the dog that did not bark the eitc for single mothers in the netherlands abstract we study the extension of an eitc for single mothers in the netherlands to mothers with a youngest child 12 to 15 years of age this reform increased the net income gain of moving into employment for the treatment group by 31 using both dd and rd we show that this reform had a negligible effect on labour participation with tight confidence intervals around zero our results are at odds with a number of related studies this finding may be due to our treatment group of single mothers of which the youngest child is relatively old or because the reform we consider was less salient furthermore related studies typically study changes in a tax credit which was part of a broader reform package making it harder to isolate the effect of the tax credit also we show that using single women without children as the control group as is commonly done in related studies can be problematic

policy watch the marriage penalty many government programs have implicit penalties or subsidies for marriage for example many couples pay higher income taxes when married than their combined tax liabilities as single filers while many other couples receive a marriage subsidy because their joint taxes fall with marriage likewise most low income couples are eligible for higher welfare benefits if they are separated rather than married this article discusses the marriage penalty with a particular focus on tax and transfer programs why does it exist who faces it to what extent does it affect marriage and labor market behavior what tradeoffs are involved in reducing it

the effect of old age assistance on retirement abstract researchers have devoted considerable attention to analyzing the impact of social security on retirement with mixed findings however the means tested program old age assistance oaa dwarfed social security until the 1950s and coincided with the early decline in elderly labor force participation also oaa benefits were determined by the states a key source of policy variation i estimate the relationship between oaa benefits and elderly participation using individual data from the 1940 and 1950 censuses oaa s impact is found to be strong and implies that participation would have risen slightly instead of falling if benefits had not increased during the 1940s

dead man walking an empirical reassessment of the deterrent effect of capital punishment using the bounds testing approach to cointegration this paper empirically estimates a murder supply equation for the united states from 1965 to 2001 within a cointegration and error correction framework our findings suggest that any support for the deterrence hypothesis is sensitive to the inclusion of variables for the effects of guns and other crimes in the long run we find that real income and the conditional probability of receiving the death sentence are the main factors explaining variations in the homicide rate in the short run the aggravated assault rate and robbery rate are the most important determinants of the homicide rate

for love or money the impact of income taxes on marriage higher sometimes lower than their combined single income tax obligations in this paper we explore the impact of the federal individual income tax as well as other economic and demograplhic variables on the marriage decisionis of individuals using longitudinal data from the panel study on income dynamics for the period 1968 92 we estimate a discrete time hazard model of the time to first marriage we find that the probability of marriage is significantly affected by a range of economic and demographic variables importantly we find that an increase in total income taxes paid by married versus single women has a negative effect on the likelihood of marriage and that the change in the marginal tax rate is also a significant determinant of marriage in some cases in contrast the tax effects are rarely significant in determining marriage probabilities among men although there are some differential responses by race in general the impacts of the income tax variables even when statistically significant are small

identification and estimation of the linear in means model of social interactions abstract this paper studies identification and estimation of the linear in means model of social interactions using a quasi panel data approach we show how endogenous social effects can be identified in the presence of unobserved group effects

interactions neighborhood selection and housing demand abstract this paper contributes to the growing literature that aims at identifying and measuring the impact of social context on individual economic behavior we develop a model of housing structure demand with neighborhood effects and neighborhood choice modeling neighborhood choice is of fundamental importance in estimating and understanding endogenous and contextual neighborhood effects controlling for non random sorting into neighborhoods allows for unbiased estimates and provides a means for identifying endogenous neighborhood effects estimation of the model exploits a household level data set that has been augmented with contextual information at two different levels scales of aggregation one is at the neighborhood level consisting of about ten neighbors with the data coming from the neighborhood clusters sub sample of the american housing survey a second level is the census tract to which these dwelling units belong these data were geocoded by means of privileged access to confidential us census data our results for the neighborhood choice model indicate that individuals prefer to live near others like themselves our estimates of the housing structure demand equation confirm that neighborhood effects are important in particular one s demand for housing depends on the mean of neighbors demand for housing

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

the tax evasion social multiplier evidence from italy we estimate social externalities of tax evasion in a model where congestion of the auditing resources of local tax authorities generates a social multiplier identification is based on a contrast of the variance of tax evasion at different levels of aggregation we use a unique data set that contains audits of about 80 000 small businesses and professionals in italy and also provides an exact measure of reference groups in our model we find a social multiplier of about 3 which means that the equilibrium response to a shock that induces an exogenous variation in mean concealed income is about 3 times the initial average response this is a short run effect that persists to the extent that auditing resources are not adjusted to internalize the congestion externality

