomes in an unprecedented way. This paper uses data from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, an annual survey of financial transactions from a representative sample of U.S. consumers, to better understand these dynamics. A look at trends across age, education, and income groups, reveals that in-person payment rates, which were decreasing by about 5 percent per year from 2017 to 2019, dropped by almost 25 percent from 2019 to 2020, before a slight recovery in the following two years. Simultaneously, the odds of an in-person payment dropped by about 20 percent during the pandemic, though this represents only 40 percent of the overall, six-year decrease. While temporal trends are generally consistent across demographic strata, there is evidence that greater educational attainment corresponds to a relatively larger drop in share of payments made in-person in 2020. A second analysis, limited to 2019 and 2020 data and factoring in consumers’ payment instrument adoption as well as the state-level COVID-19 conditions during data collection, suggests that the degree of adaptability varied across consumer groups. Individuals with greater income levels or credit card access generally showed a proportionally greater reduction of in-person payment rates, especially in high-risk COVID-19 conditions.
While most research has focused on how consumption influences well-being, we examine the reverse: can higher life satisfaction reduce consumption? Using panel data from the 2006–2010 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we examine whether life satisfaction predicts household spending on both basic and conspicuous goods and services. We focus on how this relationship is moderated by social capital, as measured by perceived social support, absence of loneliness, and active group membership. Fixed-effects analyses reveal that among individuals with lower social support or greater loneliness, higher life satisfaction is linked to increased spending. In contrast, among those with stronger social connections, this association diminishes or even reverses. These findings suggest that social capital can buffer the link between well-being and consumption, implying that policies fostering social ties and reducing loneliness may help decouple well-being from consumption growth and promote more sustainable lifestyles.
Population ageing, changing household structures, and the declining availability of informal family care are increasing unmet long-term care (LTC) needs across Europe. While previous studies have documented the health consequences of unmet LTC needs, much less is known about their implications for healthcare access. This paper examines the relationship between unmet LTC needs and healthcare access among older Europeans, conceptualising LTC as an enabling input that helps individuals with functional limitations overcome mobility and organisational barriers to healthcare utilisation. Using data from Waves 8 and 9 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), combined with both waves of the SHARE Corona Survey, I analyse individuals aged 65 and over with functional limitations. To address the potential endogeneity of unmet LTC needs, I implement an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits variation in the availability of informal care provided by adult children. The IV estimates suggest that unmet LTC needs are associated with substantially lower use of healthcare services, with larger effects for services requiring greater mobility and organisational support, such as hospital admissions and preventive care, than for GP contacts. These findings are consistent with LTC reducing non-monetary barriers to healthcare access and with shortcomings in LTC provision generating spillover effects on the healthcare system. More broadly, the results highlight the continuing role of family support in facilitating healthcare access among older adults, while underscoring the growing importance of formal LTC systems as demographic change and declining informal caregiving reduce households’ capacity to meet care needs. Strengthening LTC provision may therefore improve equity in healthcare access and contribute to more efficient healthcare delivery in ageing societies.
We here use UK panel data and establish the causal effect of parental State Pension eligibility on their adult children’s well-being in a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis. The life and income satisfaction of adult children whose mothers become eligible for the State Pension both rise by 0.06 standard deviations in the short run. These impacts are stronger for adult children with lower incomes, who have young children of their own, and who live close to their parents. These findings are consistent with the key role of intergenerational time transfers from older eligible mothers in enhancing their adult children’s well-being.
