PHS Monday Seminar: Mustafa Hussein, PhD, “Urban Labor Policy as Health Policy: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from US Metropolitan Living Wage Ordinances”
Mustafa Hussein is an Assistant Professor of Public Health Policy at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Metropolitan living wage (LW) policies, enacted by many US cities in the 1990s and early aughts, offered intriguing experiments in local labor market reform, including mandating a higher minimum wage and more generous benefits for low-wage workers in businesses receiving benefits from local governments. These policies appear to have led to positive overall economic effects for low-wage workers, but their health implications remain unexamined. Evaluating the health effects of LW policies may hold unique lessons for improving population health and health equity in an increasingly urbanized world. In the Community Tracking Study (1996-2007), we leverage a natural experiment in the timing of LW introduction across US metropolitan areas to estimate LW policy effects on health outcomes using a difference-in-differences design across wage and education groups. We find consistent and generally robust positive effects on health outcomes, particularly access to health insurance and office visits, among workers in the bottom decile of the wage distribution and those with a high school diploma. The magnitude of health effects generally appears to be proportional to the degree of mandated benefit generosity and quality of implementation. These findings support an important role for urban labor policy as a malleable determinant of population health.
Join Meeting
Meeting number (access code): 120 960 4373
Meeting password: eB2JFihji53 (32253445 from phones)
This post was authored by ROSALIND FRANCES BENDIX-LEWIS on 11/03/2020.