Economics Insights @ CBS

This paper analyzes longitudinal state-level data during the period 1995–2004 to investigate whether use of newer prescription drugs has reduced the ratio of the number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits to the working-age population (the “DI recipiency rate”).  

Nursing care is arguably the single biggest factor in both the cost of hospital care and patient satisfaction. Inadequate inpatient nursing levels have also been cited as a significant factor in medical errors and emergency room overcrowding. Yet, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the current methods of determining nurse staffing levels, including the most common one of using minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. In this paper, we represent the nursing system as a variable finite-source queuing model.

The ability of humans to display bodily expressions that contradict mental states is an important developmental adaptation. The authors propose that mind-body dissonance, which occurs when bodily displayed expressions contradict mentally experienced states, signals that the environment is unusual and that boundaries of cognitive categories should be expanded to embrace atypical exemplars. Four experiments found that mind-body dissonance increases a sense of incoherence and leads to category expansion.

One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women.