Browsing by Author "Rangel, Marcos"

Ecological factors and the policy environment are central constraints on population well-being. This dissertation emphasizes the role of shocks to help understand the nature of such constraints, and explores the relationship between population, environment, and development in greater detail than is typically possible.

Chapter 1 opens by contributing to a growing body of evidence around the impacts of old-age pensions on the well-being of pension recipients and their families. I draw from the unique disbursement structure of a popular, widely utilized benefits program in rural Brazil, and data from two nationally representative surveys conducted in 2013 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. I first employ regression discontinuity design to measure the direct effect of the program’s age threshold on pension take-up. Second, I compare differences in reports of health and well-being among age-eligible and age-ineligible adults in rural areas to the same differences among populations that generally do not qualify for the benefit (i.e., urban populations). This difference-in-differences shows robust evidence of a beneficial pension effect, though along somewhat different dimensions by gender. I then show evidence of two credible mechanisms for improved health and well-being: first, improved food security within households that have eligible pension recipients; second, the cohabitation of younger family members, potentially providing support to aging family members. Taken together, this chapter demonstrates that the rural benefits program in Brazil leads to tangible health benefits for its recipients, through channels that are likely to complement rather than crowd out other public services.

Chapter 2 moves on to explore how a massive natural disaster affected smoking behavior, a common coping mechanism. External stressors are commonly hypothesized to play a role in the adoption of certain health behaviors, but understanding the role of exposure is frequently hampered by research designs and data that are inadequate for tracing causality. I use this study to evaluate the relationship between unanticipated exposure to a natural disaster and smoking behaviors using longitudinal data collected from families in Aceh, Indonesia before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Exposure to the tsunami is measured as a community indicator of physical proximity to damage, and as individual indicators of personal experiences at the time of the tsunami. My analysis indicates that the effect of exposure on smoking uptake varies considerably by age, and that most forms of exposure increase smoking volume. These effects appear to be temporary, but even in the context of Indonesia’s extraordinarily high smoking rates an impact is perceptible even ten years after the tsunami.

Chapter 3 delves further into the effects of the tsunami, exploring the distribution of resources after the broad destruction of infrastructure and subsequent, fast-paced reconstruction. I evaluate multiple aspects of water access for roughly 6,000 families through 2014. Logit regression analysis show increasing disparities in access to basic amounts of water, and multinomial logit regression analysis indicates that shifts are driven by a massive increase in the market for privately distributed bottled water. This study disentangles key distributional processes to show how reconstruction influenced a central social determinant of health among an already vulnerable population.

The chapters to follow aim to relate the well-being of individuals to the influences that arise from interconnected policy choices and ecological factors. The first chapter emphasizes a policy shock, the second an ecological shock, and the second seeks to identify a combined effect of the two. This original research is intended to help illuminate the role that institutions might play in improving population well-being.

In October of 2019, a social crisis exploded in Chile; over one million Chileans marched on the streets, followed by riots and extensive destruction of public and private property. The economic and social inequality was unequivocally the cause of this conflict. Simultaneously, similar crisis crises occurred in many parts of the world, from Sudan to Indonesia and even in the US. The three chapters of this dissertation address the causes of the social crisis within the population and why it has been hard for the State to fund more social services. The first chapter measures and analyzes intergenerational income mobility in Chile. By creating a new administrative panel dataset, I look at the different educational and labor market roadblocks that individuals face while climbing the social mobility ladder. The year-to-year data allows this chapter to analyze in detail the possible roadblocks and co-funding factors that affect mobility. These challenges include low returns in higher education for low-income students, socioeconomic class, role models in schools, drop-out, and irregular labor markets.

The second chapter questions whether public policies can promote intergenerational income mobility. Using a subway expansion as a quasi-experiment, this chapter shows how a reduction in transport cost increased educational opportunities of students' and their intergenerational income mobility by 2 percentage points, an increase equivalent to a 5$\%$ increase in wages. Allowing students to attend school beyond their neighborhood could be an effective policy to promote intergenerational mobility and should be considered before moving the whole family to a different neighborhood.

