a dynamic model of welfare reform a dynamic structural model of labor supply welfare participation and food stamp participation is estimated using the 1992 1993 and 1996 panels of the survey of income and program participation details of various policies including welfare time limits work requirements and earned income tax credit eitc are incorporated formally in the budget constraint policy simulations reveal that the economy accounts for half of the increase in the labor supply of female heads of family between 1992 and 1999 a time limit results in a larger efficiency gain than a work requirement or a direct reduction in welfare benefits a reform package can lead to both a reduction in the government expenditure and an improvement in utility the eitc expansion results in a substantial efficiency gain among individuals with the lowest expected wage these individuals are almost unaffected by the economic expansion but their income and utility increase significantly under the reform package

is there a bright side to a black market for inkind transfers a number of recent studies analyze inkind transfer programs while acknowledging the presence of a black market 3 4 9 however the black market for inkind transfers typically finds its way into these analyses only in terms of the recipients ability to sell their inkind transfers as such it is viewed as undesirable and as a leakage from the program in this study i take a more complete view of black markets and the policy opportunities they present and i discover that black markets may instead have desirable consequences this research takes a different approach to the study of inkind transfers and black markets by acknowledging the existence of both sides of the black market demand as well as supplyand by exploring the possibility that government policy may be able to exploit the black market incentive this approach yields results that often contradict those from existing analyses and suggest that a black market under certain conditions may reallocate resources efficiently and perhaps equitably and can reduce the cost of inkind transfer programs to the government while maintaining or even improving the well being of recipients finally while this study focuses on the food stamp program as an example its implications can be extended to other inkind transfer programs the next section reviews the standard economic and econometric analyses of inkind transfer programs and then examines how they are affected by acknowledging the demand side of the black market in section iii i construct a simple theoretical model to aid in identifying the likely buyers of illegal food stamps section iv explores ways to make desirable use of the existence of a black market incentive and proposes an alternative program that lowers costs by exploiting this incentive section v contains conclusions

do formula or competitive grant funds have greater impacts on state agricultural productivity this article examines the impact of public agricultural research and extension on agricultural total factor productivity at the state level the objective is to establish whether federal formula or competitive grant funding of agricultural research has a greater impact on state agricultural productivity a pooled cross section time series model of agricultural productivity is fitted to annual data for forty eight contiguous states over 1970 1999 our results show that public agricultural research and agricultural extension have statistically significant positive impacts on state agricultural productivity in addition hatch formula funding has a larger impact on agricultural productivity than federal competitive grant funding and a reallocation of hatch formula funds to competitive grant funding would lower agricultural productivity this seems unlikely to be a socially optimal policy furthermore from a cost benefit perspective our study shows that the social marginal annualized real rate of return to public resources invested in agricultural research is 49 62 and to public agricultural extension the rate is even larger

u s sweeteners combating excess consumption with an excise tax obesity is a public health problem in the united states that has been linked to excess sweetener consumption the american heart association aha recommends no more than 6 9 teaspoons capita day while the u s food and drug administration fda recommends 200 calories capita day of caloric sweetener consumption both recommendations are well below the reported 2016 sweetener consumption levels we quantify the input tax rates needed to reduce the current excess sweetener consumption level to the aha and fda recommended standards we calculate the joint tax in the united states on two major sweeteners sugar and high fructose corn syrup hfcs to be 31 and 24 cents per pound respectively based on the aha standard and 19 and 17 cents per pound respectively using the fda standard these taxes would be roughly the magnitude of the existing sugar and hfcs prices in both cases the tax incidence on producers is much smaller than on consumers our focus is very different from past studies in that it deals with the effect of taxes on inputs to meet the recommended target rather than a selective tax sugar sweetened beverage tax if a sweetener tax were implemented u s sugar and hfcs producers would lose us 398 us 489 and us 683 us 844 million per year respectively

likely effects on obesity from proposed changes to the us food stamp program abstract some have suggested that the us food stamp program fsp should be revised with a view to combating obesity among the poor in this paper we assess the likely impacts of allowing fsp participants to purchase only healthy foods when using food stamps our results indicate that fsp participants would probably increase their consumption of healthy food but the implications for their purchases of unhealthy food are not clear market wide consequences are even less clear because changing what may be purchased using food stamps would lead to higher prices for healthy foods and lower prices for unhealthy foods and these price effects would feed back into consumer decisions with adverse effects on consumption patterns of both participants and non participants in the fsp in addition more restrictive rules on the use of food stamps would discourage participation in the fsp we conclude that while reforming the fsp may indeed to lead to better diets among participants it is likely to be an ineffective and inefficient instrument for bringing about desired nutritional outcomes unless accompanied by additional policy instruments

