Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Welfare Policies written by Megan Deepti Philomena Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the impact of welfare policies in India and the United States with an emphasis on the indirect effects on children’s well being. Welfare policies, especially policies that target poverty alleviation, have been shown to increase employment and family income. I explore their potential to have secondary effects on children’s health and education and to have long run effects. I analyze three large public welfare policies, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India, the WWII GI Bill in the United States and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the United States. The first chapter studies NREGA in India, the world’s largest public works program, which has increased employment and wages in rural India. Using a regression discontinuity with difference-in-difference empirical strategy based on a unique method used by the government to roll out the program in three phases, I find that the program significantly increased child health investments, reduced child mortality and increased children’s ability to complete math and reading exercises. The second chapter studies the WWII GI Bill in the United States, which provided generous education financial support to veterans and is popular for having increased college education. Using a regression discontinuity design based on the sharp fall in eligibility across birth cohorts due to the enlistment method, I find that the WWII GI Bill also caused a significant increase in high school completion and in the long run an increase in employment and a decrease in poverty. The third chapter studies the EITC in the United States, which is a tax credit scheme that supplements earned income and has increased employment particularly for single mothers with high school level of education or below. Using the differential increase in 1993 in the tax credit generosity across families with one child and families with two or more children, I find that the program increased child health insurance coverage, especially through private health insurance. The analyses of the three programs demonstrate that welfare policies can indirectly benefit children’s development and have positive effects in the long run, which should be included in their evaluation.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Policy induced Effects on Household Welfare and Community Development written by Licheng Xu and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public policy plays a vital role in almost every sector of the modern society. In particular, economic policies and regulations affect the decision-making process of market participants either directly or indirectly. The design and reform of economic policies often have intended or unintended micro-level consequences, affecting the welfare of ordinary households and the development of local communities. This dissertation investigates such policy-induced effects on three particular matters, with evidence from both China and the United States. In the context of China, reforms on the land tenure system and the household registration (hukou) system affect the land and labor allocation within rural households, resulting in changes to their economic welfare. On the other hand, in the U.S. context, the disbursement schedule of monthly food stamp benefits is directly linked to the consumption pattern of recipient households, which in turn affects the prevalence and severity of food security in the local communities. As such, a seemingly minor change in the timing of welfare payment can potentially lead to significant changes in the observed incidence of crime and violent conduct. Based on all the empirical findings, I discuss related policy implications accordingly in either context.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of United States Food Assistance Programs on Individual Behavior written by Gabrielle Alexandra Ferro and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays that look at the impact of food assistance programs on individuals behavior. The United States government offers a variety of welfare programs meant to provide assistance to families and individuals. This dissertation focuses on two specific food assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP). While the NSLP is not traditionally thought of as a welfare program, it provides subsidized meals for all school children, regardless of income, and further subsidizes meals for children from low-income households. The first essay uses primary data to determine if pre-ordering and nudging affect childrens selection behavior in the lunchroom. Research on food assistance programs and nutrition is particularly important given recent legislation changes and increases in adolescent obesity. The second essay analyzes the impact of students a la carte choices in the lunchroom on their selection of fruit, vegetables, and low fat dairy. The third essay studies the impact that state policies have on an individuals decision to migrate to another state.

Download or read book Three Essays on Immigration and Social Policy written by Tsewang Rigzin and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three papers at the intersection of social policy and immigration. The first paper analyzes the impact of immigrant welfare exclusion on government social spending at both an aggregate and specific social program level, using cross-national social expenditure panel data from 21 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2015 and taking advantage of the significant variation in welfare exclusivity across OECD countries by year. The second paper utilizes the variation in states' response to the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion to investigate its effects on low-income immigrants' inter-state mobility, specifically in-migration, and out-migration. Finally, the third paper utilizes data from the National Survey of Children's Health to examine the effect of the announcement of the Trump administration's revised Public Charge rule on insurance coverage and other health outcomes for children of immigrant parents.

