Health insurance, labor market shocks, and mental health during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis.

We use the Census Household Pulse Survey (HPS) to examine employment and earnings loss, health insurance, and hardships related to physical and mental health and health care, as well as food insecurity and difficulty meeting expenses, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic job loss is strongly associated with uninsurance in the HPS. Moreover, among those who were not employed due to a pandemic economic reason such as a business closure, we find substantial regression-adjusted differences in hardship by insurance status, especially in the domains of mental health, mental health care and financial difficulties (food insufficiency and difficulty paying usual expenses).

On the Importance and Intrinsic Difficulties of Incorporating Health Insurance Benefits in Absolute Poverty Trends.

Context: US government poverty measures do not include health insurance in the threshold or health insurance benefits in resources. Yet the 2019 Economic Report of the President presented long-term trends using the full-income poverty measure (FPM), which includes health insurance benefits as resources. A 2021 technical advisory report recommended statistical agencies produce absolute poverty trends with and without health insurance.

School Disengagement, School-Age Births and High School Graduation: Evidence From Linked Administrative Records.

Background: Failure to complete secondary education often results from a process of educational disengagement. Studies of teen childbearing and high school completion have not adequately accounted for the role of school disengagement prior to conception and may overestimate causal impacts of teen childbearing.

Methods: We link New York City birth and school records to study a cohort of 22,484 Black and Latina public school students.

Improving estimates of Medicaid's effect on poverty: Measures and counterfactuals.

Objective: To re-evaluate the effect of Medicaid on poverty using a poverty measure that accounts for health insurance needs and benefits and an evaluation approach that reflects disparities in access to alternative coverage.

Data Sources: The Current Population Survey (CPS) for calendar year 2015.

Study Design: We estimate the effect of losing Medicaid on poverty, combining two previous approaches: (1) A propensity impact, which simulates a no-Medicaid counterfactual incorporating changes to health insurance and medical out-of-pocket spending, using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

Longitudinal Patterns of School Disengagement before Conception among New York City Teen Mothers.

Background: School-based pregnancy prevention programs should optimally be offered while students are still engaged in school since early disengagement is strongly associated with risk of a teen birth.

Methods: We used linked New York City birth and enrollment data (2005-2013), a sample of 6,809 teen mothers (mean age conception = 16.2 years).

Estimating the educational consequences of teenage childbearing: Identification, heterogeneous effects and the value of biological relationship information.

Understanding the contribution of childbearing to social disadvantages of teenage mothers requires estimates that control for unobservables and generalize to teenage mothers. Sibling-differences and Instrumental Variables (IV) are common approaches to this end. Using the "Add Health" data, which oversampled siblings, and building on IV specifications from a widely-cited study, we compare various estimates of the consequences of teenage childbearing for schooling attainment.

Estimating The Effects Of Health Insurance And Other Social Programs On Poverty Under The Affordable Care Act.

The effects of health insurance on poverty have been difficult to ascertain because US poverty measures have not taken into account the need for health care and the value of health benefits. We developed the first US poverty measure to include the need for health insurance and to count health insurance benefits as resources available to meet that need-in other words, a health-inclusive poverty measure. We estimated the direct effects of health insurance benefits on health-inclusive poverty for people younger than age sixty-five, comparing the impacts of different health insurance programs and of nonhealth means-tested cash and in-kind benefits, refundable tax credits, and nonhealth social insurance programs.

Including health insurance in poverty measurement: The impact of Massachusetts health reform on poverty.

We develop and implement what we believe is the first conceptually valid health-inclusive poverty measure (HIPM) - a measure that includes health care or insurance in the poverty needs threshold and health insurance benefits in family resources - and we discuss its limitations. Building on the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, we construct a pilot HIPM for the under-65 population under ACA-like health reform in Massachusetts. This pilot demonstrates the practicality, face validity and value of a HIPM.

Does Child Care Quality Mediate Associations Between Type of Care and Development?

Studies document that, on average, children cared for in centers, as compared to homes, have higher cognitive test scores but worse socioemotional and health outcomes. The authors assessed whether the quality of care received explains these associations. They considered multiple domains of child development-cognitive, socioemotional, and health-and examined whether mediation is greater when quality measures are better aligned with outcome domains.

New evidence on the validity of the Arnett Caregiver Interaction Scale: Results from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort.

The Arnett Caregiver Interaction Scale (CIS) has been widely used in research studies to measure the quality of caregiver-child interactions. The scale was modeled on a well-established theory of parenting, but there are few psychometric studies of its validity. We applied factor analyses and item response theory methods to assess the psychometric properties of the Arnett CIS in a national sample of toddlers in home-based care and preschoolers in center-based care from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort.

The Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Nutrition of Preschoolers.

Children spend a considerable amount of time in preschools and child care centers. As a result, these settings may have an influence on their diet, weight, and food security, and are potentially important contexts for interventions to address nutritional health. The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is one such intervention.

An assessment of the validity of the ECERS-R with implications for measures of child care quality and relations to child development.

The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) is widely used to associate child care quality with child development, but its validity for this purpose is not well established. We examined the validity of the ECERS-R using the multidimensional Rasch partial credit model (PCM), factor analyses, and regression analyses with data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort. The PCM identified rating category disordering, indicating previously unrecognized problems with the scale's response process validity.

The effects of maternal employment on child injuries and infectious disease.

This article presents estimates of effects of maternal paid work and nonmaternal child care on injuries and infectious disease for children aged 12 to 36 months. Mother-child fixed-effects estimates are obtained by using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Estimates indicate that maternal employment itself has no statistically significant adverse effects on the incidence of infectious disease and injury.

Consequences for infants of parental disagreement in pregnancy intention.

Context: Despite the well-established literature on couples' pregnancy intentions and on the consequences of unintended pregnancy, the effects of parents' disagreement in fertility intentions has not been explored. Parental disagreement in pregnancy intention, as well as a father's pregnancy intention, may affect infant health.

Methods: Logistic regression analyses using 1979-1992 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth assess effects of unintendedness and parents' disagreement on outcomes related to infants' health and development.

On the validity of retrospective assessments of pregnancy intention.

Information on pregnancy intention is often gathered retrospectively (after the birth of a child). This article investigates whether the retrospective assessment of pregnancy intention leads to biased estimates of the extent or consequences of unintended fertility. Comparisons are made between pregnancy intentions ascertained during pregnancy and after birth using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.