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

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

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

the american welfare system and family structure an historical perspective cross sectional studies find a positive relationship between a state s welfare benefits and single motherhood but is this evidence of a welfare effect or rather of cross state differences in social attitudes that influence both policy and behavior this paper demonstrates that the spatial variation in welfare policy long preceded the spatial correlation of policy and behavior undermining the social norm hypothesis but the findings also raise doubts about the role that welfare policy played in the changes in family structure over the century the correlation between welfare benefits and family structure only appears in 1970 and then only for whites

effect of large scale social interactions on body weight i estimate models of endogenous social interactions in body weight at the county and state levels the results show that dispersion in body weight across time and space in the u s is not clearly excessive and that much of this variation can be attributed to observable individual and regional characteristics models exploiting variants of methods proposed by glaeser et al 2003 fixed effects instrumental variable and split sample instrumental variable methods to address endogeneity suggest that there are not large social multipliers on body weight outcomes the evidence suggests there may be small multipliers on bmi obesity and morbid obesity there is no evidence that underweight is subject to a social multiplier the results are sensitive to specification

job changes and hours changes understanding the path of labor supply adjustment we use british panel data to investigate single women s labor supply changes in response to three reforms that affected individuals work incentives we use these reforms to identify changes in labor supply there is evidence of small hours of work effects for two of such reforms a third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers hours of work the mechanism by which the labor supply adjustments were made occurred largely through job changes rather than hours changes with the same employer this is little overall effect of the reforms on wages

understanding regression versus variance tests for social interactions this article considers the relationship between the use of regressions and the use of variance contrast methods to uncover social interactions we illustrate how these methods employ different identifying assumptions and are therefore complementary approaches we also provide formal identification results that extend existing ones for the two methods jel c12 c21 c23 z13 this article is designed to understand the relationshipbetweentwoapproachestotheempirical analysis of social interactions the first approach is the use of linear regressions to uncover social interactions this approach estimates social interaction effects through changes in the conditional linear expectation of individual outcomes when group level variables are included in the conditioning set in econometrics this method was first analyzed by manski 1993 who dubbed it the linearin means model since the group level variables are typically averages of individual variables within the group this model is also studied by brock and durlauf 2001a 2001b cohencole 2006 and graham and hahn 2005 among others durlauf 2004 surveyed empirical studiesof social interactionsbasedonsuch regressions the second approach originally proposed by glaeser sacerdote and scheinkman 1996 and developed into a full inferential procedure by graham 2005 who refers to this approachasvariancecontrasts usesintragroup variation in behavior to infer social interactions the idea in this approach is that social interactions willinduceintragroupdependences in behavior that affect sample variances for intragroup outcomes there has been relatively little work evaluating social interactions using variance contrasts one reason is that with the exception of graham s work there is little formal statistical theory for the approach the purpose of this article was to clarify the relationship between regression and variance contrast tests weclarify how these tests employ different informational assumptions to achieve identification of social interaction specifically we argue that regression and variance contrast approaches correspond to identification via exclusion restrictions in the one case and covariance restrictions on errors in the other as such the two approaches replicate the classes of identification strategies that appear in the classical simultaneous equations literature see fisher 1966 for a classic treatment the remainder of the article is organized as

the effects of work conditioned transfers on marriage and child well being a review transfer payments to poor families are increasingly conditioned on work although the effects of such programmes on employment are fairly well understood relatively little is known about their effects on marriage or child well being we review a few studies that provide such information here we sketch a theoretical model that draws from the efficient household literature the model is consistent with the wide range of effects that we observe and suggests an explanation for some of the observed differences our theoretical framework likewise explains the observed variation in the effects of such programmes on children social insurance payments increasingly take the form of conditional cash transfers requiring certain types of behaviour from recipients in order to qualify for aid in developed countries the conditions generally take the form of work requirements the american temporary aid to needy families tanf programme requires most recipients to work at least part time benefits from the american earned income tax credit eitc are available only to consumers who work the british working tax credit wtc is available only to consumers who work at least 16 hours per week and the canadian self sufficiency programme ssp which ran during the 1990s provided an earnings supplement to welfare recipients who were willing to leave the dole and take a full time job

discrete choice with social interactions this paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioural outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects we study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behaviour of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking laws of large numbers are generated in such environments multiplicity of equilibria in these models which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self consistent means for average choice behaviour will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied the properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices finally a likelihood function based on the theoretical model is given and conditions for the econometric identifiability of the model are established

