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  5. Economics of Inequality
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Economics of Inequality

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)

Hosted By: American Economic Association & Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession
  • Chair: Susan Athey, Stanford University

Estimating the Impacts of Obstetric Care on Maternal and Child Health Using Obstetric Unit Closures in the United States

Stefanie Fischer
,
Monash University, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, and IZA
Heather N. Royer
,
University of California-Santa Barbara, IZA and NBER
Corey White
,
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, and IZA

Abstract

The quality and quantity of obstetric care is a potentially important input into the production of maternal and child health. Over the past three decades, there has been a widespread and steady decline in the number of hospital-based obstetric units in the rural United States. These obstetric unit closures have generated substantial increases in the costs of seeking obstetric care for women residing in the affected regions. These closures have been particularly prevalent in rural areas. Between 1990 and 201, 435 US counties lost their only obstetric care unit. In this paper, we estimate how closures of hospital-based obstetric units affect maternal and child health outcomes for women residing in rural areas.Hospital-based obstetric units often provide other services as well, including prenatal care. Due to the range of services provided by hospital-based obstetric units, it is possible that having access to this type of care is important both prior to birth and at the time of delivery.Consistent with the fact that hospitals provide prenatal services, we find that obstetric unit closures lead to substantial decreases in the number of prenatal care visits. We find that closures lead to a significant decrease in gestational length and a marginally significant decrease in birth weight, which is likely due to the decrease in prenatal care. We find that conditions at the time of delivery are potentially important for maternal and child health. In particular, we find that rural women who are exposed to an obstetric unit closure are more likely to give birth in higher quality (urban) hospitals. Overall, we find no evidence that closures are associated with the most extreme maternal and child health outcomes: infant and maternal mortality.

Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action

Michèle Muller-Itten
,
University of Notre Dame
Aniko Oery
,
Yale University

Abstract

We study the workforce composition that emerges when same-group mentoring lowers education costs. Our continuous-time overlapping-generations model considers a majority and a minority group of identically distributed talent. Under sufficiently decreasing returns to mentoring, and in high-skill sectors, a patient social planner enforces an over-representation of minority workers relative to their population share. Such a composition never arises endogenously as a steady state, and thus requires persistent government intervention. As such, the surplus-maximizing policy goes beyond fairness objectives and qualitatively differs from leading models of workforce imbalance, with implications for the ``glass ceiling effect'' and the design of affirmative action.

The Impact of Automation and Inequality across Europe

Mary Kaltenberg
,
Pace University
Neil Foster-McGregor
,
Maastricht University

Abstract

Existing research suggests that automation has the potential to impact inequality through two channels, either by changing the relative wage returns for different sets of tasks or by changing the composition of employment. This paper measures the relative importance of these two channels for a sample of European countries by decomposing the effects of a set of characteristics along these two dimensions using the structure of earnings survey (SES) and data for 2002 and 2014 Firpo et al. (2018). The approach isolates changes in the earnings distribution to identify the component that is due to changes in composition and to changes in the wage structure. We find that the overall contribution of the risk of automation on inequality effects only a few countries. However, when decomposing these effects, the composition effect explains a large part of automation related inequality, while there is a wage effect in some countries, the effect is not nearly as large. These results confirm that the way in which technology is increasing inequality is largely due to the fact that there is a growing wage dispersion between jobs that are resilient to automation and those that are not.
Discussant(s)
Maya Rossin-Slater
,
Stanford University
Susan Athey
,
Stanford University
David Deming
,
Harvard University
JEL Classifications
  • J3 - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
  • J7 - Labor Discrimination