This research will analyze how state-level paid family and medical leave and Medicaid expansions influence drug-related outcomes. The research team will draw from a variety of administrative data sources, including restricted individual-level mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control; data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s National Inpatient Sample and Nationwide Emergency Department Sample; and the Treatment Episode Data Set-Admissions. Drawing from these rich data sources in combination with information on population demographic characteristics and state policies, the team will employ a variety of causal inference techniques to examine whether access to paid family and medical leave can help reduce the abuse of opioids. While a large literature has examined the impacts of paid family and medical leave on parental leave-taking, labor market outcomes, and child health, there is no research to date on whether it can influence drug abuse and treatment. Similarly, there is little research on the effect of Medicaid coverage on drug-related deaths or measures of drug-related morbidity.

This research will investigate how low-income and first-generation students respond financially and academically to financial aid austerity by exploiting a 2011 change that the U.S. Congress made to Pell grant eligibility that affected nearly 286,000 students. As a result, an estimated 12,000 students were eliminated from eligibility for a Pell grant, and 274,000 students received fewer grant dollars. The project will estimate the impact of this sudden unexpected loss in financial aid on college attendance, financial aid, and labor supply outcomes for low-income college students using a combination of restricted-use data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The researcher will use the panel nature of the data to track changes in outcomes for students from one academic year to the next. A regression discontinuity design will be employed to estimate the causal effect of the loss on various educational and labor market outcomes.

Russell will explore whether the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, reform affected the likelihood that ex-offenders moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This work sits at the intersection of two important policy areas—criminal justice reform and neighborhood access/mobility—and brings a racial lens to the question. It also seeks to understand whether the reform promotes statistical racial discrimination in housing, as some research has suggested “Ban the Box” laws unintentionally have.

This project seeks to extend the evidence on welfare policies by examining the long-run effects of a high-impact set of randomized experiments conducted by the nonprofit organization MDRC in the late 1980s and 1990s involving more than 100,000 welfare recipients. This is the first study of its kind to look at the very long-term effects of welfare reform experiments on adult outcomes. In each study, welfare recipients were randomly assigned to either a control, Aid to Families with Dependent Children-like program, or to interventions involving different combinations of job training, job search assistance, financial incentives to work, childcare subsidies, time limits, and/or sanctions. Merging data from these experiments with administrative tax data and other data held at the U.S. Census Bureau, Hoynes will study the long-run impacts of welfare policies on many important outcomes, including earnings and employment, fertility, marriage, mortality, and program participation for adult welfare recipients and, importantly, their children.

This research will assess before and after data in Philadelphia across industries that are and are not subject to the recent scheduling regulation in order to investigate the effectiveness of the policy, including unintentional consequences such as a reduction in the total number of hours offered to an employee. Using a daily diary study conducted via cellphone text message in English and Spanish, the project will survey 1,000 Philadelphia workers in low-wage service occupations who have a young child (ages 2 to 7). It will compare voluntary and involuntary schedule changes by using daily diaries to assess changes in hours and schedules in order to discern not only the frequency and distribution of unpredictability, but also its effect on low-wage parents and children. The results of this study will provide unique, causal information on the potential effects of new scheduling laws on both parents and children.

This research brings together social psychology, epidemiology, and stratification economics using the Health and Retirement Study’s Psychosocial Leave-Behind Questionnaire and Enhanced Face-to-Face Interviews (2006-2012) to investigate whether Blacks’ higher rates of both hypertension and inflammation (as measured by elevated levels of C-reactive protein) can be explained through their higher exposure to psychosocial and economic liabilities, and their limited access to economic resources. Further, this research explores whether this heightened exposure to hypertension and inflammation increases Blacks’ likelihood of early labor force exit (leaving the labor force before 62).