Christopher J Ruhm

University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. 1984; University of California, Berkeley, M.A. 1981; University of California, Davis, B.A. (with highest honors) 1978. Fields of Specialization: Health Economics, Labor Economics, Public Economics.

There are 50 included publications by Christopher J Ruhm :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Advance Notice and Postdisplacement Joblessness 1992 3586 This article investigates whether prenotification decreases postdis-placement joblessness. Reduced-form estimates indicate that lengthy written notice is associated with small increases in the probability of avoiding nonemployment but with no decline...
Advance Notice, Job Search, and Postdisplacement Earnings. 1994 4373 Three to 5 years after job displacements, workers receiving the advance notice mandated by current law earn approximately 10% more than their nonnotified counterparts. This differential is not the result of firms systematically notifying persons with...
Age, Socioeconomic Status and Obesity Growth 2009 4599 We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine how body weight changes with age for a cohort moving through early adulthood, to investigate how the age-obesity gradient differs with socioeconomic status (SES) and t...
Alcohol Policies and Highway Vehicle Fatalities. 1996 9424 This study investigates the impact of beer taxes and a variety of alcohol-control policies on motor vehicle fatality rates. Special attention is paid to omitted variables biases resulting from failing to adequately control for grassroots efforts to r...
Are Recessions Good For Your Health? 2000 33331 This study investigates the relationship between economic conditions and health. Total mortality and eight of the ten sources of fatalities examined are shown to exhibit a procyclical fluctuation, with suicides representing an important exception. Th...
Are Workers Permanently Scarred by Job Displacements? 1991 5157 This paper investigates whether workers suffer lasting "scars" following job displacements. Using David T. Ellwood's (1982) terminology, "scars" represent persistent effects, whereas "blemishes" are transitory adjustments which dissipate over time. M...
Bridge Employment and Job Stopping: Evidence from the HARRIS/Commonwealth Survey 1994 1487 This article analyzes a 1989 Louis Harris and Associates survey designed to elicit information on the employment histories and job-stopping behavior of men and women who then were approaching or had recently reached retirement age. The results indica...
Bridge Jobs and Partial Retirement. 1990 7240 The "job-stopping" process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer "bridge" employment, partial retirement, and reverse retirement. Fewer than two-fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs, over half partially ...
Bringing science to market: Commercializing from NIH SBIR awards. 2009 2259 We offer empirical information on the correlates of commercialization activity for research projects funded through the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award program. Based on this analysis we sugg...
Career Employment and Job Stopping 1991 3412 Career jobs typically end well before retirement and are followed by a period of postcareer employment. Although the most financially successful transitions occur when new positions are obtained in the same industry and occupation as the career job, ...
Current and Future Prevalence of Obesity and Severe Obesity in the United States. 2007 5467 This study examines past patterns and projects future prevalence rates of obesity and severe obesity among US adults. Trends in body mass index (BMI), overweight (BMI25), obesity (BMI30), class 2 obesity (BMI35), class 3 obesity (BMI40) and class 4 o...
Deaths Rise in Good Economic Times: Evidence From the OECD (with Ulf-G. Gerdtham). 2006 4377 This study uses aggregate data for 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over the 1960–1997 period to examine the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and deaths. The main finding is that total mortality a...
Displacement Induced Joblessness. 1991 2937 Previous research examining the nonemployment of displaced workers suffers from methodological flaws which reinforce widely held but substantially incorrect views about the pattern of postseparation joblessness. In particular, adjustment difficulties...
Do Earnings Increase with Job Seniority? 1990 4001 Cross-sectional wage regressions overstate the extent to which earnings increase with job seniority because they fail to take account of the sorting which occurs when high wage workers have lower rates of mobility. The main source of bias is a negati...
Do Long Tenure Workers Have Special Problems Following Job Displacement 1989 2992 This article examines whether the adjustment problems that follow job displacement become more severe as preseparation tenure increases. Recent research using nation- ally representative samples generally finds that the independent effect of seniorit...
Do Pensions Increase the Labor Supply of Older Men? 1996 3090 This paper investigates the relationship between pension coverage and the retirement behavior of older men. Pensions are associated with higher work involvement for males in their late fifties and early sixties but with lower rates of job holding for...
