The JHR

Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adriana Lleras-Muney, Special Issue Guest Editors

The crisis is real but likely closer to the 66% rise in suicides than the 228% jump in reported behaviors. Accurate measurement matters for effective intervention. #MortalitySpecialIssue

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

Han Choi, Adriana Corredor-Waldron, Janet Currie & @cfelton.bsky.social that #SuicidalIdeation diagnoses exploded by 459% (driven largely by reporting changes), while actual youth #suicides rose 66% – tragic, but a very different magnitude.

Between 2006-2021, reported “suicidal behaviors” surged 228%. But this includes major changes in screening guidelines, diagnostic definitions, and coding rules – not just worsening health.

1/4
#EmergencyDepartment visits may be proof of a youth #MentalHealth crisis. New research reveals that the alarming numbers tell a more complex story than headlines suggest.

🚨New paper alert!🚨

I continue to be surprised by how much heat and cold impact different groups in society differently.

We find heat deaths are way more concentrated among young manual/agricultural workers, while cold deaths are more concentrated among older non-workers. (1/5)

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Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices William N. Evans and Ethan M.J. Lieber A county’s fraction of adults in 1990 on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is a strong predictor of growth in local drug death rates after 2000. The part of the SSDI rate related to drug deaths is not proxying for well-known contributors to the drug crisis, e.g. OxyContin. Instead, it appears to capture the fraction of people in chronic pain. We show that in the late 1990s, physicians began prescribing opioids more aggressively to treat pain. Taken together, our estimates suggest that drug deaths rates would be 43% lower in 2015 had prescribing practices stayed at 1995 levels.

Pain pills, not just despair, fueled the #OpioidCrisis. A county’s 1990 #disability rate predicted where drug deaths would explode. William N. Evans and Ethan M.J. Lieber found 43% fewer deaths if prescribing practices stayed at 1995 levels.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

Deaths per 100,000 by Daily temperature for different sectors, primary, not employed, service sector, technical/manual, and professional/managerial

4/4
@rdbressler.bsky.social, @annapappp.bsky.social, Luis Sarmiento, Jeffrey G. Shrader & Andrew J. Wilson find that #climate vulnerability isn’t just about where you live – it’s about what you do for work. #MortalitySpecialIssue

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

3/4
Young agricultural workers (15-24) face 10x higher heat death risk than same-age professionals. Yet cold kills differently: it claims older, non-working populations.

2/4
Across decades of mortality data in Mexico, researchers find that primary sector workers face higher #HeatRisks than otherwise similar workers in other sectors.

1/4
Who’s most vulnerable to extreme heat and cold? A new study looks at the role of occupation in shaping risks to health.

The Journal of Human Resources Determinants of Mortality David Cutler & Adriana Lleras-Muney, Special Issue Guest Editors

4/4
Key finding: A 10% decrease in soybean revenues = ~170 additional deaths across the Midwest. The effects are gendered and complex. #MortalitySpecialIssue

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

he authors found that when revenue drops resulted in #IncomeStress, #HealthIssues, and increased #mortality, especially among women and those aged 65+.

2/4
The study tracked 644 #rural counties from 1980-2019, looking at how fluctuations in corn and soybean revenues affected mortality rates in #FarmingCommunities.

1/4
Can #EconomicShocks actually be deadly? New research from Marc F. Bellemare, @jhihyunliu.bsky.social & Joleen Hadrich examine 40 years of data from the US Midwest to find out.

Employers’ Language Proficiency Requirements and Hiring of Immigrants Magnus Carlsson, Stefan Eriksson and Dan-Olof Rooth Labor markets in advanced economies have undergone substantial change due to globalization, technological improvements, and organizational changes, making language proficiency increasingly important even in less skilled jobs. Has this development led employers to shy away from hiring immigrants with limited host-country language skills? We shed light on this question by conducting a large-scale field experiment, where we introduce common second-language features in immigrants’ resumes. We also conduct employer surveys to interpret our experimental results. Our main finding is that language proficiency has a strong positive effect on being invited to a job interview, even in typical immigrant entry jobs.

