John Bound

Reported increases in US maternal mortality rates and entrenched Black/White rate inequity are alarming. We analyze rigorously collected US Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System data to describe pregnancy-related mortality ratios (PRMR) levels and trends, 2000-2019. Conceptually guided by the weathering framework, we hypothesize that the increasing maternal age distribution of births contributed to PRMR increases. Stratifying on maternal age, race, educational level, and cause of death, we find US PRMR inequities persist, yet actual PRMR increases do not apply uniformly. White women with no more than a high school education averaged a 3.61% increase per year, implying a 92% increase over the period, with little growth observed among the more educated. Less-educated Black women exhibited a small proportional increase (9% over the study period). PRMRs for Black women at higher educational levels declined by over 1% per year, still remaining in excess of White rates. Simulations suggest that the shift in the maternal age distribution contributed a small amount to White PRMR increases. It would have increased PRMRs overall for Black mothers by just over 1% per year, suggesting that if the maternal age distribution had not shifted upward, the overall Black/White PRMR inequity would have decreased.

Background: The nature and timing of increasing educational inequity in US life expectancy before the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic suggest that long-term adverse labor market conditions secondary to globalization and technological change played a role for less-educated workers, but this has not been tested. Methods: We exploit spatiotemporal variation in mortality and long-term economic conditions at the year and commuting zone level to estimate the relationship between macroeconomic restructuring and diverging mortality trends, 1990–2017, by race, sex, and education. Our measure of macroeconomic restructuring is based on the baseline industrial mix of an area, a measure that is plausibly exogenous to mortality. Results: Mortality trends were substantially worse in commuting zones experiencing long-term economic stagnation than in others. For both White and Black adults, this relationship was strongest in the lowest quartile of the education distribution. Residence in commuting zones in the top quartile of our measure of economic conditions was associated with an additional 1–2 years lived between ages 25 and 84 compared with living in a commuting zone in the bottom quartile. The primary mediators of these divergent mortality trends were cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and diseases of other internal body systems. Deaths from suicide or substance abuse did not contribute importantly toward accounting for the estimated impact of long-term economic stagnation on mortality. Conclusion: In our study, diverging trends in US life expectancy were associated with macroeconomic changes witnessed over the last half-century. The causes of death mediating this link were largely found in rates of death from stress-related internal diseases.

The number of international undergraduate students at US public research universities increased dramatically over the past two decades, alongside concurrent reductions in state support for universities. We show that these trends are closely connected as public research universities relied on foreign students to cushion the effects of falling appropriations. The growing capacity in emerging economies to pay for a US education provided opportunities for universities to recover revenues from full-fare-paying foreign students. We estimate that between 1996 and 2012, a 10 percent reduction in state appropriations led to an increase in foreign enrollment of 16 percent at public research universities. (JEL H75, I22, I23)

Over the past few decades, public universities have faced significant declines in state funding per student. We investigate whether these declines affected the educational and research outcomes of these schools. Declining funding induced public universities to shift toward tuition as their primary source of revenue. Selective research universities enrolled more out-of-state and international students who pay full fare and increased in-state tuitions, moderating impacts on expenditures. Public universities outside the research sector had fewer options to replace stagnating state appropriations, requiring diminished expenditures and increased in-state tuitions. We find suggestive evidence that cuts have negatively affected research, and more definitive evidence that they adversely affected degree attainment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Over the past few decades, public universities have faced significant declines in state funding per student. We investigate whether these declines affected the educational and research outcomes of these schools. We present evidence that declining funding induced public universities to shift toward tuition as their primary source of revenue. Selective research universities enrolled more out-of-state and international students who pay full fare and increased in-state tuitions, moderating impacts on expenditures. Public universities outside the research sector had fewer options to replace stagnating state appropriations, requiring diminished expenditures and increased in-state tuitions. The evidence we present suggests that the cuts negatively affected degree attainment at the undergraduate and graduate levels. While the evidence on research is mixed, there are indications that the impact of spending declines on research outcomes may become evident over a longer time period

Over the last half century, US wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor-force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined. In this article, we examine these worrying labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without a college education. Though wages and participation have fallen in tandem for this population, we argue that the canonical neoclassical framework, which postulates a labor demand curve shifting inward across a stable labor supply curve, does not reasonably explain the data. Alternatives we discuss include adjustment frictions associated with labor demand shocks and effects of the changing marriage market—that is, the fact that fewer less-educated men are forming their own stable families—on male labor supply incentives. In the synthesis that emerges, the phenomenon of declining prime-age male labor-force participation is not coherently explained by a series of causal factors acting separately. A more reasonable interpretation, we argue, involves complex feedbacks between labor demand, family structure, and other factors that have disproportionately affected less-educated men.

The pool of students in the global economy prepared for higher education and able to pay tuition at U.S. colleges and universities has expanded markedly in the last two decades, with a particularly notable increase among potential undergraduate students from China. Given the concentration of high quality colleges and universities in the U.S., there has been a substantial increase in the demand for enrollment among students from abroad. At the same time, substantial declines in state support, driven by contractions in state budgets, have occurred at public sector universities. For such universities, declines in state appropriations force a choice between increasing tuition levels, cutting expenditures, or enrolling a greater proportion of students paying full out-of-state tuition. In this paper we present evidence showing that a significant set of public universities were able to take advantage of the expanding pool of potential students from abroad to provide a stream of tuition revenue that partially offsets declining state appropriations. Our analysis focuses on the interaction between the type of university experience demanded by students from abroad and the supply-side of the U.S. market. For the period between 1996 and 2012, we estimate that a 10% reduction in state appropriations is associated with an increase in foreign enrollment of 12% at public research universities and about 17% at the most resourceintensive public universities. Our results tell a compelling story about the link between changes in state funding and foreign enrollment in recent years. In the absence of the pool of foreign students, many universities would have faced larger cuts to expenditures and potentially greater increases in in-state tuition charges.

We present and calibrate a dynamic model that characterizes the labor market for computer scientists. In our model, firms can recruit computer scientists from recently graduated college students, f...

Over the last 25 years, the Social Security Disability Insurance Program (DI) has grown dramatically. During the same period, employment rates for men with work limitations showed substantial declines in both absolute and relative terms. While the timing of these trends suggests that the expansion of DI was a major contributor to employment decline among this group, raising questions about the targeting of disability benefits, studies using denied applicants suggest a more modest role of the DI expansion. To reconcile these findings, we decompose total employment changes into population and employment changes for three categories: DI beneficiaries, denied applicants, and non-applicants. Our results show that during the early 1990s, the growth in DI can fully explain the employment decline for men only under an extreme assumption about the employment potential of beneficiaries. For the period after the mid-1990s, we find little role for the DI program in explaining the continuing employment decline for men with work limitations. I3, J2

While increased life expectancy in the U.S. has been used as justification for raising the Social Security retirement ages, independent researchers have reporte