the impact of welfare benefits on the conjugal status of single mothers in canada estimates from a hazard model this paper focuses on the determinants of the likelihood of a remarriage marriage for female heads with children using retrospective data from statistics canada s 1990 family history survey the study attempts to identify which socioeconomic characteristics of single mothers are conducive to conjugal union formation formal or informal particular attention is given to external time varying economic covariates so as to disentangle the impact they exert on single mothers propensity to start living with a new partner the empirical analysis is carried out using a proportional hazards model which permits the estimation of the effects of various covariates on the hazard of exiting single parenthood the most striking result is the strong effect of provincial welfare benefits on conjugal union formation however the analysis reveals that single motherhood far from representing a final state remains a transitory situation for a majority of women

criminal behaviour and youth in the labour market the case of the pernicious minimum wage this paper empirically tests the relationship between variations in uniform crime reports ucr index crime rates for teenagers 16 19 years of age with changes in the real minimum wage adjusted for industry coverage in the united states for the period 1960 1987 the analysis reveals that there exists a positive relationship between changes in the real minimum wage and teenage criminal homicide forcible rape and motor vehicle theft crime rates these findings are consistent with the empirical evidence concerning the impacts of the minimum wage on youth labour market opportunities and also with the theoretical ad empirical evidence regarding the incidence of criminal activity made as an occupational choice decision formulated under risk and uncertainty however the results indicate no impact of the minimum wage on the other teenage ucr index crime rates as found by hashimoto 1987 the evidence also suggests that variations in real criminal justice expenditures per capita reduce teenage propety crime ra

taxes and transfers their effects on the decision to end a marriage abstract the transfer system typically has large marriage disincentives while the income tax system is likely to subsidize marriage for many low income families in other words the tax system may offset an increase in transfer benefits associated with marital separation the interaction of the transfer system with the income tax system has largely been overlooked the income tax system has become more relevant for low income families with the recent expansion of the earned income tax credit which filers may be eligible for even if their tax liability is zero this paper uses family level measures of the change in transfer benefits and tax liability associated with a change in family structure to consider the effect of these financial incentives on separation decisions

welfare effects on female headship with area effects the existing literature on welfare effects on female headship in the united states shows significant positive correlations in cross section possibly increasing over time however when geographic or area effects are permitted in the estimation these correlations either disappear or reverse in sign the results have implications for the study of welfare effects in other countries including canada where benefits vary considerably across provinces and localities within them

the effects of in work benefit reform in britain on couples theory and evidence this paper examines the effects of the working families tax credit wftc on couples in britain we develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system its main implications are then tested using panel data from the british household panel survey collected between 1991 and 2002 overall the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers decisions such as eligible working at least 16 hours per week and full time employment working at least 30 hours per week employment transitions childcare use and divorce rates women s responses however were highly heterogeneous depending on their partners labour supply and earnings mothers married to low income men showed larger responses in employment especially if they had younger children they were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it while more likely to receive the tax credit they also experienced a greater risk of divorce we find virtually no effect for women with higher income husbands likewise there are no statistically significant responses among married men

marital status and fertility in the united states welfare and labor market effects the incidence of marriage and the proportion of childbearing that occurs within marriage have decreased sharply in the united states in the last several decades this paper examines whether the probability that a woman is currently married and the number of children she has borne as reported in the 1980 u s census are related to two identifiable factors the variation in welfare programs across states specifically afdc and medicaid benefits and afdc up expenditures or the variation in the market wage opportunities available to women and to their potential husbands afdc and medicaid benefit levels are associated with fewer women being currently married medicaid benefits are related to lower fertility levels for both black and white women whereas afdc benefits in cash and food are associated with lower fertility among white women ages 15 24 those states that extend afdc benefits to families with unemployed parents in other words fathers in intact poor families do not have significantly more women married or higher fertility rates contrary to what might be expected from economic incentives men s market wages are associated with more frequent marriage and higher fertility whereas higher market wage opportunities for women have substantial effects in the opposite direction all of which are consistent with standard models of gender specialization and the demand for marriage and fertility

does renewable energy consumption add in economic growth an application of auto regressive distributed lag model in pakistan abstract the objective of the study is to examine the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth by incorporating capital and labour as potential determinants of production function in case of pakistan this study used auto regressive distributed lag ardl model and rolling window approach rwa for cointegration in context of pakistan the study used quarterly data over the period of 1972q1 2011q4 the causality analysis applied through vecm granger causality and innovative accounting approaches the results reveal that all the variables in the study are cointegrated that shows the long run relationship between the variables furthermore renewable energy consumption capital and labour boost economic growth the causality analysis shows the feedback effect between economic growth and renewable energy consumption

