28 posts on "Demographics"
September 25, 2020
Investigating the Effect of Health Insurance in the COVID‑19 Pandemic
Does health insurance improve health? This question, while apparently a tautology, has been the subject of considerable economic debate. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has acquired a greater urgency as the lack of universal health insurance has been cited as a cause of the profound racial gap in coronavirus cases, and as a cause of U.S. difficulties in managing the pandemic more generally. However, estimating the effect of health insurance is difficult because it is (generally) not assigned at random. In this post, we approach this question in a novel way by exploiting a natural experiment—the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion by some states but not others—to tease out the causal effect of a type of health insurance on COVID-19 intensity.
August 19, 2020
June 15, 2020
Distribution of COVID‑19 Incidence by Geography, Race, and Income
In this post, we study whether (and how) the spread of COVID-19 across the United States varied by geography, race, income, and population density. Were urban areas more affected by COVID-19 than rural areas? Did population density matter in the spread? Were certain races and income groups affected more by the spread of this deadly coronavirus? Our analysis uncovers stark demographic trends among places affected most severely by the pandemic thus far.
August 15, 2018
Will Demographic Headwinds Hobble China’s Economy?
China’s population is only growing at a 0.5 percent annual rate, its working-age cohort (ages 15 to 64) is shrinking, and the share of the population that is 65 and over is rising rapidly. Together, these trends will act as a significant restraint on the country’s economic growth. Nonetheless, there are reasons to conclude that growth will remain relatively strong going forward, most notably because the ongoing shift from rural to urban jobs will continue to boost labor productivity for some time to come.
February 17, 2017
A Close Look at the Decline of Homeownership
The homeownership rate—the percentage of households that own rather than rent the homes that they live in—has fallen sharply since mid-2005. In fact, in the second quarter of 2016 the homeownership rate fell to 62.9 percent, its lowest level since 1965. In this blog post, we look at underlying demographic trends to gain a deeper understanding of the large increase in the homeownership rate from 1995 to 2005 and the subsequent large decline. Although there is reason to believe that the homeownership rate may begin to rise again in the not-too-distant future, it is unlikely to fully recover to its previous peak levels. This is a disconcerting finding for those who view homeownership as an integral part of the American Dream and a key component of income security during retirement.
September 28, 2016
U.S. Real Wage Growth: Slowing Down With Age
In Monday’s post, we described the estimation of real wage growth rates for different cohorts of U.S. workers. Here, we turn our attention to estimating the effect of this demographic shift on the economy-wide average real wage growth rate.
August 10, 2016
Puerto Rico’s Shrinking Labor Force Participation
A key concern about Puerto Rico’s prospects is that its labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the adult population either working or looking for work, has fallen sharply.
April 13, 2015
Population Lost: Puerto Rico’s Troubling Out‑Migration
Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz For the first time in modern history, Puerto Rico is seeing its population decline. This troubling loss can be traced to an exodus of Puerto Rican citizens to the U.S. mainland, a current that has picked up considerably in recent years as Puerto Rico’s economy has deteriorated. Today, fully […]
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