Children Mirror Adults for the Worse: Evidence of Suicide Rates due to Air Pollution and Recessions

[Background] Every year, more than 700,000 die due to suicide, one of the most common reasons for youth death. While many studies have revealed two main factors for suicidal behavior: impulsive suicidal behavior due to mental illness and financial stress, it is not clear what happens if individuals face deterioration of mental health and economic recession. This paper attempts to answer this question and how suicide rates are correlated with these factors.[Methods] We empirically investigate whether economic recessions and air pollution trigger suicides by examining Japan, a country with one of the highest suicide rates, from 2014 to 2021. We take advantage of the characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the periods before the pandemic when both economic recessions and reductions in air pollution occurred simultaneously. Using monthly and municipal-level data, we construct a triple difference model that takes air pollution and unemployment as treatments.[Results] Our findings show that high levels of air pollution and unemployment have substantial impacts on the suicide rates of adults (22.9% in the short term) and children (42.7% in the short term, 36.0% in the long term), indicating that the increase in suicide rates among children is almost twice as high as that among adults. Our study finds that unemployment and air pollution alone are not associated with increased suicide rates but their simultaneous occurrence triggers suicides.[Conclusions] Our study urges suicide prevention, particularly among children, as an essential consideration for public health. Furthermore, our results indicate the need for the government to allocate resources to recover air quality and the economy simultaneously during a recession to reduce suicide mortality.

Measuring business-level expectations and uncertainty: survey evidence and the COVID-19 pandemic

Utilizing a unique firm-level survey in Japan that contains five-bin forecasts for sales, we document three findings. First, firm-level subjective uncertainty is highly and positively related to volatility of past firm growth. Second, there are substantial variations in subjective uncertainty across firms, with a long right tail with extremely high subjective uncertainty. In addition, firms that have exposure to international businesses either through international trade or foreign direct investment have both higher average expected sales and subjective uncertainty. Finally, the sudden escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic in January–February 2020 led to a substantial increase in firms’ subjective uncertainty. Our triple-difference estimation results show that this effect is especially large for firms that have direct exposure to China through international trade and foreign direct investment.

Skills for the Future? A Life Cycle Perspective on Systems of Vocational Education and Training

In this article, the authors ask how the institutional design of vocational education and training (VET) affects worker adaptability to changing skill demands over the life cycle. They compare two types of VET systems. Collectivist systems have high employer involvement and focus on specific skills, whereas Statist systems have lower employer involvement and focus more on general skills. Based on prior research demonstrating the importance of general skills in learning new skills, the authors hypothesize that worker adaptability will be higher in Statist VET systems than in Collectivist VET systems. Using a triple-difference model on data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, they find that as age increases, a significantly steeper decline in worker adaptability occurs within Collectivist systems compared to Statist systems. Results provide an explanation behind the diminishing employment returns to employer-dominated VET systems found in prior studies.

Air Pollution Control: An Analysis of China’s Industrial Off-Peak Production Policy through the Quasi-Natural Experiment Method

To reduce frequent heavy air pollution, the Chinese government suspends clinker production during the heating season in most areas of the North, which is known as the Clinker Off-peak Production Policy. The questions regarding such a repressive production policy for environmental purposes are whether this policy is effective in reducing pollutants and whether the marginal cost is high. To explore these policy effects, a quasi-experiment is designed, taking advantage of spatial-temporal variations in policy implementation. With the triple-difference method and environmental satellite data, the effect on air pollution is estimated to be −1900 μg/m2 (~2%) of SO2 and −3200 μg/m2 (~10%) of NO2. With daily price information and the difference-in-differences method, the market effect is estimated to be an approximately 10% increase in annual sale prices. The marginal cost estimated through a back-of-the-envelope analysis is 32 k RMB yuan/ton SO2 or NO2, which is 24.88 times the pollutant discharge fee but which better reflects the pollutant shadow price.

Does Affirmative Action Work? Evaluating India’s Quota System

This paper examines two common critiques of ethnic quota policies in government hiring and education: that they do not benefit the target group, and that any benefits are unevenly distributed within the target group. It focuses on the effects of educational and hiring quotas for Other Backward Class (OBC) castes in India, using difference-in-difference and triple difference designs that take advantage of the gradual introduction of these quotas. The results provide little support for these critiques: affirmative action is associated with small increases in educational attainment and government employment among eligible age cohorts, though the increases in government employment may be a result of other social and political trends. These benefits extend even to poorer OBCs (though not the very poorest), and increase the chances of social contact between uneducated OBCs and government officials.

