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We study the effect of Medicare on financial strain, measured by annual changes in medical debt in collections, using credit bureau data. We exploit the program’s eligibility age at 65 and ...

SUMMARY A host of recent research has used reweighting methods to analyze the extent to which observable characteristics predict between-group differences in the distribution of an outcome. Less attention has been paid to using reweighting methods to isolate the roles of individual covariates. We analyze two approaches that have been used in previous studies, and we propose a new approach that examines the role of one covariate while holding the marginal distribution of the other covariates constant. We illustrate the differences between the methods with a numerical example and an empirical analysis of black–white wage differentials among males. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We assess the extent to which differences in socio-economic status are associated with racial and ethnic gaps in a fundamental measure of population health: the rate at which infants die. Using micro-level Vital Statistics data from 2000 to 2004, we examine mortality gaps of infants born to white, black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian, and Native American mothers. We find that between-group mortality gaps are strongly and consistently (except for Mexican infants) associated with maternal marital status, education, and age, and that these same characteristics are powerful predictors of income and poverty for new mothers in U.S. Census data. Despite these similarities, we document a fundamental difference in the mortality gap for the three high mortality groups: whereas the black-white and Puerto Rican-white mortality gaps mainly occur at low birth weights, the Native American-white gap occurs almost exclusively at higher birth weights. We further examine the one group whose IMR is anomalous compared to the other groups: infants of Mexican mothers die at relatively low rates given their socio-economic disadvantage. We find that this anomaly is driven by lower infant mortality among foreign-born mothers, a pattern found within many racial/ethnic groups. Overall, we conclude that the infant mortality gaps for our six racial/ethnic groups exhibit many commonalities, and these commonalities suggest a prominent role for socio-economic differences.