Download or read book Three Essays on Welfare Implications of R D Policies in the Presence of Spillovers written by Jeong-Eon Kim and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays investigating welfare implications of R & D policies in the presence of spillovers. Unlike previous studies, it focuses on modeling endogenous or asymmetric spillovers to obtain more practical welfare implications. Each essay introduces a representative 'R & D model with spillovers'. The game we consider in each essay is basically composed of two stages: the R & D stage and the output stage. Each essay identifies the Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium (SPNE), and provides meaningful policy implications in terms of welfare. The first essay examines the policy implications of a research joint venture (RJV) while introducing endogenous spillovers and costly RJV. We derive the condition under which firms do not have an incentive to form an RJV, and identify when firms within an RJV share information completely. The second essay investigates the welfare effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in terms of north-south trade. It asks which southern countries, if any, should provide more IPR protection, assuming that southern countries have different abilities to absorb knowledge generated by northern country. The last essay combines the analysis of the R & D cooperation with the strategic trade policy theory. Endogenizing spillovers within an RJV, it identifies when the RJV works as a tool of strategic trade policy, and provides its welfare implications.

Download or read book Three Essays on Welfare Reform written by Traci L. Mach and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: In August 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act. This act eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the largest source of cash assistance available to needy families, and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a time-limited program with stringent work requirements. This dissertation utilizes interstate variation in pre-reform passage of waivers to examine the impact of the new system on individual behavior.

Download or read book Employment Migration and Living Arrangements written by Jonathan F. Pingle and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Social Effects of Public Policies in Emerging Countries written by Patricia A. Medrano and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Unintended Consequences of Social Politics written by Felipe A. Lozano-Rojas and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The core of this dissertation is the understanding of social policy, under the limitations established by resource and context constraints. On the three essays included here, the main concern is the interaction between the goals if social policy and the means by which societies, through a level of government, finance, fund, or advance those policies. Different levels of government have to pick among a series of policy levers to deal with budget or context constraints that the institutional framework provides them with. The spirit of this work is to inform the discussions surrounding those policies beyond the immediate areas that they intend to affect. The approach I take here evaluates policies on their unintended effects. Given complexities in policy design and implementation, I have conducted empirical policy analysis with the intention of understanding some of the factors that separate implementation from the ideal design and materialize the analysis into policy recommendations.

Download or read book Three Essays Evaluating the Impact of Public Policy on Vulnerable Populations written by Emily Rives Zier and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vulnerable populations consist of individuals who experience barriers to resources that the general public ordinarily does not. These individuals and, sometimes entire social groups, experience disparities due to personal attributes such as race or ethnicity, sex, sexual identity, age, disability, socioeconomic status, and geographic location. This work contains three essays that analyze public policies specifically intended to impact vulnerable populations. First, I utilize a difference-in-differences framework to measure the incidence of encountering a fake service dog by a legitimate assistance dog handler in states that implemented assistance dog fraud policy and states that did not between 2014 and 2018. I find that state policies are not significantly associated with reducing fake service dog encounters, and this issue is growing with time. My second essay employs linear regressions with interactions to assess whether the single or joint implementation of four supply-side policies - Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), doctor shopping policies, tamper-resistant prescription form policies, and identification requirement policies - are associated with a reduction of opioid-related deaths at the state level. I find that states with tamper-resistant prescription form policies experience higher death rates than their counterparts, despite the implementation of policies to curb deaths. Finally, in my third essay, I estimate a series of fixed effects regressions to measure the effect of immunization policy strictness on enrollment rates for school aged children. I find that stricter vaccination policy has a positive effect on overall enrollment for children aged 5 to 9 years old, particularly for public school enrollment, and that female 3 and 4-year-olds' enrollment is more negatively affected by policy strictness than is their male counterparts'. Each of these essays explores the relationship between state level policy and timely societal issues from a unique perspective. Their findings highlight the difficulty in addressing these complex problems and offer insight into their overarching impacts.

Download or read book Three Essays in Public Economics written by Hau Chyi and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Government Policy Labor Supply and Income Distribution written by Ximing Wu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Escape from Poverty Traps written by Kathleen Maura Farrin and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Essay 2, I examine food price spikes and food insecurity, particularly among subsistence households who are vulnerable to price increases for staple goods. I begin with a review of the recent food security crises, presenting a taxonomy of policy response for 124 countries. Because long-term development projects are a favorable response, I focus on policies of market integration through infrastructure buildup. I present a model that captures the welfare effects of transportation constraints for poor farmers in a village economy; after numerically solving for an economy-wide equilibrium, I vary the transportation constraint to compare outcomes under different levels of infrastructure development. I find increased rates of food insecurity and higher, more volatile village prices when transportation capacity is capped for a net importing village.

