UC Davis

This dissertation analyzes factors that affect labor market outcomes of individuals in the United States. The first and second chapter examines the relationship between children's access to public health insurance and parental labor supply. The third chapter analyzes how racial discrimination affects labor market decisions of racial minorities.

The first chapter of the dissertation exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of children’s access to Medicaid on the labor market outcomes of mothers. The results imply that the extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to positive maternal labor supply responses at the extensive and intensive margins. The effects are concentrated among single non-white and/or Hispanic mothers. The analysis of mechanisms suggests that for non-white and/or Hispanic mothers, Medicaid is less likely to work through marital and educational outcomes and that the effects are driven by the head of the family. For white non-Hispanic mothers increased educational attainment may explain the small and imprecise labor supply responses.

In the second chapter I examine the relationship between children's access to Medicaid and paternal labor market outcomes exploiting Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014. I find that fathers increase labor supply at the intensive margin as a result of extended Medicaid eligibility of their children and that the effects are concentrated among married white non-Hispanic fathers. The estimated effects on earnings, however, respond in areas outside of the maximum Medicaid eligibility cutoffs. To corroborate this finding, I explore various explanations and conclude that the most likely explanation is the correlation between the simulated eligibility measure and unobservable characteristics.

The third chapter co-authored with Kerwin Kofi Charles, Hani Mansour, Daniel I. Rees, and Bryson M. Rintala analyzes the relationship between racial discrimination and labor supply of racial minorities. Between 2001 and 2014, more than 6,500 American soldiers died while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing on data from the Defense Manpower Data Center, which contains information on each of these soldier’s home state as well as the exact date on which he died, we estimate the relationship between home-state fatalities and the labor market outcomes of first- and second generation Arab and Muslim men working in the United States. Because home state does not influence when, where or how the U.S. military deploys its soldiers, news of a soldier’s death can be thought of as producing a temporary, state-specific shock to the degree of prejudice faced by Arab and Muslim men working in the United States. We find that home-state fatalities are, in general, unrelated to wages and employment status. However, we find a strong, negative relationship between hours worked by Arab and Muslim men and whether a U.S. soldier from their state of residence died in the weeks preceding their interview. We argue that this result is consistent with customer taste-based discrimination but inconsistent with statistical models of discrimination.