Does Drinking Really Decrease in Bad Times? 2002 6188 This paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and drinking using individual-level data from 1987 to 1999 interview years of the ?behavioral risk factor surveillance system? (BRFSS). We confirm the procyclical variation in ...
Does Prekindergarten Improve School Preparation and Performance? 2007 8373 Prekindergarten programs are expanding rapidly but evidence on their effects is limited. Using rich data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we estimate the effects of prekindergarten on children’s school readiness. We find that prekindergarten ...
Econometric Estimation of Proportional Hazard Models 1993 7772 When analyzing duration data, covariates are typically assumed to modify hazard rates through the use of the proportional hazard model, in which the baseline hazard is multiplied by some function of the regressors and associated parameters, g(•), to ...
Economic Causes and Consequences of Obesity. 2005 19663 Obesity is not only a health but also an economic phenomenon. This chapter (a) examines underlying economic causes, such as technological advance¬ments, behind the obesity epidemic; (b) describes economic consequences of obesity, including increasing...
Economic Conditions and Alcohol Problems. 1995 9494 This study investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and two alcohol-related outcomes — liquor consumption and highway vehicle fatalities. Fixed effect models are estimated for the 48 contiguous states over the 1975-1988 time per...
The Economic Consequences of Labor Mobility. 1987 3758 Unlike most previous research on the relative changes in earnings of job stayers and job changers, this study examines the variance in earnings changes rather than simply average changes, men and women rather than only men, and the five-year period f...
The Economic Consequences of Parental Leave Mandates: Lessons from Europe. 1998 15951 This study investigates the economic consequences of rights to paid parental leave in nine European countries over the 1969 through 1993 period. Since women use virtually all parental leave in most nations, men constitute a reasonable comparison grou...
Educational Climate in Elective Adult education: Shared Decision Making and Communication Patterns 1989 5150 Educational climate represents the social and contextual qualities of an organization as perceived by the participants. The theoretical construct of educational climate encompasses a range of variables which have been categorized as ecology, milieu, ...
The Effects of Parental Employment and Parental Leave on Child Health and Development 2002 3740 The first years of life are recognized as a critical period for children.1,2 Since, increasingly, young children are raised in families where mothers work, parents may have less time and energy to invest in their offspring. Parental leave is therefor...
The Extent and Consequences of High School Employment 1995 4820 During the mid-1970s, a number of prestigious commissions convened to study the problems of adolescents reached the common conclusion that additional early work experience would foster the development of personal responsibility, smooth the transition...
Family Expenditures on Child Care 2007 3083 This study examines the child care “expenditure share,” defined as child care expenses divided by after-tax income. We estimate that the average child under six years of age lives in a family that spends 4.9 percent of after-tax income on child care....
Gender Differences in Employment Behavior During Late Middle Age 1996 3885 Gender differences in the employment rates of 55- to 59-year-olds are concentrated among married persons. Wives are much less likely than their husbands to hold jobs and, more often, to cite family motivations as their most important reason for not w...
Good Times Make You Sick 2003 5239 This study uses microdata from the 1972–1981 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) to ex-amine how health status and medical care utilization fluctuate with state macroeconomic conditions. Personal characteristics, location fixed-effects, general ...
A Healthy Economy Can Break Your Heart 2007 3638 Panel data methods are used to investigate how deaths from coronary heart disease (CHD) in the United States vary with macroeconomic conditions. A one-percentage-point reduction in unemployment is predicted to raise CHD mortality by 0.75%, correspond...
Healthy Living in Hard Times 2005 4670 Using microdata for adults from 1987 to 2000 years of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), I show that smoking and excess weight decline during temporary economic downturns while leisure-time physical activity rises. The drop in to...
The Impact of Advance Notification: A Comment On a Study By Nord and Ting. 1992 1696 In their analysis of the effects of advance notification of plant closings, Nord and Ting (ILR Review, July 1991) claim that much can be expected of current legislation that mandates a 60-day prenotification standard because the outcomes of voluntary...
