SBEE seminar series: Jevay Grooms
Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Essential Workers, Mental Health, and the Coronavirus Pandemic
Abstract:
It’s clear that the pandemic is disproportionately impacting communities of color. In this study, we investigate mental health distress among essential workers during the Coronavirus pandemic across race and ethnicity. We evaluate individual responses to the Patient Health Questionnaire and General Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire using unique, nationally representative, data set. Our findings suggest that Black essential healthcare workers disproportionately report symptoms of anxiety; while, Latino essential health-care workers disproportionately report symptoms of depression. Additionally, we find that being a Black or Latino essential non-health care worker is associated with higher levels of distress related to anxiety and depression. These findings highlight the additional dimensions to which Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately being affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, it calls into question how essential worker classifications, compounded by US unemployment policies, is potentially amplifying the mental health trauma experienced by workers.
Speaker Bio:
Jevay Grooms is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Howard University in Washington D.C. Prior to joining Howard University she was an NIH Senior Fellow at the University of Washington. She earned her PhD at the University of Florida in 2016. Before her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington she spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a Visiting Instructor at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. She also spent a summer as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University as part of the American Economic Association Summer Program.
She is an applied microeconomist with research areas of interests that lie at the intersection of public economics, health economics, and studies of poverty and inequality. Her overall research agenda is to study the impediments to adequate health care delivery and health outcomes of underserved and vulnerable populations with the keen intent to understand how poverty and the legacy of wealth inequality have contributed to health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities.
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The Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics seminar series is a joint presentation of the School of Information, the Ross School of Business and the Department of Economics (LSA).
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