Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Yesterday it was announced that Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics (formerly the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). She is the 3rd woman to have won the economics Nobel. The Nobel press release summarizes her research as follows: Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour…

How does caregiving impact employment and earnings?

This is the question that a recent NBER working paper by Nicole Maestas, Matt Messel, and Yulya Truskinovsky (2023) aim to answer. The authors use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) among individual report providing unpaid care to family and friend. The SIPP data are then linked to earnings data from…

Does improved health impact earnings?

According to a recent paper by Stephens and Toohey (2022), the answer is ‘yes’. This paper examines the labor market effects of a randomized health intervention of working-age men that was focused on reducing mortality due to coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. MRFIT succeeded in improving the health…

Food insecurity among health care workers

When you think of health care workers, many think of physicians, nurses and hospital administrators, who often make an above average salary. Not all health care workers, however, are well-paid and many even suffer from food insecurity according to a study by Srinivasan et al. (2021): Using nationally representative data from the period 2013–18, this…

Statistics on health care labor

On this Labor Day, below find some interesting statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) on health care wages and employment. From the first graph, one can see that health care practitioners (e.g., physicians, nurse) have much higher wages than average but health care support workers (e.g., ) have…