Catherine Maclean

Associate Professor
Department of Economics, Temple University

Catherine Maclean, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Temple University. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Associate with the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA).

Her research uses health and labor economic theory to empirically explore the effects of public and private policies and employment, particularly as it relates to health insurance coverage, substance use, body weight, and mental health.

Her current work focuses on the influence of policies on health insurance coverage, substance use, causes and consequences of substance use and mental health, and the role of employment in substance use and mental health.

  • The United States is one of three OECD countries that does not provide universal access to paid sick leave for all employees. Over the past years, just 12 states have passed sick pay mandates. In a new working paper, P4A researcher Nicolas R. Ziebarth of Cornell University and colleagues Catherine Maclean and Stefan Pichler provide first-of-its-kind evidence on how state-level sick pay mandates affect coverage rates, sick leave utilization, and labor costs.

    March 1, 2020

  • The U.S. is one of three industrialized countries without universal access to paid sick leave. Thirty-five percent of all full-time employees lack this coverage. Among low-income and part-time employees, uninsurance rates exceed 80 percent. In addition to concerns about inequality, worker well-being, and productivity, a lack of paid sick leave also contributes to the spread of disease, when ill workers are forced to choose between their health and their job.

    September 27, 2017

    Has Evidence