Abstract: While a large body of research has highlighted the substantial and persistent earnings losses suffered by displaced workers (“scarring effect”), policy interventions aimed at alleviating these losses remain largely unexplored. This paper bridges this gap by evaluating the long-term effects of unemployment insurance (UI) on post-displacement outcomes. Leveraging cross-state variations in UI policy over time, we find that a 13-week extension in maximum UI duration reduces long-term cumulative earnings losses by 10-15% over a 10-year period. This reduction is primarily driven by an increase in hours worked, with minimal impact on wage rates. Conversely, UI replacement rates have a small and largely insignificant effect on earnings, wage rates, and labor supply. These patterns are consistent across different educational levels, racial backgrounds, and economic conditions at the time of displacement. As a mechanism, we provide suggestive evidence that the non-pecuniary aspects of a job, such as fringe benefits and overall job satisfaction, improve with longer maximum duration and explain a substantial portion of the effect of maximum duration on labor supply. We also show that a job search model with non-pecuniary job attributes and a hand-to-mouth assumption rationalize this findings. Our welfare analysis suggests that when taking the non-pecuniary job characteristics into account, more generous UI may improve long-term labor market outcomes, implying that the optimal level of UI generosity may be higher than commonly assumed.

Abstract: This paper investigates the health consequences of violating social norms by examining the impact of “shotgun marriages,” marriages following premarital conception, on birth outcomes. Focusing on South Korea’s rapid but spatiotemporally heterogeneous transition away from traditional Confucian values that strongly discourage non-traditional family formation, we estimate the infant-health penalty of this stigmatized family-formation pathway and its interaction with evolving social norms. Using comprehensive administrative birth registry data from 2000 to 2017, we implement a two-step matching procedure to mitigate non-random selection into shotgun marriages. We find that entering a shotgun marriage lowers standardized birthweight by 0.033 standard deviations and increases the probability of an infant being born small for gestational age by 0.714 percentage points. We find that this effect is larger in region-years with stronger traditional norms. We examine several alternative explanations, including differential prenatal care, selection on unobserved characteristics, and compositional changes from non-marital births or abortions. The evidence is most consistent with psychosocial stress associated with stigma, although we cannot directly observe maternal stress.

Abstract: Advances in genome-wide association studies have enabled polygenic indices for complex behavioral outcomes like same-sex sexual behavior (SSSB) to study how genetic predispositions interact with social environments. Using US nationally representative data, our analyses suggest that parental religiosity moderates associations between SSSB genetic propensity, reported SSSB and depressive symptoms. These results highlight the promise, as well as the ethical constraints, of studying sensitive phenotypes amid increasing data restrictions.