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Working Paper
Health Insurance and Hospital Supply: Evidence from 1950s Coal Country
The United States government spends billions on public health insurance and has funded a number of programs to build health care facilities. However, the government runs these two types of programs separately: in different places, at different times, and for different populations. We explore whether access to both health insurance and hospitals can improve health outcomes and access to health care. We analyze a coal mining union health insurance program in 1950s Appalachia with and without a complementary hospital construction program. Our results show that the union insurance alone increased ...
Working Paper
Revisiting the Effect of Education on Later Life Health
We provide new evidence on the effect of education on later life health. Using variation in state compulsory schooling laws, we examine education's effect on a range of outcomes encompassing physical health, decision-making, and life expectancy. We employ under-utilized Health and Retirement Study data linked to restricted geographic identifiers, allowing us to match individuals more accurately to compulsory schooling laws. While positively related to educational attainment, compulsory schooling laws have no significant effect on later life health outcomes. Our results suggest that increased ...
Working Paper
Targeted Relief: Geography and Timing of Emergency Rental Assistance
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress established the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program, which provided nearly $45 billion to prevent evictions and increase housing stability. We provide new evidence on the implementation of ERA by examining the fine-grained geographic distribution of ERA funds and the timing of ERA expenditures by state and local governments. Using administrative data on ERA transactions, we find that ERA sent more funds per renting household to census tracts with higher pre-pandemic eviction filing rates, higher poverty rates, higher shares of Black ...