"Legal Origins and Female HIV "

ABSTRACT

More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formally colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to Civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In Sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safer sex and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the ‘feminization of AIDS’) explaining much of its prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa.

"To Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not at All? How Disability Benefits Affect The Employment Decisions of Older Veterans "

ABSTRACT
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program provides disability benefits to nearly one in five military veterans in the US and its annual expenditures exceed $60 billion. We examine how the receipt of DC benefits affects the employment decisions of older veterans. We make use of variation in program eligibility resulting from a 2001 policy change that increased access to the program for Vietnam veterans who served with “boots on the ground” in the Vietnam theater but not for other veterans of that same era. We find that the policy-induced increase in program enrollment decreased labor force participation and induced a substantially larger switch from wage employment to self-employment. This latter finding suggests that an exogenous increase in income spurred many older veterans to start their own businesses. Additionally, we estimate that one in four veterans who entered the DC program due to this policy change left the labor force, estimates in the same range as those from recent studies of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program.

"Early-Life Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Prevalence, Impacts over the Life Cycle and Determinants"

ABSTRACT

Early-life undernourishment is a widespread phenomenon in many developing countries, with an estimated 170 million children under 5 years of age stunted, the standard indicator of chronic malnutrition. This presentation summarizes an ongoing work program on this topic, with reference to the prevalence, impacts and determinants of such undernutrition.

"Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men"

ABSTRACT
For forty years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study's methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical community. We find that the historical disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men.

"Refund Anticipation Products and the Improper Payment of the EITC."

"Reservation Employer Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Data Set"

Abstract: The presence of employers and jobs on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. We are the first to geocode confidential data on employer establishments from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to identify location on or off American Indian reservations. We identify the per-capita establishment count and jobs in reservation-based employer establishments for most federally recognized reservations. Comparisons to nearby non-reservation areas in the lower 48 states across 18 industries, reveal that reservations have a similar sectoral distribution of employer establishments but have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000 (as it is on the vast majority of reservations and for the majority of the reservation population). By contrast, total jobs provided by reservation establishments are, on average, at par with or somewhat higher than in nearby county areas but are concentrated among casino-related and government employers. An implication is that average employment per establishment are higher in these sectors on reservations, including those with populations below 15,000, while the rest of the economy is sparser in reservations (in firm count and jobs per capita) Geographic and demographic factors such as population density and per capita income statistically account for some but not all of these differences.