the socioeconomic consequences of in work benefit reform for british lone mothers in october 1999 the british government enacted the working families tax credit which aimed at encouraging work among low income families with children this paper uses panel data collected between 1991 and 2001 to evaluate the effect of this reform on single mothers we find that the reform led to a substantial increase in their employment rate of about five percentage points which was driven by both a higher rate at which lone mothers remained in the labor force and a higher rate at which they entered it women s responses were highly heterogeneous with effects double this size for mothers with one preschool aged child and virtually no effect for mothers with multiple older children the employment increase was accompanied by significant increases in paid childcare utilization and our analysis in fact suggests that the generous childcare credit component of the reform played a key role in explaining the estimated employment and childcare usage responses we also find that the increase in labor market participation was accompanied by reductions in single mothers subsequent fertility and in the rate at which they married behavioral responses which in turn are likely to influence the reform s overall impact on child poverty and welfare

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

child care voucher and labour market behaviour experimental evidence from finland this article provides experimental estimates of the impact of a voucher for private care on labour force participation and use of private and public child care within the nordic system of universal provision of public care in a market that was providing high quality low cost public child care a voucher is nevertheless found to have a significant positive effect for the use of private child care with zero effects on either use of public care or labour force participation the use of private increased by five percentage points in the whole country and by five to seven percentage points in areas that suffer from excess demand for child care as a result of the introduction of the private child care voucher

shocks effects of macroeconomic variables on natural gas consumption in nigeria structural var with sign restrictions abstract this paper has examined the transmission of shocks from macroeconomic variables namely money supply inflation exchange rate and real gdp onto natural gas consumption using structural var svar model with sign restrictions the results revealed that both in the short run and long run natural gas consumption responds significantly to the shocks emanating from money supply and real gdp while its response to inflation shock is significant only in the short run but exchange rate shock is not significant however money supply has contributed greater proportion of the shocks followed by the real gdp inflation and exchange rate in the ordering of the variance decomposition the paper recommends that nigerian authorities adjust the monetary policy tools towards regulating the money supply and checking the inflation rate to ensure increased demand for natural gas and sustained economic growth on the response of natural gas consumption to the shock in the exchange rate since the shock is positive though insignificant it implies that depreciation of the exchange rate can discourage the demand for foreign exchange imports and boost the local production which would reciprocally lead to more natural gas consumption and improved growth in the country

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

nafta and the environment what can the data tell us abstract critics of trade liberalization agreements such as the north american free trade agreement nafta have expressed concerns that polluting industries will locate in developing countries to evade more stringent regulation with adverse environmental consequences a study of nafta s effects on u s mexico trade finds that despite differences in the stringency of u s and mexican environmental policies nafta did not cause mexico to specialize in dirtier industries between 1989 and 1999 regarding the location of manufacturing production during the nafta transition although growth was fastest in the congested mexican border region growth declined in the congested central region and increased in the less congested interior region with all regions shifting toward less polluting industries most of the observed measures of air quality in the border region which can serve as an indicator of nafta s short term scale effects do not exhibit significant breaks in their trend of improvement

social assistance and conjugal union dissolution in canada a dynamic analysis using statistics canadas general social survey on family and friends carried out in 1990 we piece together the matrimonial and conjugal life history of a large sample of canadian men and women we then estimate duration models coxs proportional hazard models describing the evolutionary laws of marriages and unions which depend on various economic or socio demographic explanatory variables the empirical modelling focuses primarily on estimating the impact of couples earned incomes and of provincial welfare programs on the dissolution rate of first marriages and unions we find that welfare benefits do not have an impact on the hazard of union dissolution and that earned incomes have a positive effect on conjugal stability excerpt summary in fre

evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program this paper exploits area based piloting and age related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program the new deal for young people in the u k a central focus is on substitution displacement effects and on equilibrium wage effects the program includes extensive job assistance and wage subsidies to employers we find that the impact of the program significantly raised transitions to employment by about 5 percentage points the impact is robust to a wide variety of nonexperimental estimators however we present some evidence that this effect may not be as large in the longer run jel j18 j23 j38

crime punishment and the market for offenses crime is a subject of intense emotions conflicting ideologies however economists have generally explained it as a reflection of individual choice and equilibrating market forces two major themes of the literature are outlined the evolution of a market model to explain the diversity of crime across time and space and the debate about the usefulness of positive versus negative incentives systematic analyses generally indicate that crime is affected on the margin by both positive and negative incentives there are serious limitations to the effectiveness of incapacitation and rehabilitation and optimal enforcement strategies involve trade offs between narrow efficiency and equity considerations

