Fear of immigration enforcement may deter undocumented parents from enrolling their US citizen children in public health insurance. This paper examines the effect of providing legal status to parents through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for health insurance coverage among US-born children. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that DACA eligibility among likely undocumented mothers increases Medicaid enrollment for their US-born children by five percentage points; however, I do not find an overall change in health insurance coverage, potentially due to a substitution effect between Medicaid and private insurance. Additionally, I do not find evidence to support a similar effect among US-born children with likely undocumented fathers.

I study the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) on labor market outcomes among potentially eligible immigrants. DACA allowed undocumented immigrants to participate in the labor market without fear of deportation, which might be expected to increase the probability of working and allowing workers to move to higher-skilled occupations. However, using a regression discontinuity design, I find very little to no effects on the probability of working and the likelihood of working in high-skilled jobs among DACA-eligible immigrants. The confidence intervals permit modest effects on these variables, but rule out large ones. Overall, my results suggest that temporary legal status had limited effects for DACA-eligible immigrants.

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), also known as Gun Violence Restraining Orders in California, are intended to prevent gun violence by temporarily removing firearms from individuals judged to be at risk of self-harm or harming others. We use data from the Longitudinal Study of Handgun Ownership and Transfer—a statewide cohort of over 38 million registered voters in California from 2004 to 2021—to examine the effects of ERPOs on suicide risk among handgun owners using a difference-in-differences design. We find that ERPOs provide a modest protective effect on suicide risk (risk difference: –4.2 suicide deaths per 100,000 handgun owners; 95% confidence interval: –9.7, 1.25). Our event-study analysis suggests that suicide risk among handgun owners remains relatively stable in the post-ERPO period, even as the number of ERPOs increased. Importantly, our findings apply to handgun owners and should not be interpreted as evidence that ERPOs had no effects in the group actually targeted by these orders. This study provides the first individual-level evidence on the effects of ERPOs.

Are estimates typically closer to the true parameter value when those estimates are published in highly-ranked economics journals? Within literatures, we find that the distribution of estimates does not appreciably differ by journal rank. Therefore, regardless of what the true parameter value is that literatures are attempting to estimate, it cannot be that the estimates in high-ranked journals are substantially closer to it. We discuss a number of possible explanations and implications for a variety of audiences.