Rucker C. Johnson

Assistant Professor
Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

You can view full-text PDF versions of the manuscripts (which are published or under review) by clicking on the titles below.

“Early-Life Origins of Adult Disease: The Significance of Poor Infant Health and Childhood Poverty ”
(with Robert Schoeni)

ABSTRACT:

The fetal origins hypothesis posits that under-nutrition in utero leads to adaptive changes in growth and development that may be beneficial in the short-run, but produces susceptibility to coronary heart disease and the related disorders hypertension, stroke, and diabetes later in life.  This study provides the first evidence on the influence of low birth weight and child income on the onset of asthma and six fatal chronic health conditions through middle-age for a nationally representative sample of the US population.  We find that poor health at birth and limited parental resources (including low income and lack of health insurance) interfere with healthy development and lead to increased risks of onset of asthma, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke or heart attack.  These effects are substantial, and the overall pattern of results is robust to the inclusion of sibling fixed effects and an extensive set of controls.  The results reveal that being born low weight increases the odds of asthma by two-thirds, increases the odds of hypertension by roughly 50 percent, and more than doubles the odds of a stroke or heart attack during middle-age.  We find that a few early life factors – birth weight, family income, and health insurance coverage – can account for the lion’s share of the racial disparities in the prevalence of health conditions in adulthood.  The general pattern of results across the various health condition outcomes indicates that low birth weight and parental income during childhood years is a very critical period that shapes opportunities and influences subsequent risks of onset of disease over the life course.

“Work after Welfare Reform and the Well-being of Children”
(with Ariel Kalil and Rachel Dunifon)

(Forthcoming book to be published by Upjohn Insititute Press)

ABSTRACT:

Using data from five waves of the Women’s Employment Survey (WES; 1997-2003), we examine the links between low-income mothers’ employment experiences and the emotional well-being and academic progress of their children.  We find robust linkages between several different dimensions of mothers’ employment experiences and child outcomes.  The pattern of results is remarkably similar across all of our empirical approaches—including OLS and child fixed effect models, with and without an unusually extensive set of controls.  First, children exhibit fewer behavior problems when mothers work and experience job stability (relative to children whose mothers do not work).  In contrast, maternal work accompanied by job instability is associated with significantly higher child behavior problems (relative to job stability).  Children whose mothers work full-time and/or have fluctuating levels of work hours or irregular schedules also exhibit significantly higher levels of behavior problems.  However, full-time work has negative consequences for children only when it is in jobs that offer limited potential for wage growth.  Such negative consequences are completely offset when this work experience is in jobs that require the cognitive skills that lead to higher wage growth prospects.  Finally, fluctuating levels of work hours and full-time work in jobs with limited wage growth prospects are also both strongly associated with the probability that the child will repeat a grade or be placed in special education.  These results suggest that “welfare reform,” when considered more broadly to include the new landscape of employment for low-income mothers, has imposed some risks to children’s development.

“The Influence of Early-Life Events on Human Capital, Health Status, and Labor Market Outcomes Over the Life Course”
(with Robert Schoeni)

ABSTRACT:

Using nationally representative data from the US, this study provides evidence on the relationship between early life conditions and cognition, human capital accumulation, labor market outcomes, and health status in adulthood.  We find that poor health at birth and limited parental resources (including low income, lack of health insurance, and unwanted pregnancy) interfere with cognitive development and health capital in childhood, reduce educational attainment, and lead to worse labor market and health outcomes in adulthood.  These effects are substantial and are robust to the inclusion of sibling fixed effects and an extensive set of controls.  The results reveal that low birth weight ages people in their 30s and 40s by 12 years, increases the probability of dropping out of high school by one-third, lowers labor force participation by 5 percentage points, and reduces labor market earnings by roughly 15 percent.  Not only are socioeconomic factors determinants of poor birth outcomes, but they also influence the lasting impacts of poor infant health.  In particular, the negative long-run consequences of low birth weight are larger among children whose parents did not have health insurance.  While poor birth outcomes reduce human capital accumulation, they explain only 10% of the total effect of low birth weight on labor market earnings.  The study also finds that racial differences in adult health can be accounted for by a few early life factors – birth weight, parental income, and parental health insurance coverage – while contemporaneous economic factors account for relatively little of this gap.  Finally, the paper sheds light on the well known strong relationship between education and health outcomes; we find that sibling models that account for time-invariant family factors reduce the effects of education on health substantially, but the remaining effects are large.  Taken together, the evidence is consistent with a negative reinforcing intergenerational transmission of disadvantage within the family; parental economic status influences birth outcomes, birth outcomes have long reaching effects on health and economic status in adulthood, which in turn leads to poor birth outcomes for one’s own children.

