Open Defecation and Anemia in Children: The Case of Nepal

Anemia is typically thought of as a nutritional outcome, with a corresponding policy focus on improving nutrient intake. PRC faculty research associates Diane Coffey, Michael Geruso, and Dean Spears convincingly show that the disease environment affects nutrient absorption. Therefore, interventions to address anemia should also focus on reducing parasitic infections that are transmitted through open defecation. They make the case that policy makers interested in reducing anemia in developing countries should also prioritize reducing open defecation.Population Research Cente

Egyptians, Aliens, and Okies: Against the Sum of Averages

Grill (2023) defends the Sum of Averages View (SAV), on which the value of a population is found by summing the average lifetime welfare of each generation or birth cohort. A major advantage of SAV, according to Grill, is that it escapes the Egyptology objection to average utilitarianism. But, we argue, SAV escapes only the most literal understanding of this objection, since it still allows the value of adding a life to depend on facts about other, intuitively irrelevant lives. Moreover, SAV has a decisive drawback not shared with either average or total utilitarianism: it can evaluate an outcome in which every individual is worse off as better overall, even when exactly the same people exist in both outcomes. These problems, we argue, afflict not only Grill’s view but any view that uses a sum of subpopulation averages, apart from the limiting cases of average and total utilitarianism

Empirical Studies in the Economics of Health Insurance, Health, and Fertility

This thesis is a collection of essays in the economics of health insurance, health, and fertility. The three essays each explore distinct and unconnected research questions. The first study asks whether differences in health risk can explain the systematically different health plan choices made by younger and older US consumers. Finding the answer to be no, the essay then explores the implications of these differential selection patterns by age. The second study asks how much of the glaring disparities in life expectancy between blacks and whites in the US can be accounted for by group differences in socioeconomic factors. The third study asks whether the often-observed negative correlation between educational attainment and fertility reflects a causal relationship. The first two essays are single-authored, with the second published in the journal Demography. The third essay is co-authored with Damon Clark and Heather Royer. These three essays share an emphasis on empirical rather than theoretical contributions, and in all cases they benefit from access to unique or restricted datasets. Nonetheless, the essays differ in the ways they characterize the data used, and the extent to which the quantities of interest are non-parametrically identified. The empirical evidence in the health insurance essay relies most heavily on economic theory for identification. In part, this first essay attempts to identify deep parameters associated with expected utility theory. The fertility essay, in contrast, relies on a natural experiment to identify its parameters of interest, which are the behavioral responses to an educational reform, rather than primitives of a utility function. Finally, the essay on racial disparities in mortality pushes aside the issue of identification, and instead provides a novel and careful accounting of partial correlations between race, socioeconomic status, and mortality. These correlations are important because they have not been previously reported, despite much interest in the research question. The first essay, in more detail, examines how health plan choice varies by age and health risk, and asks whether current pricing restrictions in employer-sponsored health insurance are optimal. US employers cannot charge different insurance premiums on the basis of age, gender, or other observable characteristics. Using administrative employer data, I show that younger and older employees in the same firm have very different preferences over health plans, above and beyond what differences in their health risk would predict. I build a simple model of plan choice that demonstrates that as long as this is the case, requiring that young and old employees face the same prices can result in socially inefficient self-sorting across the various plans offered by the employer. The phenomenon is distinct from the well-known adverse selection effects. I estimate a structural model of plan choice to quantify the efficiency gains that would result if pricing were allowed to vary with age. The results indicate that the welfare gains from introducing age-adjusted prices are small, though they are similar in magnitude to recent estimates of the welfare gains from perfectly correcting adverse selection under uniform prices in employer health plans. The second essay quantifies the extent to which socioeconomic and demographic characteristics can account for black-white disparities in life expectancy in the United States. Although many studies have investigated the linkages between race, socioeconomic status, and mortality, this article is the first to measure how much of the life expectancy gap remains after differences in mortality are purged of the compositional differences in socioeconomic characteristics between blacks and whites. The decomposition is facilitated by a reweighting technique that creates counterfactual estimation samples in which the distribution of income, education, employment and occupation, marital status, and other theoretically relevant variables among blacks is made to match the distribution of these variables among whites. For males, 80% of the black-white gap in life expectancy at age 1 can be accounted for by differences in characteristics. For females, 70% percent of the gap can be accounted for. The third essay examines the effect of school attendance and educational attainment on fertility. To shed new light on the causal relationship, we exploit a natural experiment generated by a change in UK compulsory schooling laws in 1972, which raised the minimum leaving age from 15 to 16. The reform was recent enough that access to legal abortion and modern contraception at the time was quite similar to today, granting unique insight into the fertility effects of education in a modern context. We show that the affected girls had significantly lower fertility in their teen years and that the decline was not accompanied by an increase in abortions. We also find that the reform had a negligible impact on completed fertility. Our findings suggest that education-based policies might reduce teen pregnancies without impacting completed fertility rates

The Many Definitions of Social Security Privatization

Definitions can matter, and Don Fullerton and Michael Geruso argue that proponents of social security privatization mean a host of different things by "privatization." They point out that many of the gains from privatization seen by economists like Martin Feldstein and Laurence Kotlikoff owe to only a few aspects of privatization.

Heat, Humidity, and Infant Mortality in the Developing World

We study how extreme weather exposure impacts infant survival in the developing world. Our analysis overcomes the absence of vital registration systems in many poor countries by extracting birth histories from household surveys. Studying 53 developing countries that span five continents, we find impacts of hot days on infant morality that are an order of magnitude larger than corresponding estimates from rich country studies, with humidity playing an important role. The size and implied geographic distribution of harms documented here have the potential to significantly alter assessments of optimal climate policy