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The use of NCAs is currently regulated under state law. These laws embody diverse approaches to the regulation of NCAs which generally limit enforcement of NCAs to those with reasonable and narrowly tailored terms. State law also incorporates various approaches to mitigating the negative effects NCAs might have on workers, including requiring adequate disclosure, consideration, and banning their use in certain employment contracts. These diverse approaches can leave regulatory gaps in certain states and can result in overregulation in others. But this can also be a feature—diverse approaches to legal regulation of NCAs at the state level takes advantage of the laboratory of the states to generate information that will allow economic research to better evaluate the effects of these diverse legal approaches without exposing the entire nation to potential mistakes. There has also been a growing and robust literature that has examined state variation in the regulation of NCAs and the effect of these laws on worker welfare. However, current evidence does not yet suggest a reliable and predictable link between the use of NCAs and the effect on employee welfare. Moreover, changes in employee welfare can be negatively correlated to changes in consumer welfare. Any antitrust rule that broadly prohibits the use and enforcement of NCAs would be based on incomplete evidence, would interfere with the current operation of the balanced and nuanced state by state approach to regulating NCAs, and would potentially be at odds with the antitrust laws’ focus on consumer welfare.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 expanded eligibility for public health insurance, Medicaid, to nearly all adults ages 18-64 with household incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line and living in states that opted to participate in the Medicaid expansion. The ACA Medicaid expansion can potentially decrease reliance of disabled adults on the Supplemental Security Income program which provides Medicaid coverage as well as cash assistance to low-income individuals with disabilities. In the paper we estimate the effects of Medicaid expansion on the entry into the Supplemental Security Income in the first two years following the expansion launch in January 2014. We use data from the Social Security Administration and identify causal effects by exploiting cross state variation in Medicaid eligibility resulting from states’ decisions about whether to participate in the Medicaid expansion.

We provide evidence from a field experiment — a correspondence study — on age discrimination in hiring for retail sales jobs. We collect experimental data in all 50 states and then relate measured age discrimination — the difference in callback rates between old and young applicants — to variation across states in antidiscrimination laws offering protections to older workers that are stronger than the federal age and disability discrimination laws. We do a similar analysis for nonexperimental data on differences across states in hiring rates of older versus younger workers. The experimental evidence points consistently to evidence of hiring discrimination against older men and more so against older women. However, the evidence on the relationship between hiring discrimination against older workers and state variation in age and disability discrimination laws is not so clear; at a minimum, there is not a compelling case that stronger state protections reduce hiring discrimination against older workers. In contrast, the non-experimental evidence suggests that stronger disability discrimination protections increase the relative hiring of older workers.

This paper studies the impact of unilateral divorce laws on child weight gain. I use difference-in-differences approach exploiting time and state variation in the adoption of the unilateral divorce law. I analyze a comprehensive nationwide health examination survey (NHANES I) during 1971-1974. The results show that exposure to unilateral divorce law leads to bigger Body Mass Index (BMI) for children between 2 and 18 years.However, according to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this weight gain is still under the normality patterns. I also investigate the possibles transmission mechanisms for the increase in BMI. Results indicate that for the specic age group of children between 7 and 18 years the exposure to unilateral divorce law leads to bigger BMI and bigger probability to be overweight.

We explore the effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of older workers. A concern with anti-discrimination laws is that they may reduce hiring by raising the cost of terminations and – in the specific case of disability discrimination laws – raising the cost of employment because of the need to accommodate disabled workers. Moreover, disability discrimination laws can affect nondisabled older workers because they are fairly likely to develop work-related disabilities, yet are not protected by these laws. Using state variation in disability discrimination protections, we find little or no evidence that stronger disability discrimination laws lower the hiring of nondisabled older workers. We similarly find no evidence of adverse effects of disability discrimination laws on hiring of disabled older workers.

We present new evidence on how long-term Treasury values are linked to movements in equity risk and risk aversion over 1997-2013. Intertemporally, we find that long-horizon T-bond returns have a negative partial relation to the lagged equity risk. Contemporaneously, using two different empirical state-contingent approaches, we find a much stronger positive partial relation between T-bond returns and equity-risk innovations over: (1) periods when the equity variance risk premium is relatively high, and (2) recessionary/post-recessionary economic states. Throughout our empirical work, we find it is important to control for movements in T-bond risk to establish better the partial equity-risk relations. Consistent with key implications from recent theory, our findings suggest that long-term Treasuries tended to serve in a hedge role against equity risk or macroeconomic risk over our sample period, with such hedge-related pricing influences being especially pronounced when risk aversion was elevated.

While there is a well-documented link between violence and mental health, there is substantially less known about the relationship between mental health laws and violence. One policy in particular that may have an effect on crime is based on the mental health professional’s ability to involuntarily detain a patient who is deemed dangerous. It is unclear, a priori, if involuntarily detaining mental health patients will deter violent crime by removing the threat of violence, or actually encourage violence by altering the doctor-patient relationship. To address this question empirically, I exploit the state to state variation in timing of passage and length of stay laws that dictate both the minimum and maximum mental health facility stays for those who are involuntarily detained. Using a state panel, I find that while laws dictating the maximum length of time an individual can stay in a mental health facility have no effect on violence, laws dictating the required minimum stay do. That is, we would expect to see the general homicide rate decrease by 0.12%, or about 1 murder every two years, for each state that adopts a 3 day minimum stay law.

This paper examines the outcomes and characteristics of corporate acquisitions from the perspective of stakeholder-shareholder agency conflicts. Using state variation in labor protections, we find that acquirers with strong labor rights experience lower announcement returns. Combined acquirer and target announcement returns are also lower in the presence of strong labor rights. Our findings remain statistically and economically significant after we control for a range of deal, firm, industry and state characteristics and explore various channels for the labor rights effect. Overall, the evidence indicates that employee-shareholder conflicts of interest reduce shareholder gains from acquisitions.

Adolescents face daily trade-offs between human capital investment, labor, and leisure. This paper exploits state variation in the repeal of Sunday closing laws to examine the impact of a distinct and plausibly exogenous rise in the quantity of competing diversions available to youth on their educational attainment. The results suggest that the repeals led to a significant decline in both years of education and the probability of high school completion. I explore increased employment opportunities and risky behaviors as potential mechanisms. Further, I find a corresponding decline of the repeals on adult wages.

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and receipts vary greatly by state. This paper investigates the extent to which this geographic variation in SSDI applications reflects differences in health, demographics, and employment characteristics, state policies, and politics. We find that demographic, health, and employment characteristics of the state have the greatest effect on state-level variations in SSDI application rates, explaining over 70 percent of the variation. State policy concerning mandated employer-sponsored disability insurance (also known as temporary disability insurance or TDI) has a small negative effect on overall SSDI applications. This finding supports the principle underlying many recent SSDI reform plans: temporary disability insurance coverage could save the SSDI program considerable funds in the long run. Further, when we look to explain variation within a state, we find that state changes in health insurance regulation are negatively correlated with the SSDI application rate. This could be an indication that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have spillovers to the SSDI program.

This paper studies the labor market experiences of white male college graduates as a function of economic conditions at time of college graduation. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth whose respondents graduated college between 1979 and 1988 and are followed for 14 to 23 years after college graduation. I employ both national and state variation in economic conditions at time of college graduation to identify the effect. Because timing and location of college graduation could potentially be affected by economic conditions, I also instrument for the national unemployment rate usinf year of birth and for the state unemployment rate using year of birth and state of residence at age 14. I find large, negative wage effects to graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I find that cohorts who graduate in worse economies are in lower level occupations and have slightly higher educational attainment. Labor supply is unaffected.