linking agricultural policies with obesity and noncommunicable diseases a new perspective for a globalising world abstract in light of the shift in policy paradigm in agriculture from state intervention to market liberalisation and globalisation this paper develops a series of hypotheses on the relationship between agricultural policies and consumer diets the first hypothesis is that the paradigm shift has led to greater specialisation of production so changing the ability and incentive for producers to supply certain foods relative to others second the shift has affected farmgate prices both up and down so creating opportunities for the industries which purchase farm commodities the food consuming industries fcis to substitute lower priced ingredients thereby influencing the nutritional quality and content of foods available in the marketplace third it has increased the ability of the fcis to add value through product innovation and marketing creating a market characterised by highly differentiated products targeted to individualised preferences thus increasing the acceptability of a wider variety and quantity of food products the changing agricultural policy paradigm has therefore altered the environment in which consumers make their food choices in the form of food availability affordability and acceptability nevertheless the paper finds no clear pattern when it comes to health the changes have affected both unhealthy and healthy foods and ingredients the key process of importance for health then is not whether the ingredients produced by agriculture are healthy or not but how they are substituted transformed distributed and marketed through the supply chain e g vegetable oils into transfats this leads to an important implication that policies to intervene directly in agricultural production to promote healthy eating are unlikely to be effective or efficient if they do not take into account how foods are processed distributed and marketed through the supply chain in practice this means that the potential for policy interventions in agriculture to improve diets is limited but nevertheless potentially important where it exists given the upstream nature of the change incentives could be created for the fcis to substitute healthier ingredients in their products and or to sell more of them in instances where these changes can be passed all the way to the consumer greater investment could also be made in fruit and vegetable production for local markets along with testing the hypotheses established in this paper the research priority should to identify the incentives that influence the products produced by the fcis with the objective of finding those most amenable to leveraging the supply chain towards healthier eating

the effect of food stamps on labor supply a bivariate selection model abstract although there is a large literature on the effects of u s transfer programs on labor supply this is the first such study of the food stamp program we model the nonlinearity and nonconvexity of the budget constraint and use maximum likelihood methods to estimate hours of work functions for female heads of household the largest recipient group in the program we also model the joint response to afdc and food stamps and we account for the existence of a significant number of eligible households who do not participate in the programs a three equation bivariate selection model is estimated on a sample of eligible households with maximum likelihood

cash by any other name evidence on labelling from the uk winter fuel payment standard economic theory implies that the labelling of cash transfers or cash equivalents e g child benefits food stamps should have no effect on spending patterns the empirical literature to date does not contradict this proposition we study the uk winter fuel payment wfp a cash transfer to older households exploiting sharp eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design we find robust evidence of a behavioural effect of the labelling on average households spend 41 of the wfp on fuel if the payment was treated as cash we would expect households to spend approximately 3 of the payment on fuel

the demand for education with power equalizing aid abstract state grants in aid modify the full fiscal income and tax price for education services faced by voters in local school districts if aid is non linear in the local property tax rate as occurs with district power equalization coupled with an aid floor then individual budget constraints are non linear and least squares estimation is inappropriate we develop and estimate a model that incorporates these effects derive and extensively illustrate the comparative statics present global and local elasticities and simulate the impact of parameter changes on the variance of spending and the cost of the program

farm policies and added sugars in us diets abstract we examine how us farm policies for sweetener crops have affected the consumption and composition of sweeteners in the us diet r d expenditures have lowered the unit cost of commodities used in sweeteners but have generated more technical progress in corn than in sugar crops increasing use of corn in food production ceteris paribus commodity programs have raised the price of sugar and decreased the price of corn thus high fructose corn syrup hfcs became an inexpensive substitute for sugar in food from 1970 on however the effect of policy on ingredient prices has become less important over time today the farm value share in sweetened food is below 5 and hfcs is a specialized input in many food items with limited substitution possibilities the current link between us sweetener consumption and farm policy is weak recent evidence from other high income countries shows little relationship between sweetener consumption and sugar policies

