The Economic Toll of Respiratory Infectious Diseases in Infants: Disruptions to Female Labor Supply and Mounting Healthcare Costs

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact that endemic respiratory infectious diseases (RID)–like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza (flu)–have on female labor supply and on the healthcare system in the United States. Specifically, this paper assesses the effects that infant RID hospitalizations have on women’s workforce participation, hospital charges and time spent in the hospital per RID visit, and on the population-level incidence of asthma developed in children one to five years after experiencing RID hospitalization as infants. These three research axes frame this paper as a proper investigation of the economic toll inflicted by regularly circulating RID each year. Fixed effects models utilizing within-county and within-time variation identified significant increases in female workforce separations across several industries in response to increases in infant RID incidence. Men, on the other hand, were not found to experience workforce participation consequences to the same extent or significance as women. Robustness checks support the hypothesis that female workforce separations are induced by the increased demand felt by mothers to take care of their sick children. Adding nuance, this thesis finds that women’s specific industry of employment and levels of job-specific training modulate the extent to which they reduce their labor supply when facing a child disease shock. This is the first study to establish infant RID as a regular determinant shaping female labor supply each year with its seasonal incidence. The author offers these findings as a partial explanation for the persistent gender workforce participation and earnings gap. This thesis finds that rising infant RID incidence disproportionately increases hospital charges but does not increase the length of hospitalizations by a considerable amount. This suggests that charges are increasing for reasons other than worsening severity of RID cases. Finally, this study provides population-level support to the hypothesis that infant RID is a risk factor for the development of asthma later in childhood.