Upjohn Research
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Causal Effects of Schooling on Memory at Older Ages in Six Low-and-Middle-Income Countries: Nonparametric Evidence with Harmonized Datasets
Full text linkHigher schooling attainment is associated with better cognitive function at older ages, but it remains unclear whether the relationship is causal. We estimate causal effects of schooling on performances on the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease (CERAD) word-recall (memory) test at older ages in China, Ghana, India, Mexico, Russia, and South Africa. We used harmonized data (n=30,896) on older adults (≥50 years) from the World Health Organization Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health. We applied an established nonparametric partialidentification approach that bounds causal effects of increasing schooling attainment at different parts of the schooling distributions under relatively weak assumptions. We find that an additional year of schooling, moving from none into primary school, increased word-recall scores by between 0.01–0.13 standard deviations (SDs) in China, 0.01–0.06SDs in Ghana, 0.02–0.09SDs in India, 0.02–0.12SDs in Mexico, and 0–0.07SDs in South Africa. No results were obtained for Russia at this margin due to the low proportion of older adults with primary schooling or lower. At higher parts of the schooling distributions (e.g., high-school or university completion) the bounds cannot statistically reject null effects. Our results indicate that increasing schooling from never attended to primary had long-lasting effects on memory decades later in life for older adults in five diverse low-and-middle-income countries
The Parenthood Gap: Firms and Earnings Inequality after Kids
Full text linkWe document the dynamics of career paths around parenthood, capturing worker advancement within firms and across firms with differing pay rates. Using a new linkage between administrative data on U.S. workers’ fertility and labor market histories, we show that the parental earnings gap is partly explained by mothers transitioning to lower-paying firms. Firm downgrading is driven by parents who take an extended absence from the labor force. Mothers who move to lower-paying firms see improved job amenities but less generous fringe benefits. The firm’s contribution to the parental earnings gap rises over time and reaches one-third by the child’s 11th birthday
The Distributional Effects of Firm Demand Changes: Evidence from U.S. Linked Worker-Owner Data
No full textThis project analyzes the distributional incidence of firm-level demand shocks using novel U.S. administrative data linking firms, workers, and owners. We use export demand variation and value-added innovations as quasi-experimental firm demand shocks. Our preliminary analysis shows that the incidence of these shocks—that is, which individuals benefit or lose when demand changes—is highly skewed. Individuals in the top 1% of the income distribution receive 30-60% of incidence, while those in the bottom 50% receive less than 15%. The reason for this unequal distribution is that firm owners bear most of the incidence and are frequently in the top of the distribution. However, the incidence is asymmetric for positive versus negative demand changes. While workers receive a small share of the benefits of positive firm shocks, they bear a larger share of the losses from negative shocks. These findings suggest that the incidence of several firm-level government policies is highly unequal. Additionally, the asymmetry result presents a puzzle for standard models of rent-sharing and firm insurance, which predict symmetric responses to positive and negative demand changes
