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Peer Health Shocks and Labor Supply [Draft Coming Soon!]
I provide novel evidence on how workers respond to peer health shocks within high-risk occupations by leveraging two nested natural experiments within professional hockey and gridiron football. First, I compare differences in labor supply between characteristically similar athletes who differ only in their exposure to a colleague who died of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a deadly neurological disease causally linked to continued workplace participation. Though the information about these deaths is widely publicized, I find that their occurrence differentially increases the probability for former teammates to retire. This effect is greater for those with longer periods spent as teammates and diminishes with time since they were last on the same team. Age differences cannot explain these results. Second, I leverage quasi-random differences in the monetary compensation workers would forgo upon retiring at the time of this peer health shock. I show these retirements are highly response to opportunity costs – estimating that teams would have to increase workers’ annual salaries by 50% ($500,000) to prevent their exit. Remaining treated workers display a heightened sensitivity to health risks by signing shorter contracts with larger signing bonuses in their subsequent employment contracts. The finding that labor supply decisions are highly responsive to the health status of peers suggests that workers substantially underestimate utility loss from work-related health damages even in environments where such risks are highly publicized.
We provide new evidence on sexual orientation, sexual attraction, and income using data from the 2015-21 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). These data ask individuals about both orientation and attraction, allowing us to describe a sexual minority group that has been hidden in prior research: people who identify as heterosexual but who concurrently report some same-sex attraction. We show that this population is much larger than the sample of self-identified gay, lesbian, or bisexual people, and we show that relative to heterosexual people who report exclusively different-sex attraction, heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction are younger, less likely to be married, and much more highly educated. We document that, controlling for observables, heterosexual men who report same-sex attraction experience robust and statistically significant employment and income penalties relative to heterosexual men who are exclusively different-sex attracted. These penalties are larger for non-Hispanic White men than for non-Hispanic Black men. We find no similar penalty for heterosexual women who report some same-sex attraction. Our results indicate that prior research has overlooked one of the largest groups of sexual minorities – heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction – who experience systematically different economic outcomes than heterosexual individuals who are exclusively different-sex attracted.
Information Shocks and Celebrity Exposure: The Effect of “Magic” Johnson
on AIDS Diagnoses and Mortality in the U.S.
with
Alexander
Cardazzi and
Zachary
Rodriguez; Health Economics (2023)
We present evidence that Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s announcement that he contracted HIV served as a public-health catalyst for rapidly correcting the public’s understanding of who was at risk of infection. Using a novel identification strategy, we present evidence that there was a large but temporary increase in the number of AIDS diagnoses for heterosexual men following the announcement. This effect was concentrated in areas with greater prior exposure to Johnson. We show that these men were both more likely to have been diagnosed via a formal blood test and less likely to die within 1 decade of their initial diagnosis—suggesting that Johnson’s announcement caused an intertemporal substitution in testing which prolonged patients’ lifespans as a result of earlier access to medical care. We estimate that Johnson’s announcement caused approximately 800 additional heterosexual males in the United States in metropolitan statistical areas with National Basketball Association franchises men to discover their underlying AIDS diagnosis and, of whom, were more likely to live at least 1 decade beyond their initial diagnosis date.
Determinants of Voting on Education Savings Accounts: Evidence from
Tennessee
with Ben Luikart and
Joshua
C. Hall; Journal of School Choice (2022)
Tennessee passed voucher-style Education Savings Account (ESA) legislation in 2019. We analyze the roll call vote in the Tennessee House to better understand the role of constituent, legislator, and special interest influences on support for school choice. This is accomplished using a binary probit model with legislator vote as the dependent variable. We find that legislator voting behavior in this context is most significantly determined by party affiliation and the presence of campaign funding from the Tennessee Education Association (TEA) rather than the demographic characteristics of their constituents.
The Impact of the New York City Marathon on Hotel Demand
with
Joshua
C. Hall; Economies (2020)
Daily hotel data are employed, along with information on prices, revenue, demand and hotel occupancy, to analyze part of the local economic impact of the annual New York City (NYC) Marathon. As the largest competitive race in the world, the marathon attracts domestic and international competitors and spectators. The cancellation of the 2012 marathon due to Hurricane Sandy was estimated to lead to an increase of 4000 hotel nights as well as a 10% increase in the average daily room rate. Taken together, this is associated with a USD 3 million increase in hotel revenue. The results suggest a significantly lower local economic impact of the race than previously thought.
The Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Legalization on Adoptions and Family
Formation
with
Zachary
Rodriguez
The stability and availability of legal rights are crucial factors influencing investment decisions. This paper extends this framework to the family, estimating the impact of same-sex marriage (SSM) legalization on the demand for households’ most significant investment – children. Using an array of difference-in-differences estimators with detailed data on nearly 20 million children within the foster care system from 1995-2019, we document that SSM increased adoptions by 9%-18%. This effect reduced the number of children remaining in foster care. Furthermore, we document that SSM caused an 11% (55%) increase in the probability of same-sex couples having any (adopted) child within the household.
Does Love Kill Speed? The Effect of Marriage on Formula One Driver Performance
with Clay CollinsThis paper provides an empirical test of how life events, in this case, marriage, can affect player performance in a high-risk environment. Using hand-collected data on the marital status of Formula One drivers, we test whether married drivers take fewer risks and drive more conservatively during qualifying periods. Using a variety of estimation methods to test short- and long-term effects of changes in marital status, we find no evidence that “love is the enemy of speed”. Married drivers see no changes in performance after their wedding dates, nor are they discriminated against and exit the sport earlier.
Spatial Endogenity and Learning Modalities during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Prior work has found that powerful teacher unions slowed the return to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the benefit of far more geographically granular data than was available to researchers at the time, I reexamine this relationship. To do so, I match high-frequency measures of local COVID-19 incidence to weekly school district learning modalities. I combine this weekly data with cross-sectional measures of the expansiveness of entitlements in teacher unions’ collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). I demonstrate that the relationship between union strength and in-person instruction disappears when using more geographically granular measures of COVID-19 or when accounting for the modality of neighboring districts. Leveraging differential timing in the expiration unions’ CBAs as a source of exogenous variation in their ability to respond to the pandemic, I find no change in the probability that renegotiating unions offer in-person classes regardless of strength.
Chasing Rainbows: Same-Sex Marriage, Migration, and Housing Prices in American Gayborhoods
with João TampelliniThis paper examines changes in estimated amenity values within American gayborhoods using geographically localized data over 60 years. We use a difference-in-differences design comparing gayborhoods to adjacent neighborhoods within the same city and document that the rent-to-income ratio for these neighborhoods is v-shaped over time – declining largely during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s before sharply rebounding in the 2010s. To better understand the factors impacting this increase, we exploit the staggered treatment timing of same-sex marriage laws across states. We find that marriage equality laws increase both the number and share of different-sex households residing within the gayborhood which drives up the price of housing. This increase in the price of housing displaces renters in cities with inelastic housing supply.
Do Childcare Costs Reduce Adoptions? Evidence from Marriage Equality
Empirical work has demonstrated that fertility is sensitive to the cost of childcare. In this paper, I contribute to our understanding of this relationship by demonstrating that childcare costs reduce adoptions at the extensive margin but not the intensive margin. Employing data from the American Community Survey, I combine county-level estimates on changes in the number of adopted children within same-sex households due to marriage equality laws with local measures of the share of income that goes towards childcare. The results indicate that childcare costs reduce the number of adopted children, not households’ decision to adopt. This finding suggests that the cost of raising children is significantly more binding for the fertility decisions for subsequent children than for first-borns.