"The Gendered Effect of Manufacturing Decline on Infant Health: Lessons from Import Competition from China"
While the negative consequences of rising Chinese import competition on U.S. manufacturing employment and low-skilled workers are well-documented, the spillover impacts on subsequent generations remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, I examine the influence of the decline in manufacturing employment due to increased Chinese imports on infant health outcomes. Infant health at birth is strongly linked to socioeconomic status and can have long-term effects into adulthood, playing an important role in reducing economic disparities. By analyzing restricted-access birth data from 1990 to 2007 and employing a shift-share instrumental variable approach, I identify exposure to import shocks across U.S. local labor markets.
My initial analysis finds no overall effect of import shocks on infant health, despite their significant impact on manufacturing employment. However, a gender-specific analysis reveals a nuanced picture. Exposure to import shocks predominantly affecting male manufacturing employment is associated with a significant decline in average birth weight (11.9-gram reduction). Conversely, exposure to shocks primarily affecting female manufacturing employment is linked to improvements in average birth weight (10.3-gram increase). These patterns are consistent in other measures of infant health, including the incidence of low birth weight. I find no evidence that these effects are driven by changes in fertility or migration patterns. Instead, my findings align with existing research suggesting that male job loss has a significant negative impact on family income, which negatively affects child outcomes, while female labor exit can have positive effects on child health due to changes in maternal health and increased time with children. These results underscore the importance of gender-specific dynamics in shaping child health outcomes.
With Marianne Page, UC Davis. 2021-2024 June.
Assisted with recent publication of New Advances on an Old Question: Does Money Matter for Children's Outcomes? in Journal of Economic Literature, 2024
"Effects of the Introduction of Food Stamp Programs on International Mobility"
Previous research has documented the long-run economic and health benefits associated with receiving food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) in early childhood. Yet, the program's impact on intergenerational mobility, the ability of people to move from one socioeconomic positions to another across generations, remains unexplored. This paper directly investigates whether early-life access to food stamps can lead to improved economic opportunities for children in disadvantaged households.
Utilizing the restricted-version of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and leveraging the staggered roll-out of SNAP, I find mixed results. While access to food stamps has improved income mobility as measured by both intergenerational income elasticity and rank-rank slopes between children's income and parent's income (13\% from the baseline), it has worsened education mobility. However, my analysis suggests that the measures of education used may be misspecified under linear regressions and may not account for changes in education standards over time. To address these limitations, the current work is focused on employing a newly developed measure of education mobility that differentiates changes in education mobility from changes in the marginal distribution of education across generations, allowing for a more accurate estimation of the true impact of SNAP on intergenerational mobility.
"Effects of the Electronic Benefit Trasnfer (EBT) System on Infant Health Outcomes at Birth"
(with Seojung Oh and Leah Shiferaw)
"Health Effects of Stringent Work Requirement for SNAP"