Melissa S Kearney
Biographic Data
| ID | 1903373 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa S Kearney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa S |
| FAMILY NAME | Kearney |
| SIGNATURE | KEARNEY M S |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8542-1290 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The US Covid-19 baby bust and rebound
The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession
This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including teens, Hispanic women, and college-educated white women. The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, …
How economic inequality shapes mobility expectations and behaviour in disadvantaged youth
Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility
We investigate whether an increase in the potential earnings of men leads to an increase in marriage and a reduction in nonmarital births by exploiting the positive economic shock associated with fracking in the 2000s. A reduced-form analysis reveals that in response to local-area fracking production, which increased wages and jobs for non-college-educated men, both marital and nonmarital birth rates increase, but marriage rates do not. The patte…
The Supplemental Security Income Program
In general, our examination suggests that in the absence of a universal guaranteed income program for all Americans, the operational flexibility of the categorical eligibility criteria for SSI has made the program sensitive to both downturns in the business cycle and to increases in the pool of vulnerable people. Moreover, when the dividing lines separating the working-age adult and child populations eligible for SSI from those eligible for other…
Media Influences on Social Outcomes
This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. Our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show. We implement an instrumental variables (IV ) strategy using local area MTV ratings data from a pre-period to predict local area 16 and Pregnant ratings. The results imply that this show led to a 4.3 percent redu…
The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program
The SSI program provides cash assistance to some of the nation's most vulnerable elderly, blind, and disabled residents. In this paper, we briefly summarize the history of the SSI program and present descriptive evidence on caseload composition and trends. We discuss relevant conceptual issues and empirical evidence focused on four key issues. First, we describe the advantages and disadvantages of categorical eligibility requirements and we show …
House prices and birth rates
Product Recalls, Imperfect Information, and Spillover Effects
In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 212 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizable increase from previous years. We investigate changes in toy sales following these recalls. We find that for manufacturers that had recalls, unit sales of the types of toys involved in the recall fell relative to their sales of toys in other categories. We do not find evidence of within-manufacturer spillovers to dissimilar toys. We …
Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter
Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire-and 15…
Subsidized Contraception, Fertility, and Sexual Behavior
We examine the impact of recent state-level Medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher-income women and to Medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise. We show that the income-based policy change reduced overall births to non-teens by about 2% and to teens by over 4%; estimates suggest a decline of 9% among newly eligible women. The reduction in fertility appears to have been accomplished v…
Award given by the Vernon Prize Committee for Volume 26 of JPAM
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality
A recent “revisionist” literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an “episodic” event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Surv…
Parental Education and Parental Time with Children
This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers wit…
The impact of child SSI enrollment on household outcomes
We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate the impact that child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) enrollment has on household outcomes, including poverty, household earnings, and health insurance coverage. The longitudinal nature of the SIPP allows us to control for unobserved, time‐invariant differences across households by measuring outcomes in the same household in the months leading up to and immed…
The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market
This paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the U.S. wage structure over the past fifteen years: divergent trends in upper-tail (90/50) and lower-tail (50/10) wage inequality. We document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years (since 1980). Wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987, but it has …
Parental Education and Parental Time with Children
This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers wit…
Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter
Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire-and 15…
The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession
This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including teens, Hispanic women, and college-educated white women. The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, …
How economic inequality shapes mobility expectations and behaviour in disadvantaged youth
The impact of child SSI enrollment on household outcomes
We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate the impact that child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) enrollment has on household outcomes, including poverty, household earnings, and health insurance coverage. The longitudinal nature of the SIPP allows us to control for unobserved, time‐invariant differences across households by measuring outcomes in the same household in the months leading up to and immed…
The US Covid-19 baby bust and rebound
The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market
This paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the U.S. wage structure over the past fifteen years: divergent trends in upper-tail (90/50) and lower-tail (50/10) wage inequality. We document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years (since 1980). Wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987, but it has …
The impact of child SSI enrollment on household outcomes
We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate the impact that child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) enrollment has on household outcomes, including poverty, household earnings, and health insurance coverage. The longitudinal nature of the SIPP allows us to control for unobserved, time‐invariant differences across households by measuring outcomes in the same household in the months leading up to and immed…
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality
A recent “revisionist” literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an “episodic” event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Surv…
Parental Education and Parental Time with Children
This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers wit…
Subsidized Contraception, Fertility, and Sexual Behavior
We examine the impact of recent state-level Medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher-income women and to Medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise. We show that the income-based policy change reduced overall births to non-teens by about 2% and to teens by over 4%; estimates suggest a decline of 9% among newly eligible women. The reduction in fertility appears to have been accomplished v…
Award given by the Vernon Prize Committee for Volume 26 of JPAM
Product Recalls, Imperfect Information, and Spillover Effects
In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 212 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizable increase from previous years. We investigate changes in toy sales following these recalls. We find that for manufacturers that had recalls, unit sales of the types of toys involved in the recall fell relative to their sales of toys in other categories. We do not find evidence of within-manufacturer spillovers to dissimilar toys. We …
Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter
Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire-and 15…
House prices and birth rates
Media Influences on Social Outcomes
This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. Our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show. We implement an instrumental variables (IV ) strategy using local area MTV ratings data from a pre-period to predict local area 16 and Pregnant ratings. The results imply that this show led to a 4.3 percent redu…
The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program
The SSI program provides cash assistance to some of the nation's most vulnerable elderly, blind, and disabled residents. In this paper, we briefly summarize the history of the SSI program and present descriptive evidence on caseload composition and trends. We discuss relevant conceptual issues and empirical evidence focused on four key issues. First, we describe the advantages and disadvantages of categorical eligibility requirements and we show …
The Supplemental Security Income Program
In general, our examination suggests that in the absence of a universal guaranteed income program for all Americans, the operational flexibility of the categorical eligibility criteria for SSI has made the program sensitive to both downturns in the business cycle and to increases in the pool of vulnerable people. Moreover, when the dividing lines separating the working-age adult and child populations eligible for SSI from those eligible for other…
Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility
We investigate whether an increase in the potential earnings of men leads to an increase in marriage and a reduction in nonmarital births by exploiting the positive economic shock associated with fracking in the 2000s. A reduced-form analysis reveals that in response to local-area fracking production, which increased wages and jobs for non-college-educated men, both marital and nonmarital birth rates increase, but marriage rates do not. The patte…
How economic inequality shapes mobility expectations and behaviour in disadvantaged youth
The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession
This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including teens, Hispanic women, and college-educated white women. The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, …
The US Covid-19 baby bust and rebound
Economics (13 works) · Demographic economics (10 works) · Population (7 works) · Demography (6 works) · Fertility (5 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Economic growth (4 works)