Download or read book Three Essays In Applied Regional Welfare Analysis written by Gunawan Wicaksono and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay (Chapter 1) explores the importance of spatial interactions in an overlapping generation model using an Agent-Based Model (ABM) approach. Incorporating geography into the original Galor-Zeira's model (1993) and allowing heterogeneous agents to interact locally, we show that social interactions play an important role in determining the long-run welfare and wealth distribution. This model shows the impact of endogenous wages and local interactions on agents' decision to invest in human capital. Our simulation reveals that neighborhood interactions lead to changes in the system's steady-state behaviors. In particular different strength of agents' interaction produces different outcomes in terms of the number of educated people and wealth inequality. This might explain persistent inequality in agents' wealth across locations. Policy implications are discussed. The second essay (Chapter 2) introduces the time elements of structural path analysis (SPA). Structural path analysis, which was first introduced by Defourny and Thorbecke (1984), broke down the global multipliers of the social accounting matrix (SAM) into direct influence and total influence. The introduction of time elements into SPA has enabled policymakers to estimate the range of time required for a shock to travel from its origin to its destination. Using the 2008 Indonesian SAM with a focus on the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, this study successfully introduces time into the SPA framework and estimates the possible time range within which a shock from the agricultural and manufacturing sectors will impact different households. The third essay (Chapter 3) explores impacts of monetary policy on the welfare of people in different income groups in Indonesia with a dynamic demand system. In the model, income groups adjust their expenditures shares in response to changes in commodity prices and aggregate expenditure levels. These adjustments are taken to be functions of the rate of change in the flow of financial services, which is affected by the rate of growth of the money supply (M2). Results of model estimation and deterministic numerical simulations conducted with the estimated model suggest that the welfare of the low-income group is affected more by monetary policy than is the welfare of the high-income group.

Download or read book Three Essays on Welfare Effects of Government Intervention written by Qinwen Tan and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is critical to mitigating climate change and achieving greater energy security. The desire to understand what governmental tools and how to apply to protect the local and global environment effectively and efficiently is a core driver for researches in the subfield of environmental economics. Despite the progress made in the modeling of social welfare with environmental externalities, many questions regarding secondbest biofuel policies, interaction between biofuel policies and finance system, and connection between trade and the environment remain unanswered. To date, the indirect, general effects of biofuel policies on the general economy, through "fiscal interaction effects" have largely been ignored. The thesis designs a general equilibrium model to investigate the fiscal interaction effects of tax credit policy. The marginal costs caused by tax credit are higher than the marginal benefits. In the second-best setting with pre-existing fuel tax and labor tax, tax credit is welfare reducing. The optimal second-best tax credit is estimated at the level of $0.22/GEEG ($0.15/gallon), which is 67% lower than the current tax exemption. Monte Carlo analysis shows that the probability of tax credit at $0.22/GEEG or less is 29% and at the current level or less is 72%. Next the thesis analyzes the effects of the quantitative ethanol mandate from both positive and welfare perspectives. Given the pre-existing government distortions, ethanol mandate is welfare enhancing. In the presence of fuel tax and labor tax, the net welfare gain caused by the ethanol mandate is estimated to be 8.61 billion dollars while the net welfare loss caused by tax credit is estimated to 26.87 billion dollars. Consistent with previous studies, the results show that the ethanol mandate dominates tax credit. Last, the thesis analyzes the effects of an ad valorem tariff on the local and global environment and total social welfare using a modified Bertrand duopoly model with environmentally differentiated products. The results show that tariff imposed by the developed country improves the local and global environment while reducing the social welfare. If the developed country has a high environmental standard, the country should restrict its imports of the dirty products. If the less developed country restricts the imports of clean products from the developed country, its social welfare and the local and global environment will get worse compared to a free trade case.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Welfare Impact of Natural Amenities and Natural Disasters written by Mona Ahmadiani and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation analyzes and investigates the welfare impacts of natural amenities and natural disasters. In the first essay, we shed light on an unresolved puzzle in models of interurban spatial equilibrium; in theory, housing prices and wages should compensate for differences in utility across space. Yet, empirical studies show a large spatial variation in subjective well-being (SWB) across United States counties. We find that these amenities explain a sizable fraction of the variation in county-level life satisfaction and that housing and labor markets do not fully capitalize the environmental and climate-driven spatial variation in the county-average SWB. This is important because the impacts of environmental quality on well-being provide a major rationale for environmental management and regulation. Finding that climate amenities are particularly important among local environmental conditions, in the second essay, we specifically focus on the impact of billion-dollars natural disasters on SWB and investigate the temporal impact of natural disasters. By utilizing a quasi-experimental design and combining subjective well-being and extreme weather events data, we estimate and monetize the adverse impact of natural disasters and explicitly focus on the intangible direct and indirect costs of natural disasters which are inevitably understated in prior analyses. Our findings illustrate that the impact of events on individual SWB decays six months after the event. This study provides useful information for policy-making, by suggesting a policy-relevant time frame to escalate the community healing process. We then investigate the attenuating impact of health care access, natural-peril insurance, and governmental assistance programs and find a partial compensating role for both private and public protective measures. The third essay estimates the economic value of multi-peril hazard insurance combining stated and revealed preference data. Our results indicate that the value of multi-peril hazard insurance is substantially higher for households who live in the coastal zone and on the oceanfront and lower for those not required to buy the flood insurance. We find a significant change in the welfare effect of climate-related disaster depending on individual food and erosion risk perceptions. This has clear policy implications as Congress debates on how to restructure the National Flood Insurance Program to enforce risk-rated insurance premium and deal with the financial deficit of NFIP.

