Assessing individual, community, and financial factors in birth outcomes and associated health disparities

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In recent years, cities and counties across the U.S. have passed local minimum wage policies (LMW) that set minimum wage standards to upwards of 15 dollars per hour or more in an effort to close widening gaps between federal minimum wage thresholds and local cost of living. These LMW have raised the stakes considerably for answering outstanding questions about the impact of minimum wage increases, and particularly increases of this magnitude, on the earliest antecedents of population health. Namely, do changes in minimum wages – and particularly LMW– lead to gains in low-income families' economic wellbeing that can be observed as improvements in birth outcomes; do these policies help alleviate inequality of opportunity or do they actually have diminished or even negative consequences for individuals and communities that have historically experienced discrimination; and do these changes in minimum wages produce similar patterns of widening or narrowing differences on some economic outcomes and not others that suggests that these outcomes link the policies to widening or narrowing social inequalities in birth outcomes. Using microdata from the U.S. Vital Statistics Surveillance System birth certificate registries and Current Population Survey, this project aims to (1) examine the effect of minimum wage policy, and particularly LMW (city and county), on change in birth outcomes; (2) determine whether effects of these policies on birth outcomes are modified by individual and community characteristics (i.e., mother's race/ethnicity and nativity, labor market conditions and residential inequality of opportunity) or the duration of the community's exposure to the policies; and (3) evaluate whether the impact of minimum wage policies, and LMW in particular on economic outcomes (e.g., income, poverty, health insurance, unemployment), and the potential heterogeneity of these impacts across groups and localities, help explain the socioeconomic mechanisms through which minimum wage policy impacts birth outcomes. The project innovates by adapting and extending cutting-edge quasi-experimental techniques to construct a valid counterfactual control for what would have happened in absence of a change in minimum wage policy. In sum, the proposed project addresses several highly significant, but understudied, questions about the health effects of minimum wage policy. Findings from this work will also speak to broader questions about the potential for labor market policies to intervene on social determinants of health, potentially improving prenatal and infant health, which can provide life-long and intergenerational benefits for physical health and socioeconomic outcomes.