No abstract

We estimated the short-term effects of symptoms of depression on labor market outcomes using data from the [2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009] Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. After accounting for the endogeneity of depression through a correlated random effects panel data specification, we found that exhibiting depressive symptoms reduces the likelihood of employment. We did not, however, find evidence of a causal relationship between depressive symptoms and hourly wages or weekly hours worked. Our estimates are substantially smaller than those from previous studies and imply that depressive symptoms reduce the contemporaneous probability of employment by 2.4 percentage points. In addition, we examined the effect of depression on work impairment and found that exhibiting depressive symptoms increases annual work loss days by about 1.4 days (33%), which implies that the annual aggregate productivity loses because of depression-induced absenteeism range from $900m to $1.9bn in 2009 USD.

We investigate the health impacts of unconventional natural gas development of Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania between 2001 and 2013 by merging well permit data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection with a database of all inpatient hospital admissions. After comparing changes in hospitalization rates over time for air pollution-sensitive diseases in counties with unconventional gas wells to changes in hospitalization rates in nonwell counties, we find a significant association between shale gas development and hospitalizations for pneumonia among the elderly, which is consistent with higher levels of air pollution resulting from unconventional natural gas development. We note that the lack of any detectable impact of shale gas development on younger populations may be due to unobserved factors contemporaneous with drilling, such as migration.

This paper studies the impact of the recent Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on premiums in the health insurance marketplaces. Exploiting the late adoption of the Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania and Indiana in 2015, I use both difference-indifferences and the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of the Medicaid expansion on marketplace premiums. The preferred estimates indicate that Medicaid expansion is associated with statistically significant lower premiums for gold plans (17 percent) and the secondlowest-priced silver plans (25 percent). I also find evidence that Medicaid expansion decreases average premiums for other silver and bronze plans by about 16 and 13 percent, respectively. Overall, these findings are consistent with lower expected medical cost after Medicaid expansion removed certain low-income individuals from the marketplace risk pools.

This paper represents the views of the authors, and no official endorsement by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality or the Department of Health and Human Services is intended or should be inferred, nor do the contents necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.