changes in the consumption income and well being of single mother headed families there is a long standing debate over how the material well being of the disadvantaged has changed over time in the united states this debate has intensified in light of notable increases in income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s and during the 1990s dramatic changes in welfare and tax policies that target poor families including expansions in the earned income tax credit eitc welfare waivers and the passage of the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act prwora while some championed these changes as catalysts for self sufficiency others predicted that these reforms would lead to severe deprivation 1 a large body of research has shown that these changes were associated with a dramatic fall in welfare receipt and increases in work and earnings 2 there is little consensus however on how material well being has changed during this period particularly for the most disadvantaged families such as those at the bottom of the income or consumption distribution in this paper we analyze changes in material well being between 1993 and 2003 for single mother headed families a group that has been the target of these recent changes in tax and wel fare policy for these families we analyze changes in income and total consumption as well as changes in disaggregated consumption time use and health insurance coverage we describe the underlying trends in well being for disadvantaged families during this dynamic period rather than identifying the causal effects of individual policies or macroeconomic conditions we begin by briefly documenting the recent trends in income and consumption for single mother headed families for income the trends differ sharply for different deciles of single moth ers for example between 1993 1995 and 1997 2000 reported income in the bottom decile falls by about 16 percent while reported income rises by more than 17 percent in the third fourth and fifth deciles the trends for reported consumption on the other hand tell a very different story these data show neither the sharp decline at low percentiles nor the large increases at the remaining percentiles in the bottom half of the distribution of single mothers rather we find a modest about 7 to 12 percent rise in consumption throughout the entire distribution while we do not examine the reasons for the sharp differences in income and consumption changes in this paper we do argue that consumption is a better measure of material well being for those at the bottom of the distribution

household responses to food subsidies evidence from india abstractthe indian public distribution system is one of the world s largest food security programs and provides a monthly quota of cereals at discounted prices to poor households i study the effec

the price effects of cash versus in kind transfers this article examines the effect of cash versus in kind transfers on local prices both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods in kind transfers also increase supply in recipient communities which could lead to lower prices than under cash transfers we test and confirm this prediction using a programme in mexico that randomly assigned villages to receive boxes of food trucked into the village equivalently valued cash transfers or no transfers we find that prices are significantly lower under in kind transfers compared to cash transfers relative to the control group in kind transfers cause a 4 fall in prices while cash transfers cause a positive but negligible increase in prices in the more economically developed villages in the sample households purchasing power is only modestly affected by these price effects in the less developed villages the price effects are much larger in magnitude which we show is due to these villages being less tied to the outside economy and having less competition among local suppliers

on using linear regressions in welfare economics this article consists of two parts the first part shows that the ordinary least squares regression coefficient is a weighted average of slopes between adjacent sample points when applied to a linear regression with income as the independent variable the regression coefficient depends heavily on the slopes of high income groups the weight of the highest income decile may well exceed that of the other nine deciles this may be undesirable especially if the regression is used for welfare analysis because the marginal propensities to consume attributed to the commodities are determined by the high income groups the second part of the article proposes alternative estimators the extended gini estimators that enable investigators to control the weighting scheme and to incorporate their social views into the weighting scheme of the estimators

decomposing trends in income volatility the wild ride at the top and bottom we use 2 year panels from the current population survey to provide a detailed accounting of family income volatility from 1980 to 2009 volatility doubled overall and the increase was most pronounced among the top 1 of the income distribution but in any given year the level of volatility among the bottom 10 exceeds that of the top the increased volatility comes from higher instability of head and spouse earnings other nonlabor income and from reduced covariance between these income sources with the tax system this suggests that current tax policy is less effective in mitigating income shocks than previous decades jel j31 i30

supply and demand functions for multiproduct u s cash grain farms biases caused by research and other policies this study presents new estimates of supply and demand elasticities for u s multiproduct cash grain farms and estimates of input and output bias effects caused by public and private crop research extension and farmers schooling the study also shows that the social rate of return to public crop research is large about 62 percent

economic factors affecting the increase in obesity in the united states differential response to price abstract a sharp increase in obesity during the last 15 years in the united states became one of the nation s main public health problems the theory of rational addiction seems to explain human behavior in food consumption leading to obesity reasonably well the interesting thing about our results is that the tax policy normally used to correct various distortions is to serve in this case as the preventive policy additional taxes on future prices of the addictive sweet foods contribute to lower sugar consumption and bmi at present time on the other hand increasing education level is usually considered a preventive type of policy in this case it leads to lowering the levels of the bmi in already overweight and obese population

the effects of farm commodity and retail food policies on obesity and economic welfare in the united states many commentators claim that farm subsidies have contributed significantly to the obesity epidemic by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant and symmetrically that taxing unhealthy commodities or subsidizing healthy commodities would contribute to reducing obesity rates in this article we use an equilibrium displacement model to estimate and compare the economic welfare effects from a range of hypothetical farm commodity and retail food policies as alternative mechanisms for encouraging consumption of healthy food or discouraging consumption of unhealthy food or both we find that compared with retail taxes on fat sugar or all food or subsidies on fruits and vegetables at the farm or retail levels a tax on calories would be the most efficient obesity policy a tax on calories would have the lowest deadweight loss per pound of fat reduction in average adult weight and would yield a net social gain once the impact on public health care expenditures is considered