The Effects of Male Incarceration Dynamics on AIDS Infection Rates among African-American Women and Men
(with Steven Raphael)

(Published in Journal of Law and Economics)

ABSTRACT:

In this paper, we investigate the potential connection between incarceration dynamics and AIDS infection rates, with a particular emphasis on the black-white AIDS rate disparity. Using caselevel data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we construct a panel data set of AIDS infection rates covering the period 1982 to 1996 that vary by year of onset, mode of transmission, state of residence, age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Using data from the U.S. Census, we construct a conforming panel of male and female incarceration rates. We use this panel data to model the dynamic relationship between the male and female AIDS infection rates and the proportion of men in the age/state/race-matched cohort that are incarcerated. We find very strong effects of male incarceration rates on both male and female AIDS infection rates. The dynamic structure of this relationship parallels the distribution of the incubation time between HIV infection and the onset of full-blown AIDS documented in the medical and epidemiological literature. These results are robust to explicit controls for (race-specific) year fixed effects and a fully interacted set of age/race/state fixed effects. Our results reveal that the higher incarceration rates among black males over this period explain the lion’s share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection between black women and women of other racial and ethnic groups. The magnitude and significance of these effects persist after controlling for measures of crack cocaine prevalence and flow rates in and out of prison. In a separate analysis, we exploit the occurrence of system-wide state prison overcrowding litigation as an instrumental variable for the flow rate of prison releases. We find short-run increases in prison release rates that were induced by final court decisions on relief of prisoner overcrowding resulted in significant increases in subsequent AIDS infection rates among women and blacks, manifesting 5-10 years following the increase of prison releases.

Health Dynamics and the Evolution of Health Inequality Over the Life Course:The Importance of Neighborhood and Family Background

ABSTRACT: 

This paper investigates the extent and ways in which childhood family and neighborhood quality causally influence later-life health outcomes.  The study analyzes the health trajectories of children born between 1950 and 1970 followed through 2005. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) spanning four decades are linked with information on neighborhood attributes and school quality resources that prevailed at the time these children were growing up. There are several key findings.  First, estimates of sibling and child neighbor correlations in health are used to bound the proportion of inequality in health status in childhood through mid-life that are attributable to childhood family and neighborhood quality.  Estimates based on four-level hierarchical random effects models (neighborhoods, families, individuals, over time) consistently show a significant scope for both childhood family and neighborhood background (including school quality).  The results imply substantial persistence in health status across generations that are linked in part to low intergenerational economic mobility.  Sibling correlations are large throughout at least the first 50 years of life: roughly three-fifths of adult health disparities may be attributable to family and neighborhood background.  Childhood neighbor correlations in adult health are also substantial (net of the similarity arising from similar family characteristics), suggesting that disparities in neighborhood background account for more than one-third of the variation in health status in mid life. Second, exposure to concentrated neighborhood poverty during childhood has significant deleterious impacts on adult health.  I control for the endogeneity of neighborhood location choice using instrumental variables based on political factors, historical migration patterns, and topographical features.  The results reveal that even a large amount of selection on unobservable factors does not eliminate the significant effect of child neighborhood poverty on health status later in life.  Thus, racial differences in adult health can be accounted for by childhood family, neighborhood, and school quality factors, while contemporaneous economic factors account for relatively little of this gap.

