The long-run impact of the Great Recession on student debt

This paper investigates the effect of local labor market shocks during the Great Recession on subsequent student debt-related outcomes for a panel of 1 million student loan borrowers between the ages 17 and 34 in 2009, following that cohort’s credit reports for the subsequent 10 years. We find that the Great Recession significantly increased student indebtedness, delinquency and default on student debt, and overall non-repayment of student loans. The Great Recession’s effect on student indebtedness amplifies throughout the length of the panel, through 2019. We find that re-enrollment in higher education in response to the recession and declining state and local funding for public institutions are two likely mechanisms by which the recession exerted such a long-term impact on the financial status of student borrowers, beyond the initial economic shock and the sluggish labor market recovery.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Effective Competition Standard: A New Standard for Antitrust

America’s failing antitrust system is, in large part, to blame for today’s market power problem. Lax antitrust law and enforcement have allowed troubling trends like corporate consolidation to remain unchallenged, further embedding our skewed economy. In highly concentrated markets, individuals have limited choice and little power to pick their price, quality, or provider for the goods and services they need; workers are met with powerful employers and have little agency to shop around or bargain for competitive wages and benefits; and suppliers can’t reach the market without paying powerful intermediaries or succumbing to acquisition. Our Essay offers an alternative to the courts’ consumer welfare standard. Ambiguous and inadequate, the consumer welfare standard identifies threats to competition only by the potential consequences for consumers and ignores adverse effects on workers, suppliers, product quality, and innovation. Our effective competition standard would restore the primary aim of antitrust laws—namely, to promote competition wherever in the economy it has been compromised, including throughout supply chains and in the labor market. These changes are essential to protect competitive markets in the United States, as well as individuals and the economy at large, by deconcentrating private power

Rice koji reduced body weight gain, fat accumulation, and blood glucose level in high-fat diet-induced obese mice

Rice koji is considered a readily accessible functional food that may have health-promoting effects. We investigated whether white, yellow, and red koji have the anti-obesity effect in C57BL/6J mice fed a high-fat diet (HFD), which is a model for obesity. Mice were fed HFD containing 10% (w/w) of rice koji powder or steamed rice for 4 weeks. Weight gain, epididymal white adipose tissue, and total adipose tissue weight were significantly lower in all rice koji groups than in the HFD-rice group after 4 weeks. Feed efficiency was significantly reduced in the yellow koji group. Blood glucose levels were significantly lower in the white and red koji groups with HOMA-R and leptin levels being reduced in the white koji group. White and red koji increased glucose uptake and GLUT4 protein expression in L6 myotube cells. These results showed that all rice koji have the anti-obesity or anti-diabetes effects although the mechanisms may differ depending on the type of rice koji consumed

Vertical restraints and labor markets in franchised industries

This article combines 530 digitized Franchise Disclosure Documents and standard contracts with employer-identified job ads from Burning Glass Technologies to establish stylized facts about franchising labor markets and their relation to the vertical restraints and contractual provisions that limit the autonomy of franchisees vis a vis their franchisors. We report novel findings about the application of vertical restraints like Resale Price Maintenance, Exclusive Dealing, and No-poaching Restrictions, among many others, to a low wage workforce. A legal regime that favors the franchising business model incentivizes franchisees to profit at the expense of workers and to limit egalitarian tendencies operating in the workplace.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The effect of franchise no-poaching restrictions on worker earnings

We evaluate the nationwide impact of the Washington State Attorney General's 2018-20 enforcement campaign against no-poach clauses in franchising contracts, which prohibited worker movement across locations within a chain. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies job vacancies and Glassdoor salary reports from numerous industries, we estimate a 6% increase in posted annual earnings from the job vacancy data and a 4% increase in worker-reported earnings.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Detecting and enumerating soil-transmitted helminth eggs in soil: New method development and results from field testing in Kenya and Bangladesh

Globally, about 1.5 billion people are infected with at least one species of soil-transmitted helminth (STH). Soil is a critical environmental reservoir of STH, yet there is no standard method for detecting STH eggs in soil. We developed a field method for enumerating STH eggs in soil and tested the method in Bangladesh and Kenya. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) method for enumerating Ascaris eggs in biosolids was modified through a series of recovery efficiency experiments; we seeded soil samples with a known number of Ascaris suum eggs and assessed the effect of protocol modifications on egg recovery. We found the use of 1% 7X as a surfactant compared to 0.1% Tween 80 significantly improved recovery efficiency (two-sided t-test, t = 5.03, p = 0.007) while other protocol modifications-including different agitation and flotation methods-did not have a significant impact. Soil texture affected the egg recovery efficiency; sandy samples resulted in higher recovery compared to loamy samples processed using the same method (two-sided t-test, t = 2.56, p = 0.083). We documented a recovery efficiency of 73% for the final improved method using loamy soil in the lab. To field test the improved method, we processed soil samples from 100 households in Bangladesh and 100 households in Kenya from June to November 2015. The prevalence of any STH (Ascaris, Trichuris or hookworm) egg in soil was 78% in Bangladesh and 37% in Kenya. The median concentration of STH eggs in soil in positive samples was 0.59 eggs/g dry soil in Bangladesh and 0.15 eggs/g dry soil in Kenya. The prevalence of STH eggs in soil was significantly higher in Bangladesh than Kenya (chi-square, χ2 = 34.39, p < 0.001) as was the concentration (Mann-Whitney, z = 7.10, p < 0.001). This new method allows for detecting STH eggs in soil in low-resource settings and could be used for standardizing soil STH detection globally