Look out
Smartphones and Child Injuries
Craig Palsson
Journal of Public Economics, December 2017, Pages 200-213
Abstract:
From 2005 to 2012, injuries to children under five increased by 10%, possibly because smartphones distract caregivers from supervising children. I exploit the expansion of AT&T’s 3G network in both a difference-in-differences and a triple difference framework and find that hospitals experienced a 5% increase in emergency department visits for children ages 0–5, but none for children ages 6–10, after getting 3G. Age-specific injury patterns on playgrounds, from poisoning, and in sports further support the conclusion that smartphones distract caregivers.
Inequality in Mortality over the Life Course: Why Things Are Not as Bad as You Think
Janet Currie
Contemporary Economic Policy, January 2018, Pages 7–23
Abstract:
Recent research shows increasing inequality in mortality among middle-aged and older adults. But this is only part of the story. Inequality in mortality among young people has fallen dramatically in the United States converging to almost Canadian rates. Increases in public health insurance for U.S. children, beginning in the late 1980s, are likely to have contributed.
Death by Pokémon GO
Mara Faccio & John McConnell
Purdue University Working Paper, November 2017
Abstract:
Based on detailed police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and using the introduction of the virtual reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and associated vehicular damage, personal injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called PokéStops, where users can play the game while driving. The results are robust to using points of play, called Gyms, that cannot be used to play the game while driving as a placebo. We estimate the total incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving, including the value of the two incremental human lives lost, to be in the range of $5.2 million to $25.5 million over only the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolation of these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2 to $7.3 billion for the same period.
The Vaccination Kuznets Curve: Do Vaccination Rates Rise and Fall with Income?
Yutaro Sakai
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents a new stylized fact about the relationship between income and childhood vaccination. It shows vaccination rates first rise but then fall as income increases. This pattern is observed in WHO country-level panel data, and in US county-level panel and individual-level repeated cross-section data. This data pattern suggests that both low and high-income parents are less likely to follow the standard vaccination schedule, and that such behavior is reflected in the vaccination rate at the population level. I provide several alternative explanations as to why we observe this data pattern, including avoidance measures, medical care, and social segregation.
Some Unintended Fallout from Defense Policy: Measuring the Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns
Keith Meyers
University of Arizona Working Paper, October 2017
Abstract:
During the Cold War the United States detonated hundreds of atomic weapons at the Nevada Test Site. Many of these nuclear tests were conducted above ground and released tremendous amounts of radioactive pollution into the environment. This paper combines a novel dataset measuring annual county level fallout patterns for the continental U.S. with vital statistics records. I find that fallout from nuclear testing led to persistent and substantial increases in overall mortality for large portions of the country. The cumulative number of excess deaths attributable to these tests is comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Economic Growth and Cancer Incidence
T. Luzzati, A. Parenti & T. Rughi
Ecological Economics, April 2018, Pages 381–396
Abstract:
Why do we observe increasing rates of new cancer cases? Is the increasing burden of cancer mainly the outcome of higher life expectancy and better life conditions brought about by economic development? To what extent do environmental degradation and changes in life-styles play a relevant role? To answer these questions, we empirically assessed the relationship between per capita income and new cancer cases (incidence) by using cross-sectional data from 122 countries. We found that the incidence rate of all-sites cancer increases linearly with per capita income, even after controlling for population ageing, improvement in cancer detection, and omitted spatially correlated variables. If higher incidence rates in developed countries were merely due to those factors, and not also to life-styles and environmental degradation, we would have found a flat or even an inverted-U pattern between per capita income and cancer incidence. The regression analysis was applied also to the eight most common site-specific cancers. This confirmed the existing evidence on the different patterns in rich and poor countries, explained the pattern of the estimated relationship for aggregate cancers, and gave some other interesting insights.
The Mortality Effects of Retirement: Evidence from Social Security Eligibility at Age 62
Maria Fitzpatrick & Timothy Moore
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social Security eligibility begins at age 62, and approximately one third of Americans immediately claim at that age. We examine whether age 62 is associated with a discontinuous change in aggregate mortality, a key measure of population health. Using mortality data that covers the entire U.S. population and includes exact dates of birth and death, we document a robust two percent increase in male mortality immediately after age 62. The change in female mortality is smaller and imprecisely estimated. Additional analysis suggests that the increase in male mortality is connected to retirement from the labor force and associated lifestyle changes.
