We study the lasting effects of local policy on remote-work penetration in the U.S. Using an event-study design, we find that counties that had longer COVID school closures in 2020-2021 not only experienced higher remote-work rates during those years but persisted in having higher rates through 2024. A one standard-deviation increase in school closure intensity increased the probability of working from home by about 15% in 2021 and 6% in 2024. These effects are larger for workers in teleworkable occupations. This demonstrates that temporary policy can lead to persistent changes: work arrangements that changed when local school closures were in place continued once they were lifted.

We investigate the relationship between college openings, college attainment, and health behaviors and outcomes later in life. Though a large prior literature attempts to isolate the causal effect of education on health via instrumental variables (IV), most studies use instruments that affect schooling behavior in childhood or adolescence, i.e. before the college enrollment decision. Our paper examines whether an increase in 2- and 4-year institutions per capita (“college accessibility”) in a state contributes to higher college attainment and better health later in life. Using 1980-2015 Census and American Community Survey data, we find consistent evidence that accessibility of public 2-year institutions positively affects schooling attainment and subsequent employment and earnings levels, particularly among whites and Hispanics. With restricted-use 1984-2000 National Health Interview Survey data, we again find that public 2-year accessibility increases schooling and benefits a host of health behaviors and outcomes in adulthood: it deters smoking, raises exercise levels, and improves self-reported health. However, most long-term health conditions are unaffected, which may be partially due to the age of our sample.

We examine how trends in remote work vary by U.S. county-level characteristics. Using several data sources with various definitions of remote work, we show that 2016 presidential Democratic vote share is associated with an increase in remote work starting in 2020 and continuing through 2023. An increase in 2016 Democratic vote share of one standard deviation is related to an increase in the likelihood of remote work by 1-2 percentage points and the share of job postings that advertise a remote-work component by about 2 percentage points. These effects are not altered by differences in various COVID policies and outcomes or labor-market indicators. We hypothesize that differences in preferences for workplace flexibility that are correlated with local political tastes opened a gap in remote-work rates once the pandemic-induced “remote-work revolution” substantially increased individuals’ opportunities for working from home.

A substantial fraction of k-12 schools and childcare facilities in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures may have altered the labor supply decisions of parents of affected children due to a need to be at home and take care of their children during the school day. In this paper, we examine the impact of school and childcare facility closures on parental labor market outcomes. We test whether COVID-19 facilities closures have a disproportionate impact on parents of children under 18 years old. Our results show that both women’s and men’s work lives were affected by school closures, with both groups seeing a reduction in the likelihood of working, work hours and the likelihood of working full-time. We also find that closures had a corresponding negative effect on the earnings of fathers of children under 18 years old, but not on mothers. These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree, parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, and parents without other family members living at home, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work lives to school and childcare facility closures.

We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15–17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity methods, combined with school start and end dates, we show that mothers are more affected by the school year than are fathers. During the school year, mothers sleep less, spend more time caring for others, and have less time for eating, free time, and exercise. Fathers experience fewer and mostly smaller changes. Teenagers reduce education time by 5.5 hours per day on weekdays during the summer, substituting that time with 2+ hours of free time and 1+ hours of sleep.

I demonstrate that the profound change in working from home (WFH) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is concentrated among individuals with college degrees.Relative to 2015-19, the number of minutes worked from home on "post-pandemic" (August 2021-December 2022) weekdays increased by 78 minutes for college graduates; for non-graduates, it was 22 minutes.The share of work done at home (for those who worked at all) increased by 22% for graduates and 7% for non-graduates.Average minutes worked changed little for either group.Daily time spent traveling (e.g., commuting) fell by 21 minutes for college graduates and 6 minutes for non-graduates.I examine how time-use patterns change for college graduates relative to non-graduates over the same period.College graduates experience a relative shift from eating out to eating at home, an increase in free time, and an increase in time spent with children, with the latter effect being concentrated among fathers.Thus, while the gender gap in childcare among college graduates may be diminished by the WFH revolution, gaps in children's outcomes by parents' college attainment may be exacerbated by it.

A substantial fraction of k-12 schools in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.These closures may have altered the labor supply decisions of parents of affected children due to a need to be at home with children during the school day.In this paper, we examine the impact of school closures on parental labor market outcomes.We test whether COVID-19 school closures have a disproportionate impact on parents of school-age children (ages 5-17 years old).Our results show that both women's and men's work lives were affected by school closures, with both groups seeing a reduction in work hours and the likelihood of working full-time but only women being less likely to work at all.We also find that closures had a corresponding negative effect on the earnings of parents of school-aged children.These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree and parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work lives to school closures.

