Research

Over the past two decades, opioid overdose deaths contributed to the dramatic rise in all-cause mortality among non-Hispanic Whites. To date, efforts among scholars to understand the role of local area labor market conditions on opioid overdose mortality have led to mixed results. We argue the reason for these disparate findings is scholars have not considered the moderating effects of income support policies such as unemployment insurance. The present study leverages two sources of variation-county mass layoffs and changes in the generosity of state unemployment insurance benefits-to investigate if unemployment benefits moderate the relationship between job loss and county opioid overdose death rates. Our difference-in-differences estimation strategy reveals that the harmful effects of job loss on opioid overdose mortality decline with increasing state unemployment insurance benefit levels. These findings suggest that social policy in the form of income transfers played a crucial role in disrupting the link between job loss and opioid overdose mortality.

Objective: To estimate the impact of the $600 per week Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) payments on health care services spending during the Covid pandemic and to investigate if this impact varied by state Medicaid expansion status.

Data sources: This study leverages novel, publicly available data from Opportunity Insights capturing consumer credit and debit card spending on health care services for January 18-August 15, 2020 as well as information on unemployment insurance claims, Covid cases, and state policy changes.

Study design: Using triple-differences estimation, we leverage two sources of variation-within-state change in the unemployment insurance claims rate and the introduction of FPUC payments-to estimate the moderating effect of FPUC on health care spending losses as unemployment rises. Results are stratified by state Medicaid expansion status.

Extraction methods: Not applicable.

Principal findings: For each percentage point increase in the unemployment insurance claims rate, health care spending declined by 1.0% (<0.05) in Medicaid expansion states and by 2.0% (<0.01) in nonexpansion states. However, FPUC partially mitigated this association, boosting spending by 0.8% (<0.001) and 1.3% (<0.05) in Medicaid expansion and nonexpansion states, respectively, for every percentage point increase in the unemployment insurance claims rate.

Conclusions: We find that FPUC bolstered health care spending during the Covid pandemic, but that both the negative consequences of unemployment and moderating effects of federal income supports were greatest in states that did not adopt Medicaid expansion. These results indicate that emergency federal spending helped to sustain health care spending during a period of rising unemployment. Yet, the effectiveness of this program also suggests possible unmet demand for health care services, particularly in states that did not adopt Medicaid expansion.

Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has become less generous, and what remains more often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change parallels others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups are "deserving" and "undeserving." This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? This study examines the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare between 2001 and 2015 and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance was associated with increases in both forms of hardship.

Using longitudinal Social Security records for 1.4 million workers born 1933–1977, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of how lifetime earnings by education evolved across US birth cohorts. Among men, cross-cohort earnings gains accrued almost exclusively to those with bachelor's or advanced degrees; high-school graduates exhibited minimal improvement except through prolonged late-career labor force attachment rather than higher wages. Women experienced substantial cross-cohort gains across all education levels. Greater dispersion in women's cumulative employment years amplifies lifetime inequality---both between and within education groups---relative to cross-sectional measures, though employment convergence across successive cohorts attenuated inequality growth compared to men. Inequality differences between cohorts emerge at labor market entry and remain persistent throughout the life cycle, demonstrating that early-career mechanisms critically shape long-term inequality dynamics.

This study presents the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rate rises when workers' relative earnings fall. The analysis posits that workers form earnings expectations through peer comparison and evaluate their earnings against those of their age-range peers. Based on the results, the decline in the earnings of less-educated US prime-age men relative to the overall prime-age earnings from 1980 to 2019 leads to a 0.34 to 0.48 percentage point increase in their likelihood of leaving the labor force, accounting for 24 to 33 percent of the total growth in US prime-age male labor force exit rate over this period.