We estimate the effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on county-level mortality in the first four years following expansion. We find a reduction in all-cause mortality in ages 20 to 64 equaling 11.36 deaths per 100,000 individuals, a 3.6 percent decrease. This estimate is largely driven by reductions in causes of death likely to be influenced by access to health care, and equates to one life saved per 310 newly covered individuals. A cost-benefit analysis shows that the improvement in welfare due to mortality responses may offset the entire net-of-transfers expenditure associated with the expansion.

We document the growth of the NAACP's local branches from just after its inception to the middle of the 20th century using digitized records from the organization's archives. We identify some key correlates of county-level activity, concentrating specifically on the explosive growth in Southern branches between 1938 and 1946. We link those correlates to potential explanations from the history and social science literatures, including human capital and other demographic forces, the rising demand for labor associated with war time production, a reduction in threats of racial violence, pre-existing demand for political activity, and social interactions and networks. Our review points to several potentially important pathways for future researchers to explore how the expansion in grassroots political activism may have related to significant progress in reducing racial gaps in labor market outcomes mid-century.

Survey refusal in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has tripled over the last decade. This rise coincides with the emergence of rhetoric, largely from the political right, questioning the accuracy and integrity of government statistics. We examine how support for the Tea Party and the Republican party have affected CPS refusal rates and whether households are more likely to participate in the survey when their preferred political party holds the White House. Using state and metro vote shares or an individual-level model based on the longitudinal structure of the CPS, we find no evidence that Republican or Tea Party supporters drive the long-term upward trend in refusals. We do find evidence of a political cycle in response rates. Refusal rates since 2015 exhibit polarization, with the fastest growth in refusals among those least likely to support Trump and the Tea Party. Evidence from an analysis which generates exogenous variation in Tea Party support using rain on the day of the first Tea Party rally indicates that exposure to anti-survey rhetoric decreases refusal rates, consistent with the findings from our other analyses.

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth disconnection—i.e., the share of young people who were neither in school nor at work. Youth disconnection offers important advantages, relative to unemployment or participation rates, as a measure of the labor market for the most marginal and disadvantaged youth. Before the pandemic, approximately one out of eight young people between the ages of 18 and 24 were disconnected. The disconnection rate increased dramatically in April 2020 because of the pandemic; however, it has decreased quickly since that time. The increase in the disconnection rate at the beginning of the pandemic was mostly driven by a reduction in full-time work, but toward the end of 2020, the school enrollment rate also fell. Within-individual transition analysis reveals that the pandemic drove some individuals to disconnection, regardless of whether those persons were in school, at work, or already disconnected. Full-time workers saw the largest increase in transition to disconnection. Compared to the 2007 recession, the full-time-work to full-time-work transition decreased more and the full-time-work to disconnection transition increased more during this pandemic.

The overriding objective of U.S. military compensation policy is to attract and retain the force necessary to meet the nation's national security objectives. Whether and how military service affects earnings and an individual's likelihood of completing college (one determinant of future earnings) has implications for military policies related to compensation, recruiting, and retention. Estimating the effect of military service is complicated by the fact that veterans are likely to differ from nonveterans in ways that are correlated with subsequent economic outcomes but are not observable to the researcher. This report builds on earlier work to understand how military service affects earnings, especially how these effects differ by the number of years of service and their military occupational specialties while serving. The authors also sought to understand how external factors and policies affect these impacts. To do this, they examined how economic conditions in the civilian labor market when individuals exit active duty affect postservice earnings, and they studied the effect on earnings of an Army recruiting program, Partnership for Youth Success, designed to promote enlistment but with the potential to ease the financial transition from military to civilian life.

In this paper we investigate the dual role of supply restrictions and drug treatment in combating the concurrent rise of opioid abuse and suicide in the United States over the last two decades. We find that supply-side interventions decrease suicides in places with strong addiction-help networks, implying that prescription drug abuse is associated with an inherent risk of suicide. Our findings support an important role for access to treatment services in policies designed to combat the opioid epidemic.

We estimate the long-term effects of experiencing high levels of job demands on the mortality and aging of CEOs. The estimation exploits variation in takeover protection and industry crises. First, using hand-collected data on the dates of birth and death for 1,605 CEOs of large, publicly-listed U.S. firms, we estimate the resulting changes in mortality. The hazard estimates indicate that CEOs' lifespan increases by two years when insulated from market discipline via anti-takeover laws, and decreases by 1.5 years in response to an industry-wide downturn. Second, we apply neural-network based machine-learning techniques to assess visible signs of aging in pictures of CEOs. We estimate that exposure to a distress shock during the Great Recession increases CEOs' apparent age by one year over the next decade. Our findings imply significant health costs of managerial stress, also relative to known health risks.

We study how air pollution impacts the U.S. labor market by analyzing effects of drifting wildfire smoke that can affect populations far from the fires themselves. We link satellite smoke plumes with labor market outcomes to estimate that an additional day of smoke exposure reduces quarterly earnings by about 0.1 percent. Extensive margin responses, including employment reductions and labor force exits, can explain 13 percent of the overall earnings losses. The implied welfare cost of lost earnings due to air pollution exposure is on par with standard valuations of the mortality burden. The findings suggest that labor market channels warrant greater consideration in policy responses to air pollution.

This paper provides revealed-preference estimates of the monetary value of avoiding job search in a high-unemployment labor market by examining the behavior of military servicemembers deciding between reenlisting and exiting the military. We find that servicemembers would sacrifice 1.5-2% in earnings in exchange for avoiding a one percentage point increase in the home-state unemployment rate. Comparing these estimates to realized losses in post-service civilian earnings resulting from exiting the military during times of high unemployment suggests that mitigating factors (e.g., leisure, private and public transfers) offset less than one-third of the earnings losses caused by entering a weak labor market.

We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of election to political office on natural lifespan. In contrast to previous findings of shortened lifespan among US presidents and other heads of state, we find that US governors and other political office holders live over one year longer than losers of close elections. The positive effects of election appear in the mid-1800s, and grow notably larger when we restrict the sample to later years. We also analyze heterogeneity in exposure to stress, the proposed mechanism in the previous literature. We find no evidence of a role for stress in explaining differences in life expectancy. Those who win by large margins have shorter life expectancy than either close winners or losers, a fact which may explain previous findings.