female labour supply human capital and welfare reform we estimate a dynamic model of employment human capital accumulation including education and savings for women in the united kingdom exploiting tax and benefit reforms and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy we find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone mothers returns to experience which are important in determining the longer term effects of policy increase with education but experience mainly accumulates when in full time employment tax credits are welfare improving in the u k increase lone mother labor supply and marginally reduce educational attainment but the employment effects do not extend beyond the period of eligibility marginal increases in tax credits improve welfare more than equally costly increases in income support or tax cuts

the effect of the u s welfare system on marital status abstract an issue of long standing importance in the u s welfare system has been its lack of neutrality with respect to family composition which generally provides payments only to female headed families that is families with no able bodied male present using data from 1969 to 1985 to examine the issue this study finds that 1 the simple cross sectional correlations between marital status and welfare benefits are almost always in the expected direction but are generally weak in significance 2 that the magnitude and significance of the correlations have nevertheless grown over time and 3 that the correlations for men are no weaker and usually stronger especially for blacks than those for women

distributional impacts of the self sufficiency project a large literature has been concerned with the impacts of recent welfare reforms on income earnings transfers and labor force attachment while one strand of this literature relies on observational studies conducted with large survey sample data sets a second makes use of data generated by experimental evaluations of changes to means tested programs much of the overall literature has focused on mean impacts in this paper we use random assignment experimental data from canada s self sufficiency project ssp to look at impacts of this unique reform on the distributions of income earnings and transfers ssp offered members of the treatment group a generous subsidy for working full time quantile treatment effect qte estimates show there was considerable heterogeneity in the impacts of ssp on the distributions of earnings transfers and total income this heterogeneity would be missed by looking only at average treatment effects moreover these heterogeneous impacts are consistent with the predictions of labor supply theory during the period when the subsidy is available the ssp impact on the earnings distribution is zero for the bottom half of the distribution the quantiles of the ssp earnings distribution are higher for much of the upper third of the distribution except at the very top where the quantiles of the earnings distribution are the same under either program or possibly lower under ssp further during the period when ssp receipt was possible the impacts on the quantiles of the distributions of transfer payments income assistance plus the subsidy and total income earnings plus transfers are also different at different points of the distribution in particular positive impacts on the quantiles of the transfer distribution are concentrated at the lower end of the transfer distribution while positive impacts on the quantiles of the income distribution are concentrated in the upper end of the income distribution impacts of ssp on these distributions were essentially zero after the subsidy was no longer available

welfare effects on the marital decisions of never married mothers the economic theory of marriage suggests that more generous welfare benefits should serve to reduce the probability of marriage among mothers who have given birth out of wedlock this relationship is explored using data on never married mothers in the national longitudinal survey of youth only very limited evidence indicates that higher welfare payments lower the probability of marriage for nonblack never married mothers for black never married mothers the results suggest that higher benefits are associated with higher marriage rates

the married widow marriage penalties matter marriage penalties are a controversial feature of many government policies empirical evidence of their behavioral effects is quite mixed which is surprising because economic theory predicts that they should have an impact on the headship decision we investigate the removal of marriage penalties from the surviving spouse pensions of the canadian public pension system in the 1980s these reforms provide a simple and transparent source of identification our results indicate that marriage penalties can have large and persistent effects on marriage decisions we also present evidence suggesting that it is individuals with characteristics correlated with greater wealth who respond to the penalties jel j1 h2

execution and deterrence a quasi controlled group experiment using portfolio analysis in a type of controlled group experiment this study develops an empirical model of homicide changes in texas over a period of a normal number of executions the empirically derived model then estimates the changes in the number of homicides in texas 1 over a period of near zero executions and 2 over an immediate subsequent period of double the normal number of executions the actual changes in texas homicides over the first period is less than estimated by the model and greater or no different than estimated by the model in the second period because changes in the number of homicides in texas and throughout the united states were negative over both periods these empirical results are consistent with the deterrence hypothesis that is there were a greater than predicted number of homicides in the first period and fewer than predicted number in the second period

the effect of social benefits on youth employment combining regression discontinuity and a behavioral model natural experiments provide robust identifying assumptions for the estimation of policy effects yet their use for policy design is often limited by the difficulty of extrapolating on the basis of reduced form estimates in this study we exploit an age condition in the eligibility for social assistance in france which lends itself to a regression discontinuity rd design we suggest making the underlying labor supply model explicit that is translating the reduced form discontinuity in terms of discontinuous changes in disposable incomes this exercise shows the potential of combining natural experiments and behavioral models in particular we can test the external validity of the combined approach we find that it predicts the effect of a subsequent reform which extends transfers to the working poor remarkably well the model is then used to simulate the extension of social assistance to young people and finds that a transfer program with an in work component would not create further disincentives to work in this population

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs