Publications
Half Empty and Half Full? Women in Economics and the Rise in Gender-Related Research (with Francisca Antman, Kirk Doran, and Bruce A. Weinberg), AEA Papers and Proceedings, 114: 226-31.
Demographic Diversity and Economic Research: Fields of Specialization and Research on Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality (with Francisca Antman, Kirk Doran, and Bruce A. Weinberg), AEA Papers and Proceedings, 114: 528-34.
Revolutionized Life: Long-term Effects of Childhood Exposure to Persecution on Human Capital and Marital Sorting, Journal of Population Economics 37, 34 (2024).
Working Papers
Pandemic Babies: Medical Care Delays in Utero and Infant Birth Outcomes [Revisions Requested by Health Economics]
This paper examines the impact of medical care delays on infant and maternal health, using Medical Procedure Delay Orders (MPDOs) issued by over 30 U.S. states at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with a large national claims dataset. I find that in utero exposure to MPDOs increases the likelihood of low birth weight and premature births by approximately 14%. Women exposed to MPDOs during pregnancy experience delays in critical prenatal care, such as ultrasounds, and gestational diagnoses. These maternal mechanisms likely contribute to the adverse birth outcomes observed. The long-term social costs are substantial, with an estimated $1.4 billion in additional healthcare expenses and $23.8 million in annual income losses by middle age. These findings underscore the intergenerational and long-term significance of uninterrupted maternal care.
Medical Practice Closures and Inequality in Healthcare Utilization (with Rebecca McKibbin) [Revisions Requested by American Journal of Health Economics]
This paper studies the effect of the closure of office-based medical practices on the location where patients sought healthcare during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. First we show that the exit rate of office-based practices increased in 2020 using data from a nationwide US claims database. Using this supply shock to patients, we then show that following an office-based practice closure, there is an increase in overall usage of emergency departments. There is also a shift from office-based care to hospital-based care, suggesting that some patients are not able to establish a new relationship with an office-based provider within five months of the practice closure. Patients from areas with greater disadvantage (lower income levels and higher shares of minority population) as well as the elderly and Medicaid beneficiaries are disproportionately affected. However, the availability of telehealth services mitigates the impact.
A Nation of Two Tales: The Dual Intergenerational Economic Transmission in Rural and Urban China [Accepted at Population Research and Policy Review]
The novelty of this paper lies in its comparative study of intergenerational economic mobility in rural and urban China, exploring multiple intergenerational transmission mechanisms. This paper finds lower intergenerational economic mobility in urban areas over the past quarter-century (1989 to 2015) compared to rural areas. Furthermore, using predicted community time-invariant indexes for parental human and non-human capital measures as instruments, I demonstrate that parental educational attainment has a relatively greater impact on child income in rural China, whereas parental non-human capital, such as social gift expenses, has a more substantial effect on child income in urban households. This paper highlights the heterogeneous intergenerational economic transmission patterns in China's dual society under the Rural-Urban Household Registration System. Moreover, the existing rural-urban difference in intergenerational economic transmission does not diminish with internal labor migration.
The health benefits of expansions in Medicaid coverage depend on whether insured patients can find providers. This paper investigates how one important group of providers, Obstetrician-Gynecologists (OB-GYNs) select their practice locations in response to expansions of Medicaid/CHIP coverage to mid-low income pregnant women. Expanding eligibility leads to an overall increase in the total supply of OB-GYNs at the county level, with an inflow of individual OB-GYNs to mid-low income counties. However, in state border counties, expanded eligibility reduces the number of OB-GYNs, as OB-GYNs move to the state with lower eligibility. In keeping with my model, while Medicaid/CHIP eligibility expansions on average increase physician supply, in certain cases, it can reduce access to care as physicians avoid low Medicaid reimbursement rates.
The Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) program expands access to medical education and healthcare training. Using an event study strategy, I find that the AHEC program increases local healthcare sector employment. Additionally, individuals exposed to a local AHEC during childhood are less likely to be overweight or experience health limitations and are more likely to complete a four-year college degree or graduate education in adulthood. These dual benefits of expanding medical provider education---improving both population health and human capital---are particularly pronounced among families with less-educated parents, minority populations, and rural residents.
First Foot Forward: A Two-Step Econometric Method for Parsing and Estimating the Impacts of Multiple Identities (with Andrew S. Hanks, Kevin M. Kniffin, Bo Wang, and Bruce A. Weinberg; NBER WP #30293) [under review]
Society increasingly recognizes that individuals often possess multiple identities and that there often exists differential value associated with each specific identity. As a model domain to study individuals with more than one identity, we focus on interdisciplinary dissertators in the United States. Our novel estimation method leverages a two-step process to characterize earnings of interdisciplinary dissertators as functions of the identities (academic fields) they acquire as graduate students. We estimate a first-stage regression of log earnings for monodisciplinarians and then regress log earnings for interdisciplinarians on functions of the first-stage coefficients. Our two-step method provides a framework for parsing and estimating the varied impacts of multiple identities across a wide range of organizational contexts.