This study investigates the impact of significant basic pension increases in 2019 and 2021 on the labor supply and private transfers of the elderly in South Korea, utilizing the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLOSA) panel data (2017–2022). To address reciprocal causation and identify causal magnitudes, we employ a panel Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and a difference-in-differences SEM framework (SEM-DID), supplemented by a Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) CSDID robustness check. The empirical results reveal a clear divergence in policy outcomes: while the pension expansion did not significantly alter the labor supply of older adults along either the intensive or extensive margins, it exerted a robust crowding-out effect on private transfers, with a 1
This study examines how land requisition and the development of land rental markets jointly affect rural households’ migration for work across regions of China. Using a nationally representative dataset, contrary to previous studies that focus on a small number of counties or provinces, we provide empirical evidence on the heterogeneous effects of land tenure security at different levels of land rental market development across China’s regions. Our results show that improved land tenure security, combined with more developed land rental markets, increases both the likelihood of migration and the number of migrants in the western region. In contrast, it reduces both outcomes in the eastern region.
This paper examines how infant health complications at birth measured by low birth weight and prematurity affect maternal labor market outcomes over the first seven years of a child’s life. Using Canadian administrative data linking birth certificates to annual tax records for 640,500 first births between 2006 and 2015, I compare mothers of unhealthy infants-those born with low birth weight or preterm-to carefully matched mothers of healthy infants. I find that mothers of unhealthy infants experience a persistent 2.6
Unpaid farm household members are estimated to make measurable contributions to annual revenue product in 1850 New York: males (238), females and children (94), but less than hired labor (485). It appears likely that larger families enhanced rather than reduced household wealth. Estimated productivity made it expensive to educate farm children, helping to account for meagre secondary school enrollment. To accommodate zero inputs, non-parametric linear programming Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to compute the technical efficiency of 254 New York farms and project observed output onto the production frontier. Marginal product is only meaningful on the production boundary or frontier. Optimized output is regressed against inputs using a quadratic form and the least-absolute deviations estimator, which is robust to outlier data points.
This paper investigates the gender pay gap among employed students. Using four waves of a large-scale French tertiary education student survey, I find that female students earn on average 7.8
Paternity leave policies are intended to increase fathers’ involvement in childcare and reduce gender inequalities in labor market outcomes. We study the effects of recent paternity leave expansions in Spain using administrative data on earnings and detailed daily records of maternity and paternity leave spells. First, we examine whether the successive extensions of paternity leave implemented between 2017 and 2021 affected gender gaps in labor market outcomes following childbirth. Event-study estimates show no evidence that longer paternity leave reduced the earnings gap between mothers and fathers. To shed light on this result, we analyze how fathers use their leave. Descriptive evidence shows that fathers are more likely than mothers to take leave during summer months, split it into multiple spells, and combine it with part-time work. We then exploit the timing of the 2022 FIFA World Cup as a salient leisure event and document a significant increase in the number of fathers on leave during the tournament (relative to the same dates in surrounding years), with no comparable increase among mothers. These patterns suggest that a nontrivial share of paternity leave may be used for purposes other than childcare, potentially limiting its impact on gender inequalities.
How individuals spend their time has a crucial bearing on their well-being. Climate change—by modifying the environmental determinants of time disposition—can alter time-use patterns among individuals. The present paper contributes to the limited literature in this direction. Utilising data from the Time Use Survey, 2019, the present paper investigates the association between weather and time allocation to learning and leisure among children. The results suggest that individuals substitute leisure for learning during days with extreme temperatures. Hot days lower time allocation to learning, driven primarily by a reduction in school/college attendance. The weather-time use relationship is muted in places with a warmer climate, suggesting evidence of longer-run acclimatisation. However, I fail to find any conclusive evidence of short-run adaptation to unpleasant weather. The findings further reveal that the temperature-time use relationship is muted for specific socio-economic groups such as the males, the educated and the well-to-do. The study concludes that policy emphasis should be laid towards building climate-resilient infrastructure as well as flexible academic calendars to ensure learning continuity especially for the vulnerable groups.