This paper uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the effects of mobile money transfer technology (MMT) on healthcare usage in the face of negative health shocks. We use survey data from 2013-16 with quarterly observations on about 1,600 households of 10 villages in the Kisumu region of Western Kenya. We find evidence that MMT, likely through greater ease of informal borrowing, helps households increase utilization of formal healthcare services in terms of visits to a clinic, consultation and medication expenditures in comparison with the non-users of this technology.

We investigate whether adult marijuana use in Washington responds to increased local access as measured by drive time to the nearest legal marijuana retailer as well as measures of retail density. Using survey data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find that as retailers open closer to where they live, more individuals use marijuana and more frequently. These effects are concentrated among young adults (ages 18-26), women, and rural residents. Controlling for distance to the nearest retailer, we find that whether retail density affects marijuana use depends on how it is measured.

Reported mental health problems have risen dramatically among US college students over time, as has treatment for these problems. We examine the effect of state-level Medicaid expansion following the 2014 implementation of the Affordable Care Act on the diagnosis of mental health conditions, psychotropic prescription drug use, and the mental health status of a national sample of college students. We find that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to report being on public insurance after 2014 in expansion states relative to non-expansion states, while more advantaged students do not see this increase. Both diagnosis of common mental health conditions and psychotropic drug use increase following expansion for disadvantaged students relative to advantaged ones, which translates into an elimination of the pre-expansion gap in these outcomes by family background in expansion states. However, in contrast to some recent work on Medicaid expansion and mental health, we do not find that these changes are associated with improvements in self-reported mental health status. We also do not find that Medicaid expansion has affected risky health behaviors or academic outcomes.

We investigate the relationship between opioid diverting policy and suicides among the veteran population. The opioid epidemic of the past two decades has had devastating health consequences among U.S. veterans and military personnel. In 2013, the Veterans Health Administration (VA) implemented the Opioid Safety Initiative (OSI) with the goal of discouraging prescription opioid dependence among VA patients. Between 2012 and 2017, prescription opioids dispensed by the VA fell 41% (VA, 2018). Because this involved the aggressive curtailing of opioid prescriptions for many VA patients, OSI may have had a detrimental effect on veterans’ mental health leading to suicide in extreme cases. In addition, because rural veterans have much higher rates of VA enrollment, more prescription opioid use and abuse, and lower rates of substance abuse and mental health treatment utilization, we expect any effect of OSI on veteran suicides to be concentrated in rural areas. We find that OSI raised the veteran suicide rate relative to the non-veteran (“civilian”) rate with rural veterans suffering the lion’s share of the increase. We estimate that OSI raised the rural veteran suicide rate by a little over one-third between 2013 and 2018.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We examine the spillover effects of recreational marijuana legalization (RML) in Colorado and Washington on neighboring states. We find that RML causes a sharp increase in marijuana possession arrests in border counties of neighboring states relative to nonborder counties in these states. RML has no impact on juvenile marijuana possession arrests but is rather fully concentrated among adults. We find mixed results regarding the source(s) of this change. Using separate data on self-reported marijuana use, we show that RML is accompanied by an increase in use in neighboring states relative to non-neighboring states. However, the increase in arrests following RML is highly concentrated in a few states, which we argue is more consistent with a change in police enforcement near some state borders driving the arrest results. (JEL I12, I18, K14)

I use Current Population Survey Data from February and April 2020 to examine how individual workers have transitioned between labor-market states and which workers have been hurt most by the COVID-19 pandemic. I find not only large effects on workers becoming unemployed but also a decline in labor-force participation, an increase in absence from one’s job, and a decrease in hours worked. Generally, more vulnerable populations—racial and ethnic minorities, those born outside the U.S., women with children, the least educated, and workers with a disability—have experienced the largest declines in the likelihood of (full-time) work and work hours.

Prior tests of Hicks’ Induced Innovation Hypothesis (IIH) have been greatly hampered because the lack of supply-side data implicitly requires the untenable assumption that the marginal research cost is the same for different inputs. We document that, with appropriate model specification and panel data, a two-way fixed-effects estimator can account for much of the non-neutrality of the innovation function. Using a test procedure that is robust to a time-variant and non-neutral innovation function, we test the IIH in U.S. agriculture for the period 1960–2004. We use only readily available data for innovation demand and total public research expenditures.

Previous studies have shown that years of formal schooling attained affects health behaviors, but little is known about how the stringency of academic programs affects such behaviors, especially among youth. Using national survey data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, we study the effects of mathematics and science high school graduation requirements (HSGR) on high school students’ risky health behaviors—specifically on drinking, smoking, and marijuana use. We find that an increase in mathematics and science HSGR has significant negative impacts on alcohol consumption among high school students, especially males and nonwhite students. The effects of math and science HSGR on smoking and marijuana use are also negative but generally less precisely estimated. Our results suggest that curriculum design may have potential as a policy tool to curb youth drinking.