Natural Disasters and Birth Rate: Evidence from the 2010 Chilean Earthquake

A major natural disaster can generate changes in the affected population’s behavior. As Chile is considered one of the countries with the highest seismic activity and has experienced several of the most intense earthquakes on record in the world, this work seeks to identify behavioral changes in the birth rate within an affected population related to a natural disaster in Chile. Based on evidence from the 2010 Chilean earthquake, an empirical study was carried out drawing on birth rate data and social data associated with earthquakes in Chile between 2004 and 2015. Two models were estimated. The first model is a difference-in-differences model for determining the effect of the disaster on the birth rate in the affected area in the post-disaster period. The second model is a triple-difference model that includes the trend of the data over time. The results indicate a positive relationship between the variation in the birth rate and the occurrence of the natural disaster. Studying the relationship between disaster events and fertility contributes to understanding the phenomena of social dynamics. This knowledge could improve public policy decision making for better planning in the face of a natural disaster.

Heightened immigration enforcement impacts US citizens’ birth outcomes: Evidence from early ICE interventions in North Carolina

We examine how increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities impacted newborn health and prenatal care utilization in North Carolina around the time Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act was first being implemented within the state. Focusing on administrative data between 2004 and 2006, we conduct difference-in-differences and triple-difference case-control regression analysis. Pregnancies were classified by levels of potential exposure to immigration enforcement depending on parental nativity and educational attainment. Contrast groups were foreign-born parents residing in nonadopting counties and all US-born non-Hispanic parents. The introduction of the program was estimated to decrease birth weight by 58.54 grams (95% confidence interval [CI], −83.52 to −33.54) with effects likely following from reduced intrauterine growth. These results are shown to coexist with a worsening in the timing of initiation and frequency of prenatal care received. Since birth outcomes influence health, education, and earnings trajectories, our findings suggest that the uptick in ICE activities can have large socioeconomic costs over US-born citizens.

The effects of paid family leave on food insecurity—evidence from California

This study examines the relationship between the 2004 introduction of California’s paid family leave (PFL) program on food security. While previous work has shown that PFL laws affect employment, poverty and health, there is no evidence so far whether such policies affect food security levels of families after the birth of a child. Estimating difference-in-differences (DD) and triple difference (DDD) models, this is the first study to evaluate potential effects on food security, which could be a potential mechanism explaining improvements in health outcomes for both infants and mothers found in previous studies. My analysis shows that California’s PFL implementation reduced the incidence of very low household food security by 2.29 (DD) and 1.98 percentage points (DDD) in the year following a birth. I find that the effects are driven improvements in food security among children who are 1.41 percentage points less likely to be food insecure after the PFL introduction. Subgroup analysis shows that the effects are largest for low-income households, a group that has been shown to highly value PFL benefits, as well as for families with more than one child.

It’s a Party in the MLB: An Analysis of Shirking Between Games in Major League Baseball

This paper uses game-level Major League Baseball data to identify whether players with greater job security shirk in their preparation between games. Past work has identified evidence of moral hazard arising in multiyear Major League Baseball player contracts, but little work has been done in identifying when shirking takes place. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, this study finds evidence of an inverse relationship between the number of years remaining on player contracts and performance when the player is playing on short rest, when opportunity to rest is scarce, but not on long rest. Using a triple-difference specification, evidence is found that this inverse relationship between years remaining on a player’s contract when playing on short rest occurs for games played in “party cities.” This evidence would suggest that between game preparation is one avenue through which players on multiyear contracts shirk.

The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on School Engagement: Evidence From 287(g) Programs in North Carolina

During the past 15 years, immigration enforcement increased dramatically in the U.S. interior. There is a growing recognition that immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior has spillover effects onto U.S. citizens. I examine the impacts of a type of partnership between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement, 287(g) programs, on school engagement within North Carolina. In North Carolina, nine counties were approved to establish 287(g) programs, and another 15 applied but were not approved to participate. I use a triple difference strategy in which I compare educational outcomes for different groups of students in these two sets of counties before and after activation of 287(g) programs between 2003/2004 and 2012/2013. I find that 287(g) programs decrease school engagement by decreasing attendance. This effect appears to be driven by increabes in chronic absenteeism (missing 15 or more days per year).