JHR News & Research Highlights

April 2, 2019April 2, 2019

No Evidence of Labor Market Disruptions Due to Sick Pay Mandates

Do paid sick leave mandates damage employment levels?

The United States is one of very few OECD countries where employers provide sick pay only voluntarily. This has led to a situation where a third of private-sector full time-employees had no access to paid sick leave in 2011 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among low-income, part-time, and service-sector workers, more than 80 percent had no access to paid time off when they were sick. In response, over the past years, a dozen states and several dozen cities have passed sick pay mandates. A major criticism by opponents of such mandates is that they would disrupt labor markets, destroy jobs, and lead to lower wages. But if we compare labor markets in places with mandates with similar places without mandates, what are the results?
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April 2, 2019April 4, 2019

Study Finds We Might Not Select the Best Bundled Insurance Plans for Our Needs

Choosing the right health insurance plan is difficult. People typically face large menus of plans that differ on various dimensions, like what health services are covered and how insurer co-pays are structured. A further layer of complexity is that plans for one set of services (e.g., drugs) are often bundled with plans for a different set of services (e.g., hospital). This “product bundling” affects the choice environment and may in turn affect the choice strategy a person uses. A recent study published in the Journal of Human Resources asks, “Do we get it right?”
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February 25, 2019

Text-Messaging Parents Can Help Kids Learn to Read—Especially If the Curriculum Is Personalized and Differentiated

Educational interventions based on behavioral economics principles have shown promise for combatting some of the persistent disparities in education outcomes. Researchers have studied text-messaging “nudges” and found them to be successful at all levels of education, from pre-K to the transition to college.

With this in mind, Christopher Doss, Erin M. Fahle, Susanna Loeb, and Benjamin York dug deeper to look at how personalizing text messages to the recipient could make a difference. Their work aims to identify the importance of personalization and differentiation within a text-messaging program designed to help parents of kindergarteners support the literacy development of their children at home.
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February 25, 2019March 6, 2019

Text-Messaging Program READY4K! Supports Early Literacy Development in the Home

Racial and socioeconomic gaps in academic achievement begin early in life, with large gaps in skills present by the time children enter kindergarten. One factor contributing to this educational inequality is the great variation in home learning experiences.

Researchers and practitioners have taken a variety of approaches to help parents support the literacy development of their children. Examples include interventions during doctors’ visits or hosting workshops for parents at schools. Unfortunately, these traditional approaches are hampered by their relative infrequency and/or substantial demands on parents’ time.

Benjamin York, Susanna Loeb, and Christopher Doss wondered whether something as common as a text message could improve the home learning experience. “In this study, we field a randomized control trial to test the efficacy of a text messaging intervention that leverages lessons from behavioral economics on overcoming barriers to adult behavior change.”
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February 25, 2019February 25, 2019

Does an Inheritance Make You Work Less?

Many people are dying wealthier and leaving larger estates. At the same time, the old-age economic dependency ratio—the number of people aged 65 and over as a percentage of the total labor force—will increase in many parts of the world. During his life, Gilded Age millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie asserted that a large inheritance causes people to work less. If this is true, the old-age dependency ratio may worsen even further, and it would be useful to design sensible tax policies for bequests and inheritances accordingly. Researchers Erlend E. Bø, Elin Halvorsen, and Thor O. Thoresen explore the effect of inherited wealth on labor force participation in their recent study.
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January 16, 2019January 16, 2019

When the Fire Goes Out, Children Face Lasting Effects: Evidence from the Indonesian Forest Fires

Recent devastating wildfires have drawn attention to how climate change is expected to make weather phenomena more unpredictable and wildfires more frequent and difficult to control. Little is known about how the accompanying air pollution affects long-term outcomes in children, who are especially vulnerable to its effects.

Maria Rosales-Rueda and Margaret Triyana analyzed the impacts of early-life exposure to the 1997 Indonesian forest fires on children’s long-term health outcomes in Indonesia. These fires were among the most intense fires in Indonesia’s history, emitting levels of particulate matter similar to the hazardous haze from agricultural burning or chronic exposure to indoor air pollution generated by the use of biomass fuels.
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December 19, 2018December 19, 2018

Who Needs a Ring? The 1996 Welfare Reform’s “Independence Effect”

Ratio of earnings and employment for single mothers vs. single men

In 1996 federal welfare reform replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the oldest welfare program for the poor, with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. The primary goal of this historic reform was to encourage work and decrease welfare dependence. However, another explicit goal was to decrease single motherhood and encourage marriage. This emphasis on single motherhood and marriage is based on a long-standing criticism of the AFDC program—that it discouraged marriage because the eligibility rules made it difficult for married couples to receive benefits from the program.

In a recent study, Robert Moffitt, Brian Phelan, and Anne Winkler take advantage of the passage of time to reexamine whether welfare reform had its intended effect of discouraging single motherhood and encouraging marriage.
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December 17, 2018December 17, 2018

Having More Siblings Reduces Education Attainment, but Not by Much

Two trends are often observed as a country develops: a decline in family size and a rise in education attainment. Are they related? In particular, could the fall in family size be one reason for the increase in education levels? Hui Ren Tan (Boston University) considered this question within the context of the 19th and early 20th century United States.
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December 7, 2018December 7, 2018

Unintended Consequences—How Targeting Schools for Special Benefits in France Can Do More Harm Than Good

Compensatory education policies—policies aimed at offsetting educational inequalities between socially and academically disadvantaged children and more advantaged students—are widely used and represent a significant part of public education spending in many countries. In France, they correspond to about ten percent of the annual spending per pupil. They provide underprivileged schools with additional resources to compensate for social and academic disadvantages. In a new JHR paper, Laurent Davezies (CREST) and Manon Garrouste (University of Lille) propose some evidence to explain why these programs are often not working as intended.
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November 29, 2018November 29, 2018

Do Conferences Contribute to Academic Impact?

Academics invest significant resources in attending and organizing conferences, and yet—until now—there has been strikingly little empirical analysis that tests the effectiveness of these meetings in promoting academic impact. In a new paper for JHR, Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon (University of Kent) and Ben McQuillin (University of East Anglia) present compelling evidence for the impact of conferences in increasing the visibility of presenting papers.
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