Thank you, JEBO for publishing this paper!

Maybe everyone having their own type of insurance is best for each person. Or maybe not.
Maybe having to deal with many insurance plans, different networks, etc for the whole fam could be detrimental to hlthcre access. If you are interested in this question, stay tuned for the sequel to this paper 😉

Second quibble point: The important nuance, this is NOT about coverage going down. In many cases, More people are insured, but coverage becomes more fragmented.

So is that ok? Is more fragmentation in the family ok?👇

Some quibble points: Our definition of uniformity is pretty basic, calling everyoneon medicaid, uniform. We could have some people on Medicaid managed care v s. traditional Medicaid, and we could further refine our measure of uniformity.

As you can see from this graph, in the 90s we see a lot of fragmentation of medicaid eligibility for kids, that gets reduced in the 2000s with the introduction of SCHIP.

When parents gain Medicaid, families move into “all public” coverage. Less patchwork, fewer gaps. Children's eligibility is higher than that of adults, where there have been more expansions for children, it has widened the gap between kids and their parents.

(2) Expansions to adult/parents do help increase uniformity in families. This is hopefully intuitive, because adult eligibility is usually the binding constraint.

We look at the expansion of Medicaid (across categories and income) to understand if these policies have increased or decreased uniformity in families. We find that (1) Expanding coverage for children does not increase uniformity (and may reduce it). However,

Why has uniformity declined? Public insurance in the U.S. is designed at the individual level: Children often qualify at higher income thresholds. Adults lag behind. This creates “patchwork” coverage within families.

Using CPS data (1988–2019), we document that the vast majority of families (~77%) in the U.S. already are "under the same umbrella".
AND that Family-level insurance uniformity fell by ~10 percentage points over 30 years (for families <400% FPL).
Even as overall coverage expanded.

We define a simple concept: insurance uniformity = everyone in a family has the same type of coverage (e.g., all Medicaid, all private, etc.). These have been relatively stable.

🚨New Paper 🚨 with Dan Grossman and Sarah Hamersma!
authors.elsevier.com/c/1mxflc24bE...

In policy debates, we often say the U.S. system is “fragmented.”
But what does that actually look like for families, and how has that evolved? and how has US policy shifted this?

What is the phenomenon called when people who do complicated stuff try to explain things in the most simple terms while people who do really simple stuff, try to use fancy language to elevate the sophistication of what they are doing?

Please Share! The Environmental Inequality Lab is hosting it's second undergraduate research training program in environmental and energy economics this summer & it's open to all (with current U.S. work authorization)!

Full-time, funded, in-person, 10-weeks.

More details here tinyurl.com/EEE-URTP

Got some good news about a paper (that I'll share later), but just wanted to share that I tracked how long it took to work on this paper.
From the first meeting about the project to the conditional acceptance: 1708 days
From first meeting to first submission: 691 days

GitHub - DAAF-Contribution-Community/daaf: DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework: An open-source, extensible workflow for Claude Code that allows skilled researchers to rapidly scale their exp... DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework: An open-source, extensible workflow for Claude Code that allows skilled researchers to rapidly scale their expertise and accelerate data analysis by a...

Today, I’m launching DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework: an open-source, extensible workflow for Claude Code that allows skilled researchers to rapidly scale their expertise and accelerate data analysis by 5-10x -- *without* sacrificing the transparency...
github.com/brhkim/daaf/...

What’s your song(s) to listen to after a sh*tty day, not to cheer you up but to sulk in it?
Something like Anna Nalick‘s “wreck of the day“

Hidden Curriculum: picking journals New paper: “Submissions Related to Editors’ Research Are More Likely To Succeed: Evidence From Economics Journals” shows evidence that (1) editors are less likely to desk reject manuscripts related to...

Substack: Hidden Curriculum: picking journals

The reality here is that universities would love to hire visible and capable conservative scholars. That they have to create separate centers, and then hire people who would never make it in an open search, underlines the fact that its not anti-conservative bias, its a lack of strong candidates.

Congrats!

Also, please share for visibility!

Mentoring Program on Aging and Health Economics Research

Are you a PhD Student curious about working in topics of health and aging? Do you feel like you may need extra support? I have a program for you!

A one-day mentoring workshop hosted by yours truly and Jetson Leder-Luis (BU) through @nber.org

www.nber.org/calls-papers...

I watched two 16-year olds get abducted, I have not been able to get any organization to try to help them, I think about them every day, I read stuff like this and I want to puke

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

Trump's Schedule F Rule Finalized A bizarro rule formally justifies politicizing public services

New, from me: Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants.

The new rule is dishonest and unmoored from reality in its effort to formalize the politicization of the federal government 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-sch...

John, you should have told me when I was younger that things would only get worse! Lol 😂

And just overall doing less. I think I got it a little bit better just by actively trying to do less in general. I've also gotten worse at email. I used to be very good at replying to things on time but now I sometimes don't prioritize my email.

LOL no worries. This one is easy because I don't have any good advice. I'm also drowning. The advice that I think helped only ever so slightly on the margin are things that everyone knows, like'say no to more things'. Prioritize tasks and focus on what you absolutely need to get done or is urgent.

1000%. I had no idea how busy i would be