earnings inequality and the changing association between spouses earnings increases in the association between spouses earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high earning or two low earning partners this article uses log linear models and data from the march current population survey to describe trends in the association between spouses earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality among married couples from 1967 to 2005 the results indicate that increases in earnings inequality would have been about 25 30 lower than observed in the absence of changes in the association depending on the inequality measure used three components of these changes and how they vary across the earnings distribution are explored

cash welfare as a consumption smoothing mechanism for divorced mothers abstract while there has been considerable research on the disincentive effects of cash welfare under the aid to families with dependent children afdc program there is little evidence on the benefits of the program for single mothers and their children one potential benefit of this program is that it provides short run consumption insurance for women at the point that they become single mothers this is only true however to the extent that the program is not crowding out other sources of support such as own savings labor supply or transfers from others i assess the importance of this insurance mechanism by measuring the extent to which afdc smooths the consumption of women who transition to single motherhood through marital dissolution i use longitudinal data on family structure and consumption expenditures on food and housing from the panel study of income dynamics psid matched to information on the welfare benefits available in each state and year over the 1968 1985 period i find that raising potential benefits by one dollar raises the food and housing consumption of women who get divorced and their families by 28 cents this estimate implies that for each dollar of afdc received by this population their consumption of these categories of goods rises by up to 51 cents this is roughly the share of food and housing in the consumption bundle of divorced mothers and their families suggesting little crowdout of other sources of support

does welfare play any role in female headship decisions abstract previous studies have examined whether the welfare system has contributed to the dramatic increase in single parent families this paper explores why the results in this literature are sensitive to the presence of state fixed effects it considers one natural explanation namely that the composition of the population differs across states in ways that are related to welfare program generosity after controlling for individual effects the results provide no evidence that welfare raises the propensity to form female headed households for either whites or blacks these results illustrate the potential pitfalls of assuming that state factors are fixed over a long period of time they also suggest that previous studies may have overstated the effect of welfare programs on family structure

international dimensions of obesity and overweight related problems an economics perspective obesity is a growing concern new world health organization who figures indicate that obesity is spreading around the world as a global epidemic according to the who there are more people suffering from overweight related problems than malnutrition globally there are more than 1 billion adults who are overweight and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese while 800 million suffer from malnutrition who 2004 the economic costs due to obesity can be burdensome currently in the united states medical costs associated with obesity and smoking account for about 9 each of all health expenditures finkelstein fiebelkorn and wang u s obesity attributable medical expenditures reached 75 billion in 2003 obesity however is important not only from an economic perspective but also from a social perspective the social consequences of obesity are serious and multiple studies have shown that obesity affects in a negative and statistically significant way personal and working relations earnings and wages particularly for females cawley overall obesity is a complex phenomenon several recent economic studies have explored the role of different cultural and sociodemographic factors on obesity rates leaving genetics aside obesity is caused by the consumption of too many calories and or low expenditures of calories i e low physical activity consequently most published economic research provided a justification for the increased growth of obesity rates by analyzing several factors that may contribute to this imbalance of caloric consumption and usage see chou grossman and saffer cutler glaeser and shapiro lakdawalla and philipson philipson and posner there are mainly two arguments that could justify the growth of overweight problems around the world some researchers argue that obesity growth is mainly due to a higher intake of calories while others state that obesity is mainly caused by a lower expenditure of caloies in daily activities in line with the calorie consumption argument cutler glaeser and shapiro stated that americans have become more obese over the past twenty five years primarily due to the consumption of more calories analyzing changes in food consumption between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s for

expenditure response to increases in in kind transfers evidence from the supplemental nutrition assistance program recent studies on food stamp participant households marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps versus income have had contradictory results experimental studies have found household behavior aligns with standard economic theory where households marginal propensity to spend on food out of food stamps is equivalent to cash income observational studies nd that households have a larger marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps than cash income in this study we re examine this question by estimating how an unprecedentedly large increase in food stamp benets due to the implementation of the american recovery and reinvestment act aects food at home expenditure we nd that the policy change caused households to increase food at home expenditure as well as increase households share of total expenditure allocated toward food at home expenditure we compare these results to a time period without a meaningful food stamp policy change and nd our results are unique to the arra implementation time period