The last chapter explores how members of the economic elite in Congress can reduce taxes, one of the most effective methods to reduce inequality. By creating a new biographical dataset of over 2500 members of Congress, I am able to analyze the educational history and wealth of Congressmen. I use the detailed biographical characteristics such as being a landowner or firm owner and find that a 10% reduction of elite members in Congress is associated with a 0.45 GDP points increment of taxes in the country. Overall, my findings suggest that it's possible to achieve a highly detailed analysis of the roadblocks of intergenerational mobility, that public policies can affect social mobility, and that the influence of elite members in Congress has historically reduced the State's capacity.

The family is an important source of caregiving and support for its members. Its importance has been reinforced by recent demographic trends in the United States and around the world. Due to improvements in health and life expectancy, today most individuals spend the majority of their adult life with a parent present. Yet, our understanding of extended families is limited. Aside from a few exceptions, the literature in economics has predominantly focused on household decision-making and resource allocations. In this dissertation, I fill the gap in the literature by focusing on aging parents and their adult children, that are not necessarily coresiding with them in the same housing unit, to study how family members share information, allocate resources, and influence members’ economic outcomes.

Recognizing the importance of understanding how families allocate resources among their members for policy design and evaluation, my first chapter focuses on resource allocations of extended families. This work is the first to make use of novel survey data to identify a proxy measure of imperfect information in extended family networks. I find that a significant proportion of parents have imperfect information about the financial well-being of their adult children. In addition, this observed imperfect information is predictive of how well families can cooperate and allocate resources. I find that families with more accurate information share their resources efficiently, they are able to reconcile their different preferences and allocate resources as a collectively rational unit. Conversely, families with imperfect information do not allocate their resources efficiently, leaving potential welfare improvements unrealized. This work improves our understanding of decision-making in the extended family and contributes to recent efforts at the frontier of the literature in family economics examining resource allocations of extended families.

This first chapter builds on findings from my second chapter, which presents a descriptive examination of prevalence and correlates of information asymmetry and uncertainty within extended families. I use data from Add Health and the AddHealth Parent Study to document incidence and prevalence of misperceptions in the family by contrasting parents’ reporting of their adult child well-being with the adult child’s own reporting. I make two main contributions. With this work, I contribute to a recent and burgeoning line of literature on information sharing in the family by demonstrating the potential use of survey data to measure misperceptions and uncertainty in the family and exploring how they relate to different characteristics such as family structure, and demographics. In addition, I examine whether misperceptions are associated with parent-child relationship quality and how much family members can rely on each other for support. Results show that a significant proportion of parents have incorrect or uncertain information about their adult children’s health conditions and these misperceptions are negatively correlated with relationship quality, and sense of familial support.

The third chapter, which is co-authored with Scott Abrahams, focuses on whether intergenerational correlation in socioeconomic outcomes be explained by transmission of personality traits across generations of the family. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and the Add Health Parent Study (AHPS) to characterize the transmission of personality traits from parents to their adult children. We document sizable correlations, particularly for conscientiousness and grit, which are highly predictive of educational attainment and income. Yet, relative to the transmission of cognitive ability, this intergenerational transmission in personality traits can only account for a negligible portion of the rate of intergenerational persistence in educational attainment.

This dissertation combines three essays that explore how pregnant women’s exposure to social and physical stressors affect human capital at it earliest stage, in utero. Informed by theoretical groundwork adopted from medical and epidemiological literature and applying quasi experimental methods to population-representative data, this work rigorously examines the impact of risk factors for which policy in the form of regulation is the main institutional instrument on newborns’ health and survival. I begin with a chapter that evaluates the introduction of alcohol-related policies in a large metropolitan area in Brazil. The staggered adoption over the area permits identifying the positive causal effects of these policies on fetal survival. The second chapter quantifies the adverse effect of air pollution on newborns’ health using the meteorological phenomenon of thermal inversion formation to disentangle the impact of pollution from the role of economic conditions. The third chapter investigates the consequences of immigration enforcement in the U.S. on the birth outcomes of in utero children for likely unauthorized families.