nep-dem New Economics Papers
on Demographic Economics
Issue of 2020‒10‒12
eight papers chosen by
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

  1. Racial Disparities in Frontline Workers and Housing Crowding during COVID-19: Evidence from Geolocation Data By Milena Almagro; Joshua Coven; Arpit Gupta; Angelo Orane-Hutchinson
  2. Act Early to Prevent Infections and Save Lives: Causal Impact of Diagnostic Efficiency on the COVID-19 Pandemic By Chen, Simiao; Jin, Zhangfeng; Bloom, David E.
  3. Work, Care and Gender during the COVID-19 Crisis By Hupkau, Claudia; Petrongolo, Barbara
  4. Impact of State Children’s Health Insurance Program on Fertility of Immigrant Women By Kabir Dasgupta; Keshar Ghimire; Alexander Plum
  5. The Peace Baby Boom: Evidence from Colombia's peace agreement with the FARC By Guerra-Cújar, María Elvira; Prem, Mounu; Rodríguez-Lesmes, Paul; Vargas, Juan F.
  6. Competition and Career Advancement:The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave By Julian Johnsen; Hyejin Ku; Kjell G Salvanes
  7. Investigating the Effect of Health Insurance in the COVID-19 Pandemic By Rajashri Chakrabarti; Lindsay Meyerson; William Nober; Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
  8. COVerAGE-DB: a database of age-structured COVID-19 cases and deaths By Timothy Riffe; Enrique Acosta; José M. Aburto; Diego Alburez-Gutierrez; Ugofilippo Basellini; Anna Altová; Simona Bignami; Didier Breton; Eungang Choi; Jorge Cimentada; Gonzalo De Armas; Emanuele Del Fava; Alicia Delgado; Viorela Diaconu; Jessica Donzowa; Christian Dudel; Antonia Fröhlich; Alain Gagnon; Mariana Garcia Cristómo; Victor M. Garcia-Guerrero; Armando González-Díaz; Irwin Hecker; Dagnon Eric Koba; Marina Kolobova; Mine Kühn; Chia Liu; Andrea Lozer; Mădălina Manea; Muntasir Masum; Ryohei Mogi; Saskia Morwinsky; Ronald Musizvingoza; Mikko Myrskylä; Marilia R. Nepomuceno; Michelle Nickel; Natalie Nitsche; Anna Oksuzyan; Samuel Oladele; Emmanuel Olamijuwon; Oluwafunke Omodara; Soumaila Ouedraogo; Mariana Paredes; Marius Pascariu; Manuel Piriz; Raquel Pollero; Federico Rehermann; Filipe Ribeiro; Silvia Rizzi; Francisco Rowe; Isaac Sasson; Jiaxin Shi; Rafael Silva-Ramirez; Cosmo Strozza; Catalina Torres; Sergi Trias-Llimos; Fumiya Uchikoshi; Alyson A. van Raalte; Paola Vazquez-Castillo; Estevão Vilela; Iván Williams; Virginia Zarulli

  1. By: Milena Almagro; Joshua Coven; Arpit Gupta; Angelo Orane-Hutchinson
    Abstract: We document that racial disparities in COVID-19 in New York City stem from patterns of commuting and housing crowding. During the initial wave of the pandemic, we find that out-of-home activity related to commuting is strongly associated with COVID-19 cases at the ZIP Code level and hospitalization at an individual level. After layoffs of essential workers decreased commuting, we find case growth continued through household crowding. A larger share of individuals in crowded housing or commuting to essential work are Black, Hispanic, and lower-income. As a result, structural inequalities, rather than population density, play a role in determining the cross-section of COVID-19 risk exposure in urban areas.