food product composition consumer health and public policy introduction and overview of special section as efforts to improve diets in high income countries intensify attention has turned to how policies may influence diet composition the case studies in this special issue contribute to our understanding of how two main types of policies have influenced food product composition and dietary outcomes 1 policies affecting food manufacturers input costs and 2 information policy affecting competition research on the first type of policy is relatively new but suggests that us commodity policies would not be good policy instruments to influence diets except through the long run impacts of agricultural research research on the impacts of information policy continues to demonstrate that it can spur food industry competition to introduce healthier products but may not result in healthier diets international comparisons show where the us experience may have relevance for other high income countries

an economic model of welfare stigma perhaps the most basic assumption of the economic theory of consumer demand is that more is better than less virtually all of the major propositions of consumer theory can in a certain sense be derived from the assumption that goods are good interestingly however this tenet seems to be violated by the behavior of many individuals in the low income population for many turn out to be eligible for a positive welfare benefit but do not in fact join the welfare rolls for example it has been estimated that in 1970 only about 69 percent of the families eligible for afdc aid to families with dependent children participated in the program see richard michel 1980 the corresponding percentage for afdc u the program for which families with an unemployed male are eligible was only 43 percent and the participation rate in the food stamp program was only 38 percent see maurice mcdonald 1977 this phenomenon has puzzled many investigators because such individuals do not locate on the boundaries of their budget sets consequently most investigators ignore the problem when studying the effects of welfare programs on behavior in this paper this seemingly irrational rejection of an increase in income is modeled as resulting from welfare stigma that is from disutility arising from participation in a welfare program per se 1 the existence of stigma has been amply documented in the sociological literature patrick horan and patricia austin 1974 lee rainwater 1979 where interviews of recipients have often uncovered feelings of lack of self respect and negative self characterizations from participation in welfare nevertheless this phenomenon has not been modeled and many questions consequently remain when is the disutility of participation strong enough to prevent participation shouldn t we expect individuals to weigh the disutility of participation against the potential benefit in their decisions what is the elasticity of participation with respect to the potential benefit also in a slightly different vein how are the work disincentives of welfare affected by stigma these questions have been given scant attention by economists yet they are crucial for our ability to predict the impact of various welfare programs on the lowincome population here these questions are addressed by modeling nonparticipation as a utility maximizing decision the model is developed and estimated for the afdc program 2 the model posits an individual utility function containing not just disposable income but

the effects of benefit timing and income fungibility on food purchasing decisions among supplemental nutrition assistance program households the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap is the largest nutritional safety net in the united states prior research has found that participants have higher consumption shortly after receiving their benefits followed by lower consumption towards the end of the benefit month known as the snap benefit cycle this consumption pattern has been found to have negative effects on beneficiaries we hypothesize two behavioral responses of snap participants may work in tandem to drive much of the cycle 1 short run impatience a higher preference to consume today and 2 fungibility of income the degree of substitutability between a snap dollar and a cash dollar using data from the national food acquisition and purchase survey foodaps a newly developed nationally representative survey of daily food acquisitions by snap households we find evidence of both behavioral responses however the degree of short run impatience and fungibility of income is found to differ significantly across poverty levels and use of grocery lists to plan food purchases snap households could gain from food purchase planning education

estimating the value of an in kind transfer the case of food stamps the value of one in kind transfer food stamps is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in puerto rico in 1982 the evidence indicates that the cashout of the stamps had no detectable influence on food expenditures the explanation partly lies in the distribution of expenditures for the stamps were inframarginal for most recipients however some evidence indicates that trafficking in stamps was widespread as well including indirect evidence from estimation of the piecewise linear constraint model copyright 1989 by the econometric society

the effects of lottery prizes on winners and their neighbors evidence from the dutch postcode lottery each week the dutch postcode lottery pcl randomly selects a postal code and distributes cash and a new bmw to lottery participants in that code we study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors consistent with the life cycle hypothesis the effects on winners consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables consistent with the theory of in kind transfers the vast majority of bmw winners liquidate their bmws we do however detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings pcl nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants

levels and long term trends in earnings inequality overcoming current population survey censoring problems using the gb2 distribution over its history the march current population survey cps has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income this together with time consistency problems in top coding means that users of both the public use and restricted access cps will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time we address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full time full year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind calculating gini coefficients from the estimated parameters and comparing them with past findings

income inequality and income segregation this article investigates how the growth in income inequality from 1970 to 2000 affected patterns of income segregation along three dimensions the spatial segregation of poverty and affluence race specific patterns of income segregation and the geographic scale of income segregation the evidence reveals a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation an effect that is larger for black families than for white families in addition income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large scale spatial segregation of affluence rather than by affecting the spatial segregation of poverty or by altering small scale patterns of income segregation