This paper examines the impact of exemptions to China’s 1979 One-Child Policy on fertility and the spousal age gap. The exemptions, implemented at different times across provinces, created exogenous variation that we exploit using a staggered Difference-in-Differences design. Our analysis uses the 2010 China Family Panel Studies and focuses on couples with rural hukou status, who were most affected by these exemptions during the study period. We find that the exemptions led to a 32
We study the extent to which perceptions of sexual harassment at work can be modified through a light information intervention. We conducted an online survey with 12,000 respondents in Spain, and we asked which of six behaviors they classified as sexual harassment. Respondents were then randomly assigned to control and treatment groups, with the treatment group receiving published statistics on how the Spanish population classifies these behaviors. Then, we re-elicited perceptions, and also asked whether the respondent had experienced such behaviors (victimization) or engaged in them (perpetration). We find that the information treatment significantly increased the fraction of respondents classifying severe behaviors (e.g., groping) as harassment, with no significant effect on milder behaviors (e.g., insulting jokes). Victimization reports were largely unaffected, with only marginal evidence of an increase in reports of hearing insulting jokes, while perpetration was more responsive, with the treatment increasing acknowledgment of making insulting jokes as well as (marginally) more severe behaviors. Our findings provide a basis for understanding how interventions can shape perceptions of workplace sexual harassment.
Industrial robots are reshaping labor markets, while marriage and fertility behavior is undergoing significant change. Using six waves of the China General Social Survey from 2012 to 2021, this study examines the effects of industrial robot adoption on marriage and fertility behavior in China and explores the underlying mechanisms. The results show that industrial robot adoption significantly delays first marriage and reduces fertility. The fertility-reducing effect is significantly stronger for men than for women, while the marriage effect is not statistically distinguishable by gender. Further analysis indicates that industrial robot adoption affects marriage and fertility behavior through changes in the gender income gap, working time, and gender role attitudes. The effects also vary across social status groups and fertility-policy regimes. In addition, industrial robot adoption increases cohabitation, reduces divorce, and lowers fertility preferences, with the strongest effect observed for the ideal number of sons. These findings provide new evidence on the gendered family consequences of automation in China and offer policy implications for promoting balanced population development.
Female labor force participation (LFP) and fertility have evolved jointly across Latin America, with participation rising and fertility declining over the last two decades. This paper studies how the increase in women’s labor supply in the five largest economies in the region, as well as in the US, is partitioned between changes in population composition and changes in participation within groups. We define three groups of women based solely on whether the youngest child in the household is under age 6, between ages 6 and 12, or whether there are no children under age 13. We find that, in all countries, changes in women’s labor force participation rate within child groups account for the overwhelming share of the increase in LFP, while compositional shifts across child groups account for relatively little. When we further disaggregate the sample by education as well as by the age of their children, changes in population composition become more important. In this richer decomposition, more educated women without children under age 13 are the largest contributors to the increase in LFP, as both their participation rates and population share increased over the period.
We study the effects of alcohol prohibition on children’s learning outcomes. We exploit a plausibly exogenous change in the availability of alcohol in the Indian state of Bihar, which implemented a state-wide ban on the manufacturing, sale, transport and consumption of alcohol. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the ban reduced alcohol consumption and improved learning outcomes of school-going children in Bihar. The results are plausibly driven by improvements in the child’s social environment—lower neighborhood crime and lower domestic violence—induced by the alcohol ban.
A large and contested body of research examines how minimum wage laws affect employment and earnings for different groups of workers and industries. Far less studied are the important but ambiguous expectations about minimum wage effects on participation in safety net programs. Different scenarios of minimum wage effects on employment and earnings could produce positive, negative, or null effects on participation in means-tested programs. This study examines the relationship between the minimum wage in Seattle, Washington and participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a vital component of the U.S. safety net that provides food aid to more than 40 million Americans. Using two increases in the Seattle minimum wage and merged, longitudinal administrative data from Washington State, we estimate a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences estimate of the effect of minimum wage increases on SNAP participation and benefit levels. We find mostly null results: during the initial implementation of the minimum wage, SNAP benefit levels declined by an upper bound of 4.3
