Overview
John Bound is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). His research spans health economics, labor economics, and demography, with a focus on socioeconomic determinants of health and mortality, disability, and inequality in longevity. He collaborates extensively with Arline Geronimus on the health consequences of social disadvantage.
Key Contributions
- Compositional bias in LE trends (Bound, Geronimus, Rodriguez, and Waidmann 2015): demonstrated that the widely publicized dramatic declines in white low-education LE are largely artifacts of rising educational attainment; using relative educational rank, the apparent 3.9-year decline for white women shrinks to 1.2 years and the 2.2-year decline for white men becomes a 0.4-year gain.
- Reconciling DI employment effects (Bound, Lindner, and Waidmann 2014): SIPP-SSA decomposition across three population bins (beneficiaries, denied applicants, non-applicants with work limitations) at snapshots in 1990, 1996, and 2004. Showed that during 1990–96 DI can explain 50–100% of the employment decline among work-limited men (under extreme assumptions), but during 1996–2004 — when DI rolls barely grew — DI explains at most 20–50%. Aggregate studies overstate DI's causal role; the IV estimates (Bound 1989, French and Song 2014, von Wachter et al. 2011) are mutually consistent. See Causal Effects of DI Receipt.
- Insurance value of DI for mental health (Bound, Caswell, and Waidmann 2013): Using HRS wave 4 linked to SSA administrative records, showed that propensity-score-reweighted approved and rejected DI applicants with mental illness are economically indistinguishable — income, wealth, and earnings capacity converge — while health insurance coverage (90.5% vs. 53.1% of rejected applicants) is the largest benefit of award. Argues against the "marginal applicant" framing for mental illness claimants. See DI Denied Population.
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