a nonparametric analysis of the influence of research on agricultural productivity nonparametric productivity analysis is extended by modeling technical progress as a function of public and private research expenditures results indicate that 30 year lags are required to fully capture the effects of public research expenditures on u s agricultural productivity compared to public research private research has a stronger influence on farm productivity in the short term but a smaller influence in the longer term the internal rate of return is 0 28 for public research and 0 17 for private research

the role of asset testing in public health insurance reform abstract starting slowly with the 1996 welfare reform act and culminating in the 2010 affordable care act means tested public health insurance eligibility expanded to include adults in low income families regardless of their asset holdings this paper quantifies the effects of these eligibility expansions within the context of the 2010 affordable care act i construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with indivisible labor supply expanded to include an endogenous household choice of health insurance coverage and calibrate it to u s data i establish that changes in the distribution of labor and welfare associated with removal of asset testing are driven by exit of high productivity and high wealth households from the labor market i then expand my analysis to the 2010 affordable care act to demonstrate that removal of asset testing is critical to the obtained results even when combined with other provisions of the act finally i find that a simple asset test for eligibility of health insurance transfers undoes the distortion to the household labor supply decision among high productivity types these results are robust to the introduction of employer premium contributions an independent health insurance market and idiosyncratic shocks to eligibility for employment based health insurance

the local electoral impacts of conditional cash transfers evidence from a field experiment abstract i assess the impacts of targeted government transfers on a local incumbent s electoral performance i use the randomized roll out of a cct program in the philippines although the program was usually implemented in all villages in a municipality a subset of beneficiary municipalities were randomly selected to receive the program in a randomly selected subset of villages a number of municipalities are tightly controlled by political dynasties and thus i can test whether the effects are dependent upon the political environment in a competitive political environment incumbent vote share is 26 percentage points higher in municipalities where the program was implemented in all villages than in municipalities where the program was implemented in half of them the program had no impact in municipalities with low levels of political competition further there is evidence consistent with the argument that incumbents compensated households in control villages by redistributing their own budget there

international productivity patterns accounting for input quality infrastructure and research in this paper we present measures of land and labor productivity for a group of ninety eight developed and developing countries using an entirely new data set with annual observations spanning the past three decades the substantial cross country and intertemporal variation in productivity in our sample is linked to both natural and economic factors we extend previous work by dealing with multiple sources of systematic measurement error in conventional agricultural inputs the mix of conventional inputs indicators of quality of agricultural inputs and the amount of publicly provided infrastructure are all significant in explaining observed cross sectional differences in productivity patterns

an experiment on cash and in kind transfers with application to food assistance programs the impact of providing food assistance in kind via food stamps or restricted debit cards vs cash has long been a subject of debate prior efforts to causally identify the effects of the two types of transfers have been hindered by concerns over non random selection into assistance programs misreporting of program benefits and identification of inframarginal households who theoretically should treat cash and in kind transfers identically this paper reports the results of an economic experiment designed to cleanly test some conceptual issues associated with in kind vs cash giving in a lunchroom meal setting given current debates about the healthiness of food assistance recipients diets we also consider the impacts of placing restrictions on in kind transfers that either prohibit soda purchases with the transfer or require the transfer be spent on fruits and vegetables overall we find that as theory predicts in kind transfers have the same effect on food expenditures as an unrestricted cash transfer for inframarginal consumers and for extramarginal consumers food expenditures are higher for in kind than cash transfers participants also respond to the fruit and vegetable restriction as theory would predict however in contrast to the theoretical prediction the soda restriction reduces soda expenditures for more than half the inframarginal consumers

economies of scale household size and the demand for food household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods such as food provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods the evidence shows exactly the opposite data from rich and poor countries indicate that at constant per capita total expenditure the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries where substitution should be the least

relative undernutrition in puerto rico under alternative food assistance programmes in the early 1980s puerto rico experienced a conversion from the food stamp program fsp to the nutrition assistance program nap and a severe recession to compare relative undernutrition in puerto rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions to separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated in the dominance comparisons every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile the multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile but a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low income households under the nap than under the fsp no evidence of signi

getting a healthy start the effectiveness of targeted benefits for improving dietary choices there is growing policy interest in encouraging better dietary choices we study a nationallyimplemented policy the uk healthy start scheme that introduced vouchers for fruit vegetables and milk we show thatthe policy has increased spending on fruit and vegetables and has been more effective than an equivalent value cash benefit we also show that the policy improved the nutrient composition of households shopping baskets with no offsetting changes in spending on other foodstuffs