“Health Disparities in Mid-to-Late-Life: The Role of Earlier Life Family and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Conditions” (with Jeannette Rogowski and Robert Schoeni)

Abstract:

“Ever-Increasing Levels of Parental Incarceration and the Consequences for Children ”
(Published book chapter in edited volume Do Prisons Make Us Safer? Russell Sage Foundation, editors: Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll)

“The Place of Race in Health Disparities: How Family Background and Neighborhood Conditions in Childhood Impact Later-Life Health”
(Forthcoming book chapter in edited volume How Does Place Matter? University of Pennsylvania Press/Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank)

“The Place of Race in Hypertension: How Family Background and Neighborhood Conditions in Childhood Impact Later-Life Health”

“Landing a Job in Urban Space: The Extent and Effects of Spatial Mismatch”
(Published in Regional Science & Urban Economics)

ABSTRACT: 

The spatial mismatch hypothesis proposes that involuntary housing segregation and the increasing suburbanization of less-skilled jobs that has occurred over the past thirty years, have acted to disadvantage inner-city workers' labor market outcomes by isolating them from the labor market opportunities they are most qualified for.  Using a job search theoretic framework, this paper emphasizes the spatial nature of the job search process and analyzes the effects of job accessibility on search duration to gain deeper insights into how the volume, pattern, and efficiency of job search activity are shaped and affected by different spatial labor market conditions.  For this analysis, I merge data from both the household and employer surveys of the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality in Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles--three large MSAs with diverse spatial structures in which high levels of racial residential segregation prevail, and for which the trend of increasing decentralization of less-skilled jobs has been especially pronounced.  Using the employer survey, I develop unique detailed geographic measures of both accessibility to turnover-induced less-skilled job availability and accessibility to employment opportunities generated by net employment growth. 

I find the consistent pattern across all three MSAs that job accessibility for less-educated workers is greatest in predominantly white suburbs more than 10 miles from the centroid of black residential concentration, and that these "job-rich" areas are not served by public transportation.  The regression results indicate that job search behavior and job search outcomes are affected by the interaction of the degree of residential location constraints facing the job seeker and the job searcher's proximity to employment opportunities.  In particular, the regression analysis identifies significant race differences in the effects of job accessibility and reveals that the patterns of racial differences in the effects of job accessibility mirror the patterns of racial differences in the extent of residential location constraints (documented in the residential segregation literature).  I find large effects of job accessibility for less-educated blacks and small insignificant effects for similarly educated whites.  Simulation results show that black's greater sensitivity to local labor market demand conditions contribute significantly to the black-white gap in search durations.  In addition, the decomposition analysis shows that racial differences in the distribution of job accessibility account for one-fifth of the black-white gap in the hazard of successfully completing a job search, and the cumulative effect of racial differences in all the included spatial search-related variables accounts for forty percent of the overall black-white gap.       

"WAGE AND JOB DYNAMICS AFTER WELFARE REFORM: THE IMPORTANCE OF JOB SKILLS"
(Published in Research in Labor Economics)

ABSTRACT: 

I use data from employers and longitudinal data from former/current recipients covering the period 1997-early 2004 to analyze the relationship between job skills, job changes, and the evolution of wages. I analyze the effects of job skill requirements on starting wages, on-the-job training opportunities, wage growth prospects, and job turnover. The results show that jobs of different skill requirements differ in their prospects for earnings growth, independent of the workers who fill these jobs. Furthermore, these differences in wage growth opportunities across jobs are important determinants of workers’ quit propensities (explicitly controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity). The determinants and consequences of job dynamics are investigated. The results using a multiplicity of methods, including the estimation of a multinomial endogenous switching model of wage growth, show that job changes, continuity of work involvement, and the use of cognitive skills are all critical components of the content of work experience that leads to upward mobility. The results underscore the sensitivity of recipients’ job transition patterns to changes in labor market demand conditions.

"THE ROAD TO ECONOMIC SELF-SUFFICIENCY: JOB QUALITY AND JOB TRANSITION PATTERNS AFTER WELFARE REFORM"
(with Mary Corcoran)
(Published in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Autumn 2003)

ABSTRACT: 

In this paper, we analyze the relationships of schooling, the skill content of work experience, and different types of employment patterns with less-skilled women's job quality outcomes.  We use survey data from employers and longitudinal data from former/current welfare recipients covering the period 1997-early 2002.  We broaden the analysis of job quality beyond employment rates and wages measured at a point in time by including non-wage attributes of compensation and aspects of jobs that affect future earnings potential.  This study shows the extent to which a lack of employment stability, job skills, and occupation-specific experience impede welfare recipients' abilities to obtain "good jobs" or transition into them from bad ones.  We find that the business cycle downturn has significantly negatively impacted the job quality and job transition patterns of former/current recipients.