Download or read book Do Work Incentives Work written by Carolyn M. Wolff and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The three essays in this dissertation focus on the impacts of work incentives geared towards two very different segments of the labor market. The first essay, "Does Incentive Pay Alter Physician Effort? An Analysis of the Time and Treatment that Physicians Provide to Patients," examines the link between incentive pay and effort among a group of highly-skilled workers: physicians. The other two essays, "Exiting TANF in South Carolina after the Deficit Reduction Act" and "What Happened to Cash Assistance for Needy Families," focus on a group of generally low-skilled, low-wage workers: welfare recipients. "Exiting TANF in South Carolina after the Deficit Reduction Act " examines the impact of a recent welfare reform aimed at promoting employment and self-sufficiency on durations of welfare recipiency. "What Happened to Cash Assistance for Needy Families?" identifies trends in welfare recipiency and self-sufficiency over the past twenty years. While a number of studies have attempted to measure the impact of financial incentives on physician behavior, none has examined the impact of performance-based incentive pay on broad measures of physician effort. In "Does Incentive Pay Alter Physician Effort? An Analysis of the Time and Treatment that Physicians Provide to Patients." I use newly available data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from 2006 through 2008 to estimate the effect of three specific types of performance-based incentive pay -- productivity incentives, patient-centered incentives, and practice profiling incentives -- on both the time physicians spend with patients and the intensity with which physicians treat patients. Using a discrete factor approximation approach to control for the endogeneity of incentive pay, I am able to estimate the impact of these types of incentive pay on physician effort. I find that performance-based incentive pay is associated with physicians spending significantly less time with each patient. I also find some evidence that performance-based incentive pay impacts physicians' intensity of treatment. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA) narrowed and standardized the work and work readiness activities that satisfy the work requirement of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. In "Exiting TANF in South Carolina after the Deficit Reduction Act, " I use administrative data from South Carolina's TANF program and employ event history techniques with a difference-in-difference estimation framework to analyze the effect of this policy change. I find that the DRA's definition of work and work readiness activities reduced the likelihood of black recipients to exit the TANF program in South Carolina while increasing the likelihood of exit for non-black recipients. For blacks, this decrease in the hazard comes from a decrease in the likelihood of exit through employment. For non-blacks, the result stems from an increase in the hazards for administrative exits and for other income exits. I also find that the reform led to longer durations of TANF benefit receipt in South Carolina for black recipients and shorter durations of cash assistance for non-black recipients. A primary goal of welfare reform since the early 1990's has been to increase the self-sufficiency of welfare recipients. The essay "What Happened to Cash Assistance for Needy Families?, " coauthored with David. C. Ribar, examines trends in the characteristics and outcomes for recipient families to determine if welfare recipients are becoming more self-sufficient. Using annual public use data on AFDC and TANF households from the Department of Health and Human Services, we find both positive and negative trends over the past twenty years. We find that the size of the caseload has decreased, the fraction of the caseload with earned income has increased, and the average earnings of welfare recipients has increased. On the other hand, we find that the fraction of child-only cases has increased, the caseload has disproportionately dropped the least-skilled households, average benefits fell faster than earnings grew, and the majority of households that exit TANF have no earnings."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.