This project seeks to extend research on “deaths of despair” to look specifically at the causes of such deaths for Native Americans, and Native American women and girls in particular. Deaths of despair among Native Americans are proportionately higher than among any other group in the United States and have increased at almost twice the rate of non-Hispanic White Americans. Are the predictors of a death of despair for White constituents, especially men (joblessness, high rates of unemployment), different than those for Native American women and girls? The project will study this in the context of fracking. Preliminary analysis provides compelling, suggestive evidence that higher rates of employment and earnings among non-Hispanic White men due to extraction booms, measured by the fracking industry and building on existing literature, in proximity to Native lands and to Native American girls and women likely induces more human trafficking activity that disproportionately affects Native women and girls. In turn, this may also induce behaviors to “cope” with such contexts, such as increased alcohol and substance use and suicides among Native women and girls. The authors convincingly argue that what might reduce deaths of despair (jobs and higher wages) for one group (non-Hispanic White men) might result in higher rates of deaths of despair for another marginalized group, Native women and girls.
Archives: Grant
The Effects of the Child Tax Credit on the Economic Wellbeing of Families with Low Incomes
This project examines the effects of the expanded refundable Child Tax Credit on household economic well-being, including material hardship, debt, savings, and employment, with a focus on racial implications. The monthly Child Tax Credit, issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, was novel and represented a departure from how the United States typically provides assistance to low-income families via yearly cash transfers through the tax system or in-kind provisions, such as through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The expanded Child Tax Credit also was short-lived, issued only from July 2021 to December 2021. Existing evidence, including some from this proposed study’s investigators, reveals the monthly CTC payments reduced poverty, and especially child poverty, despite high underemployment or unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The contribution of this project is its investigation of nonincome outcomes, such as material hardship and food insecurity rates relative to the monthly CTC payments. The project also will consider racialized effects, which are important since early evidence reveals that Black and Latino families were disproportionately less likely to receive, or were delayed in receipt of, the monthly CTC payments. The study will rely on data from an app from Propel Inc., a financial services firm serving low-income Americans. The app allows low-income families manage their SNAP benefits.
The Price Effects of Market Power
This project takes a macroeconomic approach to market power. The authors will use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata on monthly prices to study how market power affects prices for the whole U.S. economy, not just one sector. Past work has looked at mark-ups and concentration as a proxy for price, but in principle, this could help address the fundamental question of whether market power or efficiency is driving increased mark-ups. This project would provide new evidence on the linkage between market concentration and margins across industries and within industries. It would also provide evidence on how import cost shocks lead to the pass-through of those shocks to the prices paid by final consumers. The authors plan to infer market power from the degree of pass-through. A main innovation in this study is the use of novel data, which record price for different sectors.
Consolidation in Drug Markets: Impact on Prices and Access
This project aims to provide an exhaustive analysis of how pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions affect market competition and prices of patent-protected branded drugs involved in the deal. So far, little direct evidence exists about the impact of mergers and acquisitions activity on pharmaceutical market outcomes, partly because reliable data on prices and ownership of drugs is very difficult to obtain. The scholars will assemble a comprehensive dataset tracking the ownership of new products. This will be one of the major contributions of this project since there are no data sources that systematically track the marketing rights of each pharmaceutical product. The project examines whether prices, sales, and formulary coverage of acquired products increase after acquisition and, if so, what types of acquisitions are more likely to lead to changes in these market outcomes. This project will be the first to examine the differences in how list and net prices of pharmaceuticals respond to changes in market structure and competition. It also asks why market outcomes change. Economic theory predicts that within-market (substitute products) mergers will lead to higher prices. More recent evidence suggests that cross-market (noncompeting products) mergers also may generate upward pricing pressure in markets. The project tests these theories in the context of the pharmaceutical market. It also explores alternative explanations, such as shifts in marketing strategy, by incorporating advertising data into the analysis. Finally, the project also investigates anticompetitive effects of acquisitions in the patent-protected branded drugs market and what types of deals are more likely to have an anticompetitive effect.
The Effects of Tech M&As on Innovation Incentives
This project is looking at the effects of “infant acquisitions,” or firms acquiring startups, on the incentives for startups to innovate, and the amount of overall innovation in the technology sector. It will empirically study the impact of megafirms’ tech acquisitions on venture investment by calculating the number of ventures funded and total dollars raised, and patent activities. The effect of large incumbents’ acquisitions of startups on innovation has been a major concern among policymakers partly because it may have a negative effect on future investment in venture capital and innovation. Restrictions on tech mergers and acquisitions have been proposed in Europe and in the United States, yet there is still no clear evidence on how they affect venture capital investment. The project will combine three data sources: S&P Global Market Intelligence on firm taxonomy; Crunchbase data on investment deals in tech ventures; and PatentViews open-source data on patents. The combined data sources allow the researchers to paint a fuller picture of each firm’s relative position in the business and technology spaces.