Relationship between season of birth, temperature exposure, and later life wellbeing
Adam Isen, Maya Rossin-Slater & Reed Walker
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 19 December 2017, Pages 13447-13452
Abstract:
We study how exposure to extreme temperatures in early periods of child development is related to adult economic outcomes measured 30 y later. Our analysis uses administrative earnings records for over 12 million individuals born in the United States between 1969 and 1977, linked to fine-scale, daily weather data and location and date of birth. We calculate the length of time each individual is exposed to different temperatures in utero and in early childhood, and we estimate flexible regression models that allow for nonlinearities in the relationship between temperature and long-run outcomes. We find that an extra day with mean temperatures above 32 °C in utero and in the first year after birth is associated with a 0.1% reduction in adult annual earnings at age 30. Temperature sensitivity is evident in multiple periods of early development, ranging from the first trimester of gestation to age 6–12 mo. We observe that household air-conditioning adoption, which increased dramatically over the time period studied, mitigates nearly all of the estimated temperature sensitivity.
The Determinants and Consequences of Accurate Beliefs About Childhood Vaccinations
Mark Joslyn & Steven Sylvester
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we examine the individual predictors that are responsible for accurate beliefs about the link between vaccinations and autism. We then show how these beliefs affect policy preferences about vaccines. We derive two hypotheses from motivated reasoning theory and test these on national survey data from Gallup and CBS News. Republicans were less likely to report accurate beliefs than Democrats. In addition, educational attainment modified the impact of party identification. The gap between Republicans and Democrats in likelihood of reporting accurate beliefs was largest among the most educated portion of the public. Finally, we show that accurate beliefs about vaccines, independent of statistical controls, are important predictors of policy attitudes about unvaccinated children attending public school and parental choice about the decision to vaccinate. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of these findings.
Trigger Warning: The Causal Impact of Gun Ownership on Suicide
David Vitt et al.
U.S. Naval Academy Working Paper, September 2017
Abstract:
With a growing debate over tighter firearm regulations, we consider an important social consequence of increased firearm access: increased firearm suicides. Using data from the federal criminal background check system, we consider the impact of firearm ownership of firearm suicide rates. To deal with concerns of identification, we instrument for firearm background checks with state-year level Google search intensity for phrases that reflect fear of future gun shortages and learning about the constitutional rights of firearm owners. We find that an increase in firearm ownership has a sizable and statistically significant impact on firearm suicide rates. A 10% increase in firearm ownership increases firearm suicide rates by 3.1%, which is five times larger than OLS estimates. Furthermore, we find no effect of gun ownership on non-firearm suicide rates, suggesting our findings are not simply capturing a suicide method substitution effect. The results are consistent with a variety of validity and robustness tests. Our results make clear the link between firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates, both of which have increased dramatically over the last decade.
Association of moral values with vaccine hesitancy
Avnika Amin et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, December 2017, Pages 873–880
Abstract:
Clusters of unvaccinated children are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. Existing messaging interventions demonstrate short-term success, but some may backfire and worsen vaccine hesitancy. Values-based messages appeal to core morality, which influences the attitudes individuals then have on topics like vaccination. We must understand how underlying morals, not just attitudes, differ by hesitancy type to develop interventions that work with individual values. Here, we show in two correlational studies that harm and fairness foundations are not significantly associated with vaccine hesitancy, but purity and liberty foundations are. We found that medium-hesitancy parents were twice as likely as low-hesitancy parents to highly emphasize purity (adjusted odds ratio: 2.08; 95% confidence interval: 1.27–3.40). High-hesitancy respondents were twice as likely to strongly emphasize purity (adjusted odds ratio: 2.15; 95% confidence interval: 1.39–3.31) and liberty (adjusted odds ratio: 2.19; 95% confidence interval: 1.50–3.21). Our results demonstrate that endorsement of harm and fairness — ideas often emphasized in traditional vaccine-focused messages — are not predictive of vaccine hesitancy. This, combined with significant associations of purity and liberty with hesitancy, indicates a need for inclusion of broader themes in vaccine discussions. These findings have the potential for application to other health decisions and communications as well.