    Keywords: Coronavirus; COVID-19; Housing crowding; Mobility; Racial disparities
    JEL: I10 J15 R23
    Date: 2020–09–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedmoi:88803&r=all
  2. By: Chen, Simiao (Harvard School of Public Health); Jin, Zhangfeng (affiliation not available); Bloom, David E. (Harvard University)
    Abstract: This paper examines the impact of diagnostic efficiency on the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an exogenous policy on diagnostic confirmation, we show that a one- day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality over the subsequent six months, respectively. The impact is larger for cities that are farther from the COVID-19 epicenter, are exposed to less migration, and have more responsive public health systems. Social distancing and a less burdened health system are likely the underlying mechanisms, while the latter also explains the more profound impact on reducing deaths than reducing infections.
    Keywords: diagnostic efficiency, information disclosure, social distancing, COVID-19, China, instrumental variable
    JEL: D83 H75 I12 I18 J61
    Date: 2020–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13749&r=all
  3. By: Hupkau, Claudia (CUNEF, Madrid); Petrongolo, Barbara (University of Oxford)
    Abstract: We explore impacts of the pandemic crisis and associated restrictions to economic activity on paid and unpaid work for men and women in the UK. Using data from the Covid-19 supplement of Understanding Society, we find evidence that labour market outcomes of men and women were roughly equally affected at the extensive margin, as measured by the incidence of job loss or furloughing, but if anything women suffered smaller losses at the intensive margin, experiencing slightly smaller changes in hours and earnings. Within the household, women provided on average a larger share of increased childcare needs, but in an important share of households fathers became the primary childcare providers. These distributional consequences of the pandemic may be important to understand its inequality legacy over the longer term.
    Keywords: COVID-19, gender gaps, home production
    JEL: J13 J16 J22 J31
    Date: 2020–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13762&r=all
  4. By: Kabir Dasgupta (NZ Work Research Institute, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law at AUT University); Keshar Ghimire; Alexander Plum (NZ Work Research Institute, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law at AUT University)
    Abstract: Between 1997 and 2000, all states in the United States (US) enacted the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to provide publicly funded health insurance coverage for children in low income families. However, only 15 states including the District of Columbia chose to provide coverage for children of newly arrived immigrants in their SCHIP. We exploite the resulting state and time variation in the implementation of the program in a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the effect of a publicly funded children’s health insurance benefit on immigrant women’s fertility. While estimates from full samples show that the net effect of the program was indistinguishable from zero, we find a significant positive effect on the fertility of unmarried immigrant women, both at extensive and at intensive margin. Our findings have important policy implications for societies experiencing a persistent decline in fertility.
    Keywords: State Children’s Health Insurance Program; Immigrant Fertility; Birth rate; Quantity-quality tradeoff
    JEL: I13 J13
    Date: 2020–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aut:wpaper:202009&r=all
  5. By: Guerra-Cújar, María Elvira; Prem, Mounu; Rodríguez-Lesmes, Paul; Vargas, Juan F.
    Abstract: Violent environments are known to affect household fertility choices, demand for health services and health outcomes of newborns. Using administrative data with a difference-in-differences (2011-2018 period), we study how the end of the 50 years old Colombian conflict with FARC modified such decisions and outcomes in traditionally affected areas of the country. Results indicate a reduction in fertility for municipalities traditionally affected by conflict because of the permanent ceasefire (2014). Total fertility rate observed a relative increase of 2.6% in the formerly conflict-affected areas. However, no impact was found for demand of health care services, neonatal and infant mortality rates, or birth outcomes such as the incidence of low weight at birth or the percentage of preterm births. Our evidence shows that municipalities with landmine victims and expelled population by forced displacement before the ceasefire have significantly higher total fertility rate in the four years following the ceasefire.
