Maya Leung Roy | Harvard Department of Economics/HBS

About Me

I am a PhD student in Harvard’s Business Economics program supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to joining Harvard, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at SIEPR working with Professor Heidi Williams. I graduated from MIT in 2020 with a B.S. in Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science.

Research Interests

Main fields: labor economics, public finance
Other interests: health economics, economic history

Research

In progress

In Sickness and In Health? Evidence on Health Shocks and Marital Instability

Awards: ASHEcon Program Chair Award: Long-Term Care, Aging, & Demography

Abstract: Marriage and health are positively correlated due to selection and protective effects, but little is known about how health affects marital dissolution. Using data on unanticipated health shocks from the PSID, I construct matched control groups of couples with similar expected marriage durability and exposure to health shocks and find that adverse health shocks raise divorce hazard: wives’ health shocks raise ten year divorce incidence by 69% while husbands’ raise it by 23%. The effect varies by diagnosis: cancer diagnoses do not significantly affect divorce hazard, while psychiatric and cardiovascular health shocks elevate it. The increase in divorce hazard cannot be explained by income loss or medical expenses. Instead, heterogeneity by household composition suggests that spousal care burdens mediate the effect of health shocks on divorce. Descriptive evidence on remarriage also suggests that both experiencing a health shock and being married to a spouse who experiences a shock affect spouses’ outside options in the event of divorce.

The Value of Hospice Care: Evidence from Facility Openings

With Yunan Ji and Edward Kong

On hold

Caring for Aging Parents: Health Effects of Division of Care Between Siblings

Fall 2019. An individual research project for my term paper in 14.33 Research and Communication in Economics at MIT. Supervised by David Atkin.

Abstract: This paper uses an IV strategy to test the hypothesis that the division of care-giving for aging parents between their sons and daughters influences parental health outcomes beyond the impact of the total amount of care provided. The results suggest that having a larger share of care provided by daughters is associated with more diagnosed conditions and worse mental health, but also show that the impact of care division on many other health outcomes is minimal or inconclusive. This paper fills gaps in the literature on health determinants of aging Americans and gender division of non-market labor.