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

welfare transfers in two parent families labor supply and welfare participation under afdc up this paper examines the effect of cash transfers and food stamp benefits on family labor supply and welfare participation among two parent families the aid to families with dependent children unemployed parent program has provided cash benefits to two parent households since 1961 despite recent expansions little is known about the program s effect on labor supply and welfare participation i develop a model of family labor supply in which hours of work for the husband and wife are chosen to maximize family utility subject to a family budget constraint accounting for afdc up benefits and other tax and transfer programs the husband s and wife s labor supply decisions are restricted to no work part time work and full time work maximum likelihood techniques are used to estimate parameters of the underlying hours of work and welfare participation equations the estimates are used to determine the magnitude of the work disincentive effects of the afdc up program and to simulate the effects of changes in afdc up benefit and eligibility rules on family labor supply and welfare participation the results suggest that labor supply and welfare participation among two parent families are highly responsive to changes in the benefit structure under the afdc up program

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

a production lot size inventory model for deteriorating items and arbitrary production and demand rates abstract in this paper we present a method for finding the optimal replenishment schedule for the production lot size model with deteriorating items where demand and production are allowed to vary with time in an arbitrary way and in which shortages are allowed the method is illustrated by a numerical example

paying for progress conditional grants and the desegregation of southern schools this paper examines how a large conditional grants program influenced school desegregation in the american south exploiting newly collected archival data and quasi experimental variation in potential per pupil federal grants we show that school districts with more at risk in 1966 were more likely to desegregate just enough to receive their funds although the program did not raise the exposure of blacks to whites like later court orders districts with larger grants at risk in 1966 were less likely to be under court order through 1970 suggesting that tying federal funds to nondiscrimination reduced the burden of desegregation on federal courts i introduction because the u s constitution reserves powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government to the states conditional grants are key levers for federal policymakers seeking to affect a broad range of state and local policies states must implement federally approved speed limits and drinking ages to receive highway funding universities must provide gender parity in athletic offerings to receive research funding and states can lose funding if they do not comply with the clean air act more recently states and school districts have risked losing federal grants for failure to comply with the accountability requirements of the no child left behind act in this paper we examine whether the threat

measuring economic efficiency using inverse optimum weights abstract this paper provides a method to measure the traditional kaldor hicks notion of economic efficiency when taxes affect behavior in contrast to traditional unweighted surplus measuring efficiency requires weighting individual benefits or surplus by the marginal cost to the government of providing a 1 transfer at each income level these weights correspond to the solution to the inverse optimum program in the optimal tax literature they are the social planning weights that would rationalize the status quo tax schedule as optimal i estimate the weights using the universe of us income tax returns from 2012 the results suggest that measuring economic efficiency requires weighting surplus accruing to the poor roughly 1 5 2 times more than surplus accruing to the rich this is because 1 of surplus to the poor can be turned into roughly 1 5 2 of surplus to the rich by reducing the progressivity of the tax schedule following kaldor and hicks original applications i compare income distributions over time in the us and across countries the results suggest us economic growth is 15 20 lower due to increased inequality than is suggested by changes in gdp because of its higher inequality the u s is unable to replicate the income distribution of countries like austria and the netherlands despite having higher national income per capita

taxation and the international mobility of inventors we study the eect of top tax rates on superstar inventors international mobility since 1977 using panel data on inventors from the u s and european patent oces we exploit the dierential impact of changes in top tax rates on inventors of dierent qualities superstar inventors location choices are signicantly aected by top tax rates in our preferred specication the elasticity to the net of tax rate of the number of domestic superstar inventors is around 0 03 while that of foreign superstar inventors is around 1 these elasticities are larger for inventors in multinational companies an inventor is less sensitive to taxes in a country if his company performs a higher share of its research there

disease and development evidence from hookworm eradication in the american south this study evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the american south the hookworm eradication campaign c 1910 began soon after i the discovery that a variety of health problems among southerners could be attributed to the disease and ii the donation by john d rockefeller of a substantial sum to the effort the rockefeller sanitary commission rsc surveyed infection rates in the affected areas eleven southern states and found that an average of forty percent of school aged children were infected with hookworm the rsc then sponsored treatment and education campaigns across the region follow up studies indicate that this campaign substantially reduced hookworm disease almost immediately the sudden introduction of this treatment combines with the cross area differences in pre treatment infection rates to form the basis of the identification strategy areas with higher levels of hookworm infection prior to the rsc experienced greater increases in school enrollment attