Delia Furtado

Brookings Event on Immigration and Care for Aging Baby Boomers

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On Tuesday, April 19th , Professor Furtado will participate in a webinar, “Who will care for aging baby boomers? Immigrants,” organized by the Center on Children and Families at Brookings. She will discuss her research on the relationship between immigrant labor and the quality of care provided in nursing homes.  Others will discuss how immigrants make it easier for the elderly to “age-in-place” and for the children of elderly parents to remain in the labor force.

After the presentations, a panel of immigration and health care experts will discuss the country’s caregiving needs and policies that can help address them.

If you are interested in participating, register here. During the live event, viewers can submit questions via email to events@brookings.edu or on Twitter using #FutureofCaregiving.

Graphic for 'Who Will Care for Aging Baby Boomers?' Event

European Economic Review Publishes Professor Furtado’s Paper on Work Norms and SSDI Take-Up

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Professor Delia Furtado’s paper “Who Goes on Disability when Times are Tough? The Role of Work Norms among Immigrants” has been published in the European Economic Review.

The paper considers how people’s views about the importance of work affect decisions to go on disability in response to rising unemployment rates.

See Professor Furtado’s tweets about the paper here.

Professor Furtado on NPR’s All Things Considered

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Nursing homes are really struggling. We all witnessed the devastating number of Covid deaths in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Now, nursing homes are toiling with labor shortages that make it very difficult to provide adequate care for residents. While the immediate impacts of the pandemic will eventually stabilize, in the coming decades, nursing homes will need to cope with increases in the demand for their services as baby boomers age. How will an industry that has struggled to hire and keep enough workers even before the pandemic be able to address the increasing care needs of an aging population?

One potential solution: A more open immigration policy. Professor Delia Furtado’s new research shows that nursing homes in areas receiving more immigrants are able to provide better quality care for residents. She talked about why this might be on The Indicator Podcast. Part of this interview aired on All Things Considered.

In related work, PhD student Treena Goswami finds that older college-educated native-born women remain in the labor force longer when they live in areas with more immigrants. Her analysis suggests that when immigrants are available to provide inexpensive care-giving or housekeeping services, older women (who can afford these services) do not have to prematurely leave the labor force in order to provide full time care for loved ones. Further evidence that policies allowing for more immigration might help the U.S. address the care-giving needs of an aging population.

Xiupeng Wang to MIT Post-Doc

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Xiupeng Wang successfully defended his PhD dissertation “Three Essays:  Cross-National Comparisons of Labor Market Dynamics” in June and will take a position as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the Initiative on the Digital Economy in the Sloan School of Management headed by Professor Erik Brynjolfsson.  The Economics Department congratulates Xiupeng on his success!

In his dissertation, Wang examined patterns of employment and wage dynamics that occur in response to technological innovation across multiple countries.  A key finding of his work is that those in middle skill jobs with relatively stronger skills systematically move to more cognitively oriented jobs with better pay when technology is introduced.  In contrast those in middle skill jobs with relatively weaker skills among workers in that category move to worse jobs characterized by manual work and worse pay when technology is introduced.  His research also shows that countries with higher levels of unionization tend to have fewer workers who move into lower paid jobs as technology is introduced.   Wang’s thesis committee consisted of Professors Ken Couch and Delia Furtado of UConn and Professor Richard Freeman of Harvard University.