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Working Paper
Informal Work and Official Employment Statistics: What’s Missing?
Using eight consecutive waves of the Survey of Informal Work Participation (SIWP) spanning 2015 through 2022, we investigate informal “gig” work participation in the United States— broadly defined to include online and offline activities—and its implications for the measurement of employment. Our results suggest that employment rates among US household heads were consistently understated in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Under conservative estimates, we find that the employment-to-population ratio would have been 0.25 to 1.1 percentage points higher over the 2015–2022 period ...
Working Paper
Employment Trajectories among Individuals with Opioid Use Disorder: Can Evidence-Based Treatment Improve Outcomes?
Using administrative records of Medicaid enrollees in Rhode Island that link their health-care information with their payroll employment records, this paper produces new stylized facts concerning the association between opioid use disorder (OUD) and employment and inquires as to whether treatment with FDA-approved medications might boost the job-finding rates of OUD patients. We find that individuals diagnosed with OUD are less likely to be employed compared with other Medicaid enrollees, that their employment tends to be more intermittent, and that they face increased job-separation risk ...
Report
Why New England’s Labor Force Participation Has Been Recovering So Slowly since the COVID-19 Pandemic
This report investigates a variety of factors that may explain why New England experienced a participation recovery gap from 2019 through 2023 and discusses the resulting policy implications.
Working Paper
Race, obesity, and the puzzle of gender specificity
Obesity is significantly more prevalent among non-Hispanic African-American (henceforth ?black?) women than among non-Hispanic white American (henceforth ?white?) women. These differences have persisted without much alteration since the early 1970s, despite substantial increases in the rates of obesity among both groups. Over the same time period, however, we observe little to no significant differences in the prevalence of obesity between black men and white men. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System ...
Report
Rhode Island in the Great Recession: factors contributing to its sharp downturn and slow recovery
This paper seeks to discover why Rhode Island experienced a more severe downturn during the Great Recession than any other New England state and why it continues to lag other states in the region and the nation as a whole in some measures of labor market health.
Report
Changing patterns in informal work participation in the United States 2013–2015
In light of the weak labor market conditions in the United States from 2008 until recently, one might have expected that participation in alternative income-generating activities, such as informal side-jobs, would have increased during that period. By the same logic, participation in informal work should have declined more recently, as conditions in the formal labor market improved. However, recent technological innovations have created a number of new opportunities for engaging in informal work. Such innovations may have promoted structural increases in informal work participation; if so we ...
Working Paper
Household inflation expectations and consumer spending: evidence from panel data
With nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound, an important question for monetary policy is whether, as predicted in prior theoretical work, an increase in inflation expectations would boost current consumer spending. Using survey panel data for the period from April 2009 to November 2012, we examine the relationship between a household's inflation expectations and its current spending, taking into account other factors such as the household's wage growth expectations, the uncertainty surrounding its inflation expectations, macroeconomic conditions, and unobserved heterogeneity at the ...
Using Inflation Expectations to Boost Consumer Spending Poses Policy Risks
Communication that raises inflation expectations has been suggested as a policy tool for central banks. Our research suggests that this policy tool has some limitations that central banks must manage when implementing it.
Report
Medication-assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in Rhode Island: Who Gets Treatment, and Does Treatment Improve Health Outcomes?
Since the early 2000s Rhode Island has been among the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis. In response, the state has made it a priority to expand access to medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD), which refers to the use of the FDA-approved medications methadone, buprenorphine, and/or naltrexone in conjunction with behavioral therapy. MAT is strongly supported by scientific evidence and endorsed by US public health officials and yet fails to reach many OUD patients. Using administrative data covering medical treatments and selected health outcomes for more than ...
Working Paper
Geographic variations in a model of physician treatment choice with social interactions
Location-specific norms of behavior are a widespread phenomenon. In the case of medical practice, numerous studies have found that geographic location exerts a strong influence on the choice of treatments and procedures. This paper shows how the presence of social influence on treatment decisions can help to explain this phenomenon. We construct a theoretical model in which physicians' treatment choices depend on patients' characteristics and on the recent choices of nearby peers - either because there are local knowledge spillovers or because physicians want to conform to local practice ...