The Care Work System as a Fundamental Cause of Economic Inequalities
This project considers the interplay between paid and unpaid care work and the relationship between care work penalties and gender, race, and class inequalities. The author makes the novel argument that prior research does not sufficiently understand the combined effects of both paid and unpaid care work penalties and how they interact. To fill this gap, this project will develop a “care-work-systems” framework to determine how pay penalties for care work impact economic inequality. The project identifies that paid and unpaid care work penalties are often viewed as separate even though they impact each other. In addition to bringing these two skeins of research literature in conversation with one another, it will also bridge the research literatures in child care and eldercare, and integrate class, in addition to race and gender, into the analysis. In addition to the theoretical contribution, it proposes an empirical study to test this framework using panel data from three countries with different care infrastructures—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany—to help shed light on how policies and social structures play a role in generating paid and unpaid care work penalties.
The Role of State Policy in Reducing Disparities in Unemployment Insurance Recipiency
This project will leverage variations in implementation timing of the requirement in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Stimulus, or CARES, Act that employers notify recently separated workers of their eligibility for Unemployment Insurance. It seeks to causally identify whether notification improves the take-up of Unemployment Insurance with an emphasis on Black and Latino workers. The author will compile a database of states’ implementation of required separation notices by employers to employees by state and year. This project is expected to yield credible evidence regarding the efficacy of these employer separation notice requirements on the receipt of Unemployment Insurance. The project will further investigate whether such requirements close the racial divide in receiving Unemployment Insurance. Given known racialized disparities in receiving these benefits, the emphasis on this is critical. The distribution of information on UI eligibility as a mechanism in attenuating (or not) racial disparities would add to policymakers’ understanding of what is driving these disparities. In the case that separation notice requirements increase the take-up of Unemployment Insurance, the project has the potential to identify a relatively low-cost intervention with large payoffs. In the case that separation notice requirements do not improve UI take-up or close racial divides, policymakers may want to reconsider the universal requirements implemented as part of the CARES Act.
The Impact of Paid Sick Leave Mandates on Women’s Employment, Income, and Economic Security
As the U.S. economy emerges from the coronavirus recession, public policies to support women’s ability to return to work and stay in the workforce will be necessary for economic recovery. This study seeks to assess if paid sick leave reduces short-term income volatility and increases long-term economic security through improved job attachment among women, particularly those who are less likely to have access to paid sick leave in the absence of paid sick leave mandates. Using the American Community Survey, Slopen will conduct analyses at the state and county level using the five states and 21 counties that implemented paid sick leave as the treatment group. She will exploit the variation in the timing of the implementation of mandates at the state or county level using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of paid sick leave mandates on women’s labor force participation, continuity of employment, weekly hours worked, income, and poverty. She also will identify effects on subpopulations most likely to lack access to paid sick leave in the absence of mandates.
The Welfare Effects of Price Discrimination Under Endogenous Product Entry: the case of Implantable Medical Devices
This project seeks to answer two questions: What are the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination, and what are the effects of third-degree price discrimination on the take-up of newer and better technologies? Goel will address this question in the context of a particular type of implantable medical device: defibrillators. The implantable medical device industry has three features that make it a compelling setting to study. First, manufacturers are able to prevent hospitals from disclosing prices, allowing them to charge different prices for the same device in different hospitals. Second, the industry is very concentrated, with more than 95 percent of the market share captured by just four firms. And third, there is a lot of product variety. On average, a manufacturer offers six brands of this particular device per year from 2014–2019. Goel will utilize a rich dataset with purchase volumes, prices, and characteristics of defibrillators, and will combine this with approval information from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She will then estimate a model of supply and demand, and conduct a counterfactual analysis in which third-degree price discrimination is banned in order to understand the dynamics of price discrimination.
Understanding Amazon: Strategy and Welfare Implications
This project aims to provide a detailed, comprehensive analysis of the Amazon.com Inc. platform, its evolution, market power, and welfare implications. Gutierrez will utilize a massive dataset that has product information, alongside prices and sales ranks, for products sold on Amazon’s platform to produce three papers. The first will provide an overview of the Amazon platform and study the evolution and heterogeneity of fees in order to empirically test whether Amazon’s fees to sellers reflect market power. The second will consist of a structural analysis of reselling to test whether Amazon competing on its own platform is anticompetitive. And the third paper will analyze the impact of private label products. This research not only examines the Amazon platform but also provides empirical evidence on whether these types of activities can be anticompetitive.