do snap participants expand non food spending when they receive more snap benefits evidence from the 2009 snap benefits increase this study examines the expenditure response to the largest increase in supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits instituted in april 2009 investigating the effects in both food and non food spending categories i find that the rise in snap benefits increased not only food at home expenditures but also housing transportation and education expenditures of snap households relative to those of non snap households specifically the snap benefit increase leads to the reduced out of pocket spending on food for infra marginal snap recipients and the freed up resources allowed households with bounded budgets to fund other essential needs such as paying mortgage rent utility fee transportation expenses as well as tuition examining non food expenditures provides a more complete picture of the impact of the snap benefit increase by shedding light on the spillover effect of the policy change the result also derives policy implication on ongoing debate about snap allotment generosity

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

is there a daily discount rate evidence from the food stamp nutrition cycle abstract quasi hyperbolic discounting predicts impatience over short run tradeoffs i present a direct non laboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients caloric intake declines by 10 to 15 percent over the food stamp month implying a significant preference for immediate consumption these findings constitute a rejection of the permanent income hypothesis and are extremely difficult to reconcile with exponential discounting the data support an explanation based on time preference and reject several alternative explanations including highly elastic intertemporal substitution i explore implications for the optimal timing of transfer payments under alternative assumptions about preferences

a rotten deal for schools an assessment of states success with the national school lunch program s in kind food benefit the national school lunch program nslp is one of the united states largest domestic food aid programs the nslp provides states with both cash and commodity foods for school meals this research assessed the success of the school commodity program by comparing states available annual funding to the value of foods that states actually received from 2001 to 2009 results indicate that an in kind food funding system is not desirable for schools states failed to receive entitled commodity food value in most years resulting in annual funding losses for schools of 35 87 million inconsistent funding inhibits schools ability to improve meals and ultimately child nutrition outcomes in light of these results it is recommended that a cash benefit should replace the national school lunch program s commodity food program

wage risk and employment risk over the life cycle we specify a structural life cycle model of consumption labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects the sources of risk are shocks to productivity job destruction the process of job arrival when employed and unemployed and match level heterogeneity our model allows for four main social insurance programmes in contrast to simpler models that attribute all income fluctuations to shocks our framework allows us to disentangle the effects of the shocks from the responses to these shocks estimates of productivity risk once we control for employment risk and for individual labour supply choices are substantially lower than estimates that attribute all wage variation to productivity risk increases in productivity risk impose a considerable welfare loss on individuals and induce substantial precautionary saving increases in employment risk have large effects on output and primarily through this channel affect welfare the welfare value of government programs such as food stamps which partially insure productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides partial insurance against employment risk and no insurance against persistent shocks

do welfare benefits cause the welfare caseload analyses of the welfare system generally examine one of five competing models 1 the work disincentive model 2 the human capital model 3 the macroeconomic model 4 the public choice model or 5 the cost of job loss model this paper employs the granger causality concept and the multiple rank f statistic to test the implications of all five of these models simultaneously the results offer modest support to all but the macroeconomic model the relationships among welfare benefits caseloads and labor market conditions appear to be too complex to be fully captured by a single model

opening up pandora s box the effect of gender targeting and conditionality on household spending behavior in mexico s progresa program summary this paper evaluates the behavioral impact of conditionality and gender targeting on spending behavior in the progresa conditional cash transfer cct program from rural mexico results indicate that transfer income is not spent differently from general income suggesting that transfers exert only an income effect in addition women who have increased control over their extra cash are not significantly more likely to spend it in a family friendly way than they do household earned income both features entail significant costs to beneficiaries and program budgets our results indicate that further evidence is needed to confidently advocate for their inclusion in cash transfer ct programs

the monthly food stamp cycle shooping frequency and food intake decisions in an endogenous switching regression framework mean food spending by food stamp households peaks sharply in the first three days after benefits are received for those who conduct major grocery shopping trips only once per month 42 of all food stamp households mean food energy intake drops significantly by the fourth week of the month for the remaining households intake remains steady over the course of the month these patterns motivate an empirical model that simultaneously accounts for the shopping frequency and food intake decisions over time results have implications for policies that may affect the frequency of grocery shopping by food stamp households

long term trends in earnings inequality what the cps can tell us abstract changes in current population survey cps topcoding rules in the 1990s artificially increased measured earnings inequality we create a time consistent cps data series and compare trends in earnings inequality from 1975 to 2001