    Keywords: fertility; pregnancy; mortality; armed conflict; violence
    JEL: I12 I15
    Date: 2020–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rie:riecdt:64&r=all
  6. By: Julian Johnsen (Centre for Applied Research, Norwegian School of Economics); Hyejin Ku (University College London, Department of Economics and CReAM); Kjell G Salvanes (Department of Economics Norwegian School of Economics)
    Abstract: Does leave-taking matter for young workers’ careers? If so, why? We propose the competition effect—relative leave status of workers affecting their relative standing inside the firm—as a new explanation. Exploiting a policy reform that exogenously assigned four-week paid paternity leave to some new fathers, we find evidence consistent with the competition effect: A worker enjoys a better post-child earnings trajectory when a larger share of his colleagues take leave because of the policy. In contrast, we find no direct earnings effect resulting from the worker’s own leave when controlling for their relative leave eligibility status within the firm.
    Keywords: leave of absence, career interruptions, ranking, tournament, promotion, gender gap
    JEL: M51 M52 J16 J22 J24 J31
    Date: 2020–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2017&r=all
  7. By: Rajashri Chakrabarti; Lindsay Meyerson; William Nober; Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
    Abstract: Does health insurance improve health? This question, while apparently a tautology, has been the subject of considerable economic debate. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has acquired a greater urgency as the lack of universal health insurance has been cited as a cause of the profound racial gap in coronavirus cases, and as a cause of U.S. difficulties in managing the pandemic more generally. However, estimating the effect of health insurance is difficult because it is (generally) not assigned at random. In this post, we approach this question in a novel way by exploiting a natural experiment—the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion by some states but not others—to tease out the causal effect of a type of health insurance on COVID-19 intensity.
    Keywords: COVID-19; Affordable Care Act; regression discontinuity
    JEL: I18 I13
    Date: 2020–09–25
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednls:88781&r=all
  8. By: Timothy Riffe (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Enrique Acosta (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); José M. Aburto (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Ugofilippo Basellini (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Anna Altová; Simona Bignami; Didier Breton; Eungang Choi; Jorge Cimentada (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Gonzalo De Armas; Emanuele Del Fava (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Alicia Delgado; Viorela Diaconu (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Jessica Donzowa; Christian Dudel (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Antonia Fröhlich; Alain Gagnon (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Mariana Garcia Cristómo; Victor M. Garcia-Guerrero; Armando González-Díaz; Irwin Hecker; Dagnon Eric Koba; Marina Kolobova; Mine Kühn (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Chia Liu (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Andrea Lozer; Mădălina Manea; Muntasir Masum; Ryohei Mogi; Saskia Morwinsky; Ronald Musizvingoza; Mikko Myrskylä (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Marilia R. Nepomuceno (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Michelle Nickel; Natalie Nitsche (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Anna Oksuzyan (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Samuel Oladele; Emmanuel Olamijuwon; Oluwafunke Omodara; Soumaila Ouedraogo; Mariana Paredes; Marius Pascariu; Manuel Piriz; Raquel Pollero; Federico Rehermann; Filipe Ribeiro; Silvia Rizzi; Francisco Rowe; Isaac Sasson; Jiaxin Shi (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Rafael Silva-Ramirez; Cosmo Strozza (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Catalina Torres; Sergi Trias-Llimos; Fumiya Uchikoshi; Alyson A. van Raalte (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Paola Vazquez-Castillo; Estevão Vilela; Iván Williams (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Virginia Zarulli (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany)
    Abstract: COVerAGE-DB is an open access database including cumulative counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and tests by age and sex. Original data and sources are provided alongside data and measures in age-harmonized formats. The database is still in development, and at this writing, it includes 87 countries, and 195 subnational areas. Cumulative counts of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and tests are recorded daily (when possible) since January 2020. Many time series thus fully capture the first pandemic wave and the beginning of later waves. An international team, composed of more than 60 researchers, contributed to the collection of data and metadata in COVerAGE-DB from governmental institutions, as well as to the design and implementation of the data processing and validation pipeline. We encourage researchers interested in supporting this project to send a message to the email: coverage-db@demogr.mpg.de
    Keywords: World, age-sex distribution, data collection, data comparability, epidemics, infectious diseases
    JEL: J1 Z0
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2020-032&r=all

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