Interdisciplinarians as Spanners: Falling and Filling in Gaps (with Andrew S. Hanks, Kevin M. Kniffin, Bo Wang, and Bruce A. Weinberg; NBER WP #27825) [under review]
Interdisciplinary research is commonly celebrated and encouraged for its ability to address emergent problems but little is known about the people who conduct such work since career-level data has not been broadly accessible. Extant theoretical frameworks generate competing predictions that (a) interdisciplinarians will be rewarded for brokering disparate areas of knowledge or (b) interdisciplinarians will be penalized for deviating from a single disciplinary category or prototype. We draw upon two large datasets covering more than one million dissertations from 1986 through 2016 from the United States as well as a novel linkage of the data and show that (1) interdisciplinary dissertations have become consistently more common and (2) working as an interdisciplinary dissertator tends to be penalized (based on recent years of salary data). More specifically, we find that the distance of topics that are combined in interdisciplinary dissertations is variably important across fields; and, when fields offer relatively high pay (e.g., Business), the penalty appears to be steeper. Our findings suggest a potential conflict of interest between enterprise-level interests to support interdisciplinary research and individual-level experiences of doing interdisciplinary work. Our study contributes to theories regarding the experience of interdisciplinarians across a wide range of organizational environments.
Do Double Majors Face Less Risk? An Analysis of Human Capital Diversification (with Andrew S. Hanks, Shengjun Jiang, Bo Wang, and Bruce A. Weinberg; NBER WP #32095) Media Coverage: Business Insider, Forbes, WSJ [under review]
We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.
Innovation Nation: Evidence from Broadening Access to PhD Training in the US (with Francisca Antman, Kirk Doran, and Bruce A. Weinberg)
The United States rose to become a global leader in scientific research in the early 20th Century. Matching the universe of ProQuest Ph.D. recipients to the full count decennial US Censuses (1850-1940), this paper investigates how access to Ph.D. training developed research manpower in the US during this critical period. Evidence from our event study design suggests that opening one more Ph.D. program during the peak ages of graduate study induces nearly 2 more Ph.D. recipients per 1 million people born in that state. Furthermore, the expansion of Ph.D. programs improved access for minority, immigrant, rural, and lower socioeconomic status families. We also find evidence of a spillover effect from opening new Ph.D. programs on promoting new inventors and improving the quality of patents.
COVID-19 Labor Market Shocks and Pediatric Mental Health: Evidence from Primary Care (with Christopher Lowenstein and Rishi Parikh)
Youth and adolescents have faced an unprecedented confluence of stressors to their mental health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study draws on individual-level electronic health records from a large and geographically diverse cohort of primary care patients to examine how the COVID-19 induced labor market shock of Spring 2020 affected mental health among youth ages 12--17. We leverage variation in the impact of the pandemic-induced recession on county-level, sector-specific employment to estimate a series of generalized difference-in-differences models and compare outcomes across counties with more versus less exposure to the pandemic economic shock. Despite an overall decrease in the use of primary care among our study sample, we find that the frequency of primary care visits with positive diagnosis for mental health conditions increased following the pandemic onset, especially among patients in counties with larger pre-pandemic shares of sectors that were most vulnerable to pandemic-induced contractions. We further find that this overall effect is primarily driven by visits for ADHD, anxiety, and affective mood disorders, and among patients with pre-existing mental health diagnoses.
Robots, Demand for Skill and Inequality: Evidence from the China Employer-Employee Survey (with Albert Park and Xiaobo Qu)
This paper examines the equilibrium effects of the most recent automation technology transition towards industrial robots in the manufacturing industry using the newly collected China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) data. We correct the endogeneity issue by using the constructed provincial capture of nationwide robotics technology as the instrumental variable for the individual firm's use of industrial robots. The 2SLS estimates show that the use of industrial robots in manufacturing firms awards wage premiums to all types of jobs and workers, meanwhile, also reshapes the employment structure and augments wage inequality within the firm. Moreover, the heterogeneity analysis across education groups, occupation levels, and task contents suggests that the shift in the demand for skill is the mechanism, through which the industrial robots affect the labor market.
Work In Progress
Medicaid Dental Benefits, Dental Care Use, and Systemic Health among Adults and Children (with Anuar Assamidanov and Brandy Lipton)
Health and Human Capital Inequality and Diversity in Law Enforcement (with Christopher Lowenstein and Aiday Sikhova)
Out of the University, Into the Workforce: Early 20th Century Scientific Training and Industrial Research (with Peter Nencka)
Ideas, Innovation, and Diversity in Economics (with Francisca Antman, Kirk Doran, and Bruce A. Weinberg)
State Grip, Innovation, and Academic Research in China (with Xueping Sun)
Historical Progress in Education, Innovation, and Science in 19th and 20th Century America (with Francisca Antman, Kirk Doran, and Bruce A. Weinberg)
Short-term and Long-term Impacts of Opening Medical Schools (with Rebecca McKibbin and Ioanni Nicholopoulos)