Incentives to Transfer Patients Under Alternative Reimbursement Mechanisms 1988 3302 Alternative hospital reimbursement systems may influence the frequency and timing of patient transfers between hospitals as well as the patient's length of stay. This paper examines the characteristics of reimbursement systems that result in efficien...
Inequality in children’s school readiness and public funding 2005 2409 “By the year 2000, all children should enter school ready to learn. . . All children will have access to high-quality and developmentally appropriate pre-school programs that help prepare children for school.” National Education Goals Panel, Goal 1 ...
Inequality in Preschool Education and School Readiness 2004 8054 Attendance in U.S. preschools has risen substantially in recent decades, but gaps in enrollment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families remain. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-199...
Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment? 1997 14990 This study examines how high school employment affects future economic attainment. There is no indication that light to moderate job commitments ever have a detrimental effect; instead, hours worked during the senior grade are positively correlate...
Job Loss and Job Change: Discussion by the Authors. 1987 3037 All three papers deal with important policy issues. Ruhm, whose analysis ranges the most widely, goes furthest in recommending policy activism. Podgursky and Swaim (P&S) are somewhat more restrained, but it is clear that they too favor special assist...
Job Tenure and Cyclical Changes in the Labor Market 1987 3001 Using data on male heads of households from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper finds that although short tenure workers accounted for a disproportionate share of total unemployment, during the early seventies, cyclical fluctuatio...
Macroeconomic conditions, health and mortality 2004 5764 Although health is conventionally believed to deteriorate during macroeconomic downturns, the empirical evidence supporting this view is quite weak and comes from studies containing methodological shortcomings that are difficult to remedy.Recent re...
Maternal Employment and Adolescent Development 2008 3447 This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the cognitive development and body weight of 10 and 11 year olds, controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family characteristics. The results suggest that limited market work b...
Mortality Increases During Economic Upturns 2005 1911 The conventional wisdom is that mortality falls when the economy temporarily improves and increases when it weakens. This strong apriori belief has engendered substantial attention to be paid to analyses indicating a countercyclical variation in deat...
Parental Leave and Child Health 2000 28471 This study investigates whether rights to parental leave improve pediatric health. Aggregate data are used for 16 European countries over the 1969 through 1994 period. More generous paid leave is found to reduce deaths of infants and young children. ...
Parental Leave Policies and Parents’ Employment and Leave-Taking 2009 3435 We describe trends in maternal employment and leave-taking after birth of a new-born and analyze the extent to which these behaviors are influenced by parental leave policies. Data are from the June Current Population Survey (CPS) Fertility Supplemen...
The Persistence of Preschool Effects: Do Subsequent Classroom Experiences Matter 2007 5657 Using rich longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K), we find that children who attended preschool enter public schools with higher levels of academic skills than their peers who experienced other type...
Policy Watch: The Family and Medical Leave Act 1997 6364 President Clinton's first legislative action upon taking office in February 1993 was to sign the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The act is designed to "support families in their efforts to strike a workable balance between the competing demands...
Technology, Trade Sensitivity, and Labor Displacement 2000 2624 Examines the relationship between international trade, technology, and exposure to job displacement, using data on displaced workers as well as those at risk of job dislocation for the two-year periods 1986-1987 and 1990-1991. Factors contributing to...
The Timing of Mothers’ Employment After Childbirth. 2008 2212 According to data from a new nationally representative study of women who gave birth in 2001, the speed of a woman's return to work after the birth of a child was influenced by many factors, including family structure, education, age, birth history,...
Trade and Displacement in Manufacturing (with John T. Addison and Douglas A. Fox) 1995 2401 Trade sensitivity is linked to job loss, but does not affect the duration of unemployment or the probability of the loss of health insurance; it is only weakly associated with subsequent earnings.
Why are disadvantaged adults more likely to be obese? 2007 944 Obesity at the individual level is a medical problem, but the rapid rise in global obesity is a policy problem. Research on US data shows that the obesity is inversely related to a variety of measures of social and economic advantage. One important f...
Workplace drug abuse policy 1993 3813 An estimated 70 percent of illicit drug users are in the workforce. This paper studies workplace policies relating to drug abuse treatment and testing in a labor market with asymmetric information about worker proclivities to abuse drugs and to incur...