#LanguageProficiency almost doubles callback rates for #immigrant job seekers - even in #LowSkillJobs. Magnus Carlsson, Stefan Eriksson & Dan-Olof Rooth found that improving from basic to advanced Swedish raised hiring chances from 8% to 15%.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

What drives #life and #death? From #EconomicShocks to #ClimateRisks, #MentalHealth to #biomarkers – new research reveals hidden forces shaping mortality worldwide. Read JHR’s newest #SpecialIssue on #mortality! #MortalitySpecialIssue
jhr.uwpress.org/page/mortality

Schools as Safety Nets: Break-downs and Recovery in Reporting of Violence Against Children Pilar Larroulet, Daniel Pailañir, Daniela Quintana, and Damian Clarke Schools are a key channel for formally reporting violence against children, but this channel broke down with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study how widespread such reporting declines were and to what extent they were recovered once schools reopened. Examining the universe of all criminal reports of violence against children in Chile, we observe sharp declines in reports of all types of violence (psychological, physical, and sexual), and find that full recovery in reporting had not occurred even nearly 2 years following initial school closures. Extending beyond the unexpected and long school closures during the pandemic, we find evidence of clear declines in violence reporting during regular school vacations and in a period of student strikes at the secondary level, suggesting a broader relevance of these results.

When schools closed during COVID, reports of #ChildAbuse dropped in Chile.
Pilar Larroulet, Daniel Pailañir, Daniela Quintana, and @damiancartmusic.bsky.social found that violence reporting didn’t return even after 2 years. Face-to-face contact with teachers matters.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Russell Weinstein

🏆Congratulations Russell Weinstein!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Reconsidering Peer Effects from Schoolmates Exposed to Violence at Home Jarod Apperson and Carycruz Bueno Prior research suggests that students exposed to domestic violence impose substantial negative externalities on peers’ learning and labor market outcomes. We test whether these findings generalize using nine-years of student data from a large urban school district linked to geocoded police records of at-home violence. In contrast to prior work, we find negligible peer effects. Adding one exposed peer to a classroom of 20 students reduces English and math scores by a statistically insignificant 0.006 standard deviations and increases disciplinary incidents by 3.2%. We reject achievement reductions greater than 0.017 standard deviations and disciplinary increases larger than 8.3%.

Students exposed to #HomeViolence don’t significantly harm classmates’ test scores or behavior. Jarod Apperson and Carycruz Bueno find that the negative impact on classmates’ grades, if any, is too small to matter.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Evan Soltas

🏆Congratulations Evan Soltas!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Jesse Rothstein

🏆Congratulations @jrothst.bsky.social !
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Quality and selection in regulated professions Gaetano Basso, Eleonora Brandimarti, Michele Pellizzari and Giovanni Pica Entry into many occupations is regulated to screen out the least able candidates, but available evidence suggests that this objective is rarely achieved. Using microdata covering the universe of Italian law school graduates (2007-2013), we show that this result is largely due to the strong intergenerational transmission of occupations within regulated professions. We find that having relatives already active as lawyers significantly increases the probability of passing the entry exam and boosts earnings, particularly for those who performed poorly in law school.

In Italy’s #LegalProfession, having lawyer relatives matters more than grades - especially for low performers.
Gaetano Basso, Eleonora Brandimarti, Michele Pellizzari, and Giovanni Pica found that 70% of connected low-GPA grads passed the bar.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

2025 Excellence in Reviewing Evan Riehl

🏆Congratulations Evan Riehl!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Wow what an honor!
Authors: now you know who to be mad at.

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Todd Pugatch

🏆Congratulations @toddpugatch.bsky.social !
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Mindy Marks

🏆Congratulations Mindy Marks!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century Rowena Gray, Siobhan O’Keefe, Sarah Quincy and Zachary Ward We present new evidence on the long-run evolution of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred after 1960. Longitudinal data suggests that task transitions were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial tasks, though gaps decreased after 1940. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work in all periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks widen Black-white inequality.

#NewResearch reveals a stark pattern: Black workers transitioned to cognitive jobs one generation after white workers. @econhistoryorbust.bsky.social, @smokeefe.bsky.social, Sarah Quincy & Zachary Ward find that even today, Black workers move down while white workers move up.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Karen Kopecky

🏆Congratulations Karen Kopecky!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.

Excellence in Reviewing 2025 Chris Karbownik

🏆Congratulations @chriskarbownik.bsky.social!
Thank you for your excellent work reviewing for the JHR in 2025.