Family Health Behaviors
Itzik Fadlon & Torben Heien Nielsen
NBER Working Paper, November 2017
Abstract:
This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through intra- and inter-generational family spillovers. Specifically, leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and utilization indicative of health-related behaviors. Our identification strategy relies on the timing of shocks by constructing counterfactuals to affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. We find that spouses and adult children immediately increase their health investments and improve their health behaviors in response to family shocks, and that these effects are both significant and persistent for at least several years. Notably, we find that these spillover effects in consumption of healthcare are far-reaching and cascade to siblings, stepchildren, sons and daughters in-law, and even “close” coworkers. Using different strategies we show that while a variety of mechanisms seem to be at play, including learning new information about one's own health, there is consistent evidence in support of salience as a major operative explanation, even when the family shock was likely uninformative. Our results have implications for models of health behaviors, by underscoring the importance of one's family and social network in their determination, and are potentially informative for policies that aim to improve population health.
Resource limitation prevents the emergence of drug resistance by intensifying within-host competition
Nina Wale et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Slowing the evolution of antimicrobial resistance is essential if we are to continue to successfully treat infectious diseases. Whether a drug-resistant mutant grows to high densities, and so sickens the patient and spreads to new hosts, is determined by the competitive interactions it has with drug-susceptible pathogens within the host. Competitive interactions thus represent a good target for resistance management strategies. Using an in vivo model of malaria infection, we show that limiting a resource that is disproportionately required by resistant parasites retards the evolution of drug resistance by intensifying competitive interactions between susceptible and resistant parasites. Resource limitation prevented resistance emergence regardless of whether resistant mutants arose de novo or were experimentally added before drug treatment. Our work provides proof of principle that chemotherapy paired with an “ecological” intervention can slow the evolution of resistance to antimicrobial drugs, even when resistant pathogens are present at high frequencies. It also suggests that a broad range of previously untapped compounds could be used for treating infectious diseases.
Pathways of Health and Human Capital from Adolescence into Young Adulthood
Jennifer Kane et al.
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social inequalities in health and human capital are core concerns of sociologists, but little research examines the developmental stage when such inequalities are likely to emerge — the transition to adulthood. With new data and innovative statistical methods, we conceptually develop, and empirically operationalize, pathways of physical health and human capital accumulation from adolescence into young adulthood, using an autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation model. Results reveal that pathways of health and human capital accumulate at differential rates across the transition to adulthood; evidence of cross-lagged effects lends support for both social causation and health selection hypotheses. We then apply this model to assess the presence of social inequality in metabolic syndrome — the leading risk factor of cardiovascular disease in the United States. Findings document social stratification of cardiovascular health that is robust to both observed and unobserved social and health selection mechanisms. We speculate that this social stratification will only increase as this cohort ages.
Blood Lead Levels and Dental Caries in U.S. Children Who Do Not Drink Tap Water
Anne Sanders & Gary Slade
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, forthcoming
Methods: Cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005–2014 recorded drinking water source (n=15,604) and blood lead levels (n=12,373) for participants aged 2–19 years, and dental caries experience for the 2011–2014 subset (n=5,677). The threshold for elevated blood lead level was ≥3 μg/dL. A binary outcome indicated presence or absence of dental caries experience. Multivariable generalized linear models estimated adjusted prevalence ratios with 95% confidence limits.
Results: In analysis conducted in 2017, 15% of children and adolescents did not drink tap water, 3% had elevated blood lead levels ≥3 μg/dL, and 50% had dental caries experience. Children and adolescents who did not drink water were less likely than tap water drinkers to have an elevated blood lead level (adjusted prevalence ratios=0.62, 95% confidence limits=0.42, 0.90). Nonconsumers of tap water were more likely to have dental caries (adjusted prevalence ratios=1.13, 95% confidence limits=1.03, 1.23). Results persisted after adjustment for other covariates and using a higher threshold for elevated blood lead level.
Conclusions: In this nationally representative U.S. survey, children and adolescents who did not drink tap water had lower prevalence of elevated blood lead levels and higher prevalence of dental caries than those who drank tap water.