Suchergebnisse

Significance Understanding the relationship between college and political ideology is of increasing importance in the United States in the context of intense partisan polarization. Leveraging a quasi-experiment and a panel survey, we find no evidence that a sample of students moves leftward along the political spectrum during the first year of college. However, we find strong evidence of a causal effect of roommates: Students move toward their randomly assigned roommates' political ideology over the course of their first year of college. Our study identifies causal evidence of social network effects for political views and identifies these causal effects for college students specifically. Our findings are inconsistent with claims that college makes students more liberal.

Abstract
While considerable research studies the association between education and health, no prior research estimates the magnitude of health improvements associated with more schooling, accounting for both quantity and quality of life. We use longitudinal PSID data that combines repeated survey measures of health status with mortality data to measure the number of Quality-Adjusted Life Years accruing over a 23-year period. To reduce endogeneity concerns we utilize detailed survey information on family background, cognitive, and non-cognitive skills; and we estimate sibling fixed effects models. An additional year of schooling is associated with 0.20-0.38 additional QALYs over the 23-year study period. These estimates are considerably larger than looking at quality-unadjusted life years. We estimate that an additional year of schooling is associated with an incremental discounted lifetime value of $26,000-$49,000 of health. To the extent that our results approximate causal estimates, increasing education may be a cost-effective way to improve population health.

Abstract
Mental health problems represent a potentially important but relatively unexplored factor in explaining human capital accumulation during college. We conduct the first study, to our knowledge, of how mental health predicts academic success during college in a random longitudinal sample of students. We find that depression is a significant predictor of lower GPA and higher probability of dropping out, particularly among students who also have a positive screen for an anxiety disorder. In within-person estimates using our longitudinal sample, we find again that co-occurring depression and anxiety are associated with lower GPA, and we find that symptoms of eating disorders are also associated with lower GPA. This descriptive study suggests potentially large economic returns from programs to prevent and treat mental health problems among college students, and highlights the policy relevance of evaluating the impact of such programs on academic outcomes using randomized trials.

This qualitative study explores key informant perceptions (i.e., clinicians, insurers, and state officials) about implementing New Mexico's No Behavioral Health Cost Sharing law and how the law may affect downstream outcomes - spending and access.

Mental illness stigma has been identified by national policy makers as an important barrier to help seeking for mental health. Using a random sample of 5,555 students from a diverse set of 13 universities, we conducted one of the first empirical studies of the association of help-seeking behavior with both perceived public stigma and people's own stigmatizing attitudes (personal stigma). There were three main findings: (a) Perceived public stigma was considerably higher than personal stigma; (b) personal stigma was higher among students with any of the following characteristics: male, younger, Asian, international, more religious, or from a poor family; and (c) personal stigma was significantly and negatively associated with measures of help seeking (perceived need and use of psychotropic medication, therapy, and nonclinical sources of support), whereas perceived stigma was not significantly associated with help seeking. These findings can help inform efforts to reduce the role of stigma as a barrier to help seeking.

Does college change students' political preferences? While existing research has documented associations between college education and political views, it remains unclear whether these associations reflect a causal relationship. We address this gap in previous research by analyzing a quasi-experiment in which university students are assigned to live together as roommates. While we find little evidence that college students as a whole become more liberal over time, we do find strong evidence of peer effects, in which students' political views become more in line with the views of their roommates over time. This effect is strongest for conservative students. These findings shed light on the role of higher education in an era of political polarization.

As of January 1, 2021, most U.S. hospitals are required to publish pricing information on their website to promote more informed decision making by consumers regarding their care. In a nationally representative sample of 470 hospitals, we analyzed whether hospitals met price transparency information reporting requirements and the extent to which complete reporting was associated with ownership status, bed size category, system affiliation, and location in a metropolitan area. Fewer than one quarter of sampled hospitals met the price transparency information requirements of the new rule, which include five types of standard charges in machine-readable form and the consumer-shoppable display of 300 shoppable services. Our analyses of hospital reporting by organizational and market attributes revealed limited differences, with some exceptions for nonprofit and system-member hospitals demonstrating greater responsiveness with respect to the consumer-shoppable aspects of the rule.