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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Jesús Bueren (European University Institute); Josep Pijoan-Mas (CEMFI, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros); Dante Amengual (CEMFI, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of lifestyles on the education gradient of life expectancy. We use panel data on health behavior and health outcomes to estimate latent lifestyle types and their impact on health dynamics. We find that the higher frequency of health-protective lifestyles among the more educated individuals explains almost 1/2 of the education gradient in life expectancy. To understand lifestyle formation, we build a life cycle model where lifestyles and education are jointly chosen early in life. These two investments are complementary because of the more educated’s higher income and the higher yield of their health-protective behavior. Importantly, with these complementarities, individuals with lower costs of healthier lifestyles self-select into higher education. Quantitatively, we find the three mechanisms similarly important in explaining the correlation between education and healthy lifestyles. We also find that the increase in the college wage premium over the last decades has widened the education gradient in lifestyles, resulting in a one-year increase in the education gradient of life expectancy across cohorts born in the 1930s and 1970s. Of this increase, 40% is driven by the direct effect of wage changes and 60% by the induced changes in the composition of college graduates and high school dropouts. |
| Keywords: | Health inequality, healthy lifestyles, education, latent types. |
| JEL: | E21 D15 I12 I14 I24 C38 |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2025_2526 |
| By: | Stuhler, Jan (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid); Dustmann, Christian (University College London); Otten, Sebastian (RWI); Schönberg, Uta (University College London) |
| Abstract: | Most studies on the labor market effects of immigration use repeated cross-sectional data to estimate the effects of immigration on regions. This paper shows that such regional effects are composites of effects that address fundamental questions in the immigration debate but remain unidentified with repeated cross-sectional data. We provide a unifying empirical framework that decomposes the regional effects of immigration into their underlying components and show how these are identifiable from data that track workers over time. Our empirical application illustrates that such analysis yields a far more informative picture of immigration’s effects on wages, employment, and occupational upgrading. |
| Keywords: | elasticity, upgrading, employment effects, wage effects, immigration, selection, identification |
| JEL: | J21 J23 J31 J61 R23 |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18229 |
| By: | Daniel Borbely (Department of Economics, Queen’s University Belfast,); Markus Gehrsitz (Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow); Stuart McIntyre (Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn); Gennaro Rossi (Department of Economics, University of Reading) |
| Abstract: | School closures occur regularly, driven by declining school performance, depopulation, school buildings not meeting safety regulations, and a range of other factors. This has given rise to a large literature examining the effect of school closures on educational outcomes, but only a limited literature on the effect of these closures on local crime rates. In this paper we study the effects of permanent school closures on crime. We leverage the closure of over 200 schools in Scotland between the school years 2006/07 and 2018/19, and employ a staggered difference-in-differences design. Our results show that neighbourhoods affected by school closures experience a reduction in crime of about 10% of a standard deviation, relative to areas where schools remained open. This effect is mainly driven by a reduction in vandalism and property crimes. We provide evidence on several mechanisms explaining the negative crime effect, such as changes in neighbourhood composition and displacement of crime-prone youth. |
| Keywords: | crime, school closures, neighbourhoods |
| JEL: | I38 R20 K42 |
| Date: | 2025–11–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2025-06 |
| By: | John Komlos |
| Abstract: | The U.S. healthcare and food-provisioning systems have failed to create an environment in which the human biological organism can flourish. Consequently, key health outcomes, most notably life expectancy, have consistently lagged those of other high-income populations since the Reagan era, coinciding with the adoption of economic policies that increased inequality and precarity across the population. We estimate the trends in physical stature, another omnibus indicator of a population’s biological well-being that reflects not only nutritional intake, inequality, and stress experienced by the population, but also the overall health environment—using a sample of 44, 322 adults from the NHANES surveys, stratified by gender and three ethnic groups. We find that the height of Americans began to decline among those born around or before the early 1980s in parallel with the diminution in the rate of increase of life expectancy. The decline in adult height ranged from 0·68 ± 0.36 cm among white women to 1·97 ± 0.50 cm among Hispanic men and is statistically significant across all six demographic groups considered. This decline in heights serves as corroborating evidence that the U.S.’s laissez-faire approach to healthcare and food provisioning delivers suboptimal population health outcomes. Public health priorities urgently need to be refocused. |
| Keywords: | healthcare, survey data, life expectancy |
| JEL: | I14 I18 N32 D31 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12207 |
| By: | Derenoncourt, Ellora (Princeton University); Gerard, Francois (Queen Mary, University of London); Lagos, Lorenzo (Brown University); Montialoux, Claire (UC Berkeley) |
| Abstract: | How do minimum wages affect informality? We study the near-doubling of the real minimum wage from 2000 to 2009 in Brazil, where 46% of the workforce is informal. Using labor force surveys covering the informal sector, we show the minimum wage exhibits near full passthrough to informal employees working in formal firms, about half of all informal employees. The formal-to-informal reallocation elasticity with respect to the formal wage is small: -0.28. Our findings illustrate how minimum wages can positively affect living standards for workers thought beyond the reach of labor law, a sizable share of the workforce in developing economies. |
| Keywords: | informality, minimum wages, inequality |
| JEL: | J23 J46 J88 |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18234 |
| By: | Mariia Vasiakina (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Christian Dudel (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | The ongoing economic transformation driven by automation has significant social implications, particularly for the health and well-being of workers who face the risk of job displacement and the pressure to acquire new skills and qualifications. However, the specific pathways through which exposure to automation risk affects health outcomes remain poorly understood, and the relative contribution of each potential mechanism is still unclear. In this study, we examine the nature of the relationship between high workplace exposure to automation risk and a range of subjective health outcomes – including self-reported health, anxiety, and both physical and mental component summary scores from the SF-12 Health Survey – among workers in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) linked with administrative records from the Occupational Panel for Germany (2014–2022), we apply the Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) mediation analysis method to assess whether broader indicators of economic uncertainty, alongside automation-specific factors, mediate the relationship between high automation risk and workers’ health. Our results indicate that the negative impact of high automation risk on health in Germany primarily operates through indirect pathways (related to mediators) for both genders, with the exception of physical health among male workers, where a direct negative effect is also evident. Economic concerns – particularly job insecurity and worries about one’s future financial situation – emerge as more significant mediators than automation-specific factors. Overall, our findings suggest that the mechanisms linking high automation risk to health are gender- and context-sensitive, and are shaped by broader economic conditions and workplace environments. |
| Keywords: | Germany, automation, health, risk exposure, technological change |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2025-032 |