【AEW Webinar】Effects of Arsenic on Birth Outcomes in California: Evidence from a Regulatory Change

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• 研討會日期 : 2023-10-12
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Heather Royer
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Heather Royer received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She is currently a Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research focuses primarily on Health Economics. Her current research focuses on trying to disentangle the causal effect of education on health and fertility.
• 演講摘要 : The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was adopted in the United States to reduce drinking water pollution and to protect public health. The Act established maximum contaminant levels (MCL) for some contaminants. However, despite growing evidence of potential health effects, few changes to the MCLs have occurred in the nearly 50 years since adoption. We study the 2006 lowering of the MCL for arsenic from 50 micrograms per liter to 10 micrograms per liter. We examine the effect of the change on the arsenic contaminant levels in California and estimate whether this change in the regulatory environment improved infant health.
• Working Paper Title : When Love Hurts: the Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Later Life Outcomes
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Kuan-Ming Chen received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2021. He is currently an Assistant Professor at National Taiwan University. His research interests are Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics.
• Working Paper Abstract : We study the impact of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) on various aspects of the victims' lives throughout the course of violence, including their marital decisions, labor market performance, fertility rate, and mental health. Our data consists of the universe of administratively reported IPV cases primarily from hospitals, police, and helplines in Taiwan from 2012 to 2018. We use later-reporting victims as control groups under a staggered event-study framework. Among all victims who eventually report IPV to the officials, we find (i) the probability of divorce increases for both men and women after the report but not at the violence onset; (ii) women's employment rate decreases after the onset of violence, but an incremental positive effect follows after reporting, particularly among young women; (iii) reduction in additional childbirth after reporting regardless of the victim's gender; (iv) rising depression outpatient-visits after violence and reporting among women.