local governments in kind transfers and economic inequality abstract we examine how in kind transfers provided by local governments affect economic inequality the allocation of in kind transfers to households and the adjustment for differences in needs are derived from a model of local government spending behavior the model distinguishes between fixed and variable costs in production as well as mandatory programmatic spending components versus discretionary spending on different service sectors and target groups to estimate the model we combine norwegian data from municipal accounts and administrative registers for the period 1982 2013 we find that economic inequality is considerably lower when taking in kind transfers into account while the poor benefit from receiving a relatively large share of public services the equalizing effect of in kind transfers tends to be smaller than the equalizing contribution from public cash transfers when examining the time trends in inequality we find that local governments attenuated the growth in cash income inequality by re allocating in kind transfers to low income families this reduction in inequality is mostly due to changes in spending priorities across service sectors and target groups while the contribution from re allocation of resources across municipalities is much smaller

on the private provision of public goods on networks abstract this paper analyzes the private provision of public goods where consumers interact within a fixed network structure and may benefit only from their direct neighbors provisions we present a proof of the existence and uniqueness of a nash equilibrium for general networks and best reply functions in addition we investigate the neutrality result of warr 38 and bergstrom blume and varian 6 whereby consumers are able to undo the impact of income redistribution as well as public provision financed by lump sum taxes to this effect we show that the neutrality result has a limited scope of application beyond a special network architecture in the neighborhood of the set of contributors

broad and narrow bracketing in gift certificate spending abstract we survey 1050 consumers who have just redeemed one or more open loop gift certificates to learn whether they view gift certificate income cash gifts and non gift income as substitutes we find that the majority 83 of recipients spend the certificates in the same way as cash the other respondents 17 bought an item they would not have bought otherwise but adjustments in their shopping pattern do not seem to result from constraints in redeeming the certificates 80 of all respondents in this group says they have used the certificate to buy an item they really love to have while inconsistent with standard microeconomic demand theory this behavior can be explained by narrow bracketing in spending gift certificates these consumers consider a limited choice set of nice personal items our data show that females are more likely to narrow bracket gift certificate income and that positive reciprocity towards the giver induces narrow bracketing in case the giver is a household member who suggests to buy a particular item using the certificate previous studies have found that both giving in kind gifts waldfogel 1993 as giving gift cards offenberg 2007 entail a welfare loss of 10 30 when compared to giving cash we find that the welfare effects of open loop gift certificates among users are limited the consumption of broad bracketing consumers is unaffected and narrow bracketing consumers seem to value the possibility to separate gift certificate income from other income sources

a life cycle perspective on changes in earnings inequality among married men and women abstract the connection between changes in earnings inequality of individuals and changes in family earnings involves several links the movements in the employment of different family members the association between changes in husbands and in wives earnings and patterns of assortative mating a decomposition of the logarithm of the coefficient of variation in family earnings identifies these links the data on the dispersion of family earnings are organized not simply over time but also by age the growth in wives relative employment and earnings has partly offset the effects on family earnings inequality of the increase in husbands earnings inequality

consumption and poverty how effective are in kind transfers the ability of in kind transfers to alleviate poverty depends on accurate targeting as well as recipients valuations of the benefits using data from the consumer expenditure surveys the efficiency of in kind transfers is examined in a microsimulation framework in which recipients are identified as those who have the lowest consumption in this framework in kind transfers of food capital services which includes housing and consumer services are an effective means of providing support to the poor even at high levels of subsidization the multiple good transfers that are considered are essentially equivalent to cash grants copyright 1996 by royal economic society

cheap food policy fact or rhetoric abstract the term cheap food policy has frequently been used as a descriptor for us commodity programs by those who contend payments to farmers ultimately result in lower food costs for consumers more recently farm policy has been criticized for contributing to the obesity problem in the us by making large quantities of fattening foods widely available and relatively inexpensive this paper econometrically evaluates the impact of direct government payments on the affordability of food in the us in the aggregate and across specific food groups the models find direct payments do not significantly affect the affordability of food either in the aggregate or across specific food groups

how consumer price subsidies affect nutrition summary we study the effect of an exogenous increase in food grain subsidy from a program targeting the poor in rural india and find that the increase in income resulting from the subsidy increased consumption of the subsidized grains and certain more expensive sources of nutrition lowered consumption of coarse grains the cheaper yet unsubsidized staple food and increased expenditures on nonfood items but had no effect on nutrition in poor households estimates of the price effect of the subsidy on nutrition are also negligible the price subsidy increased consumption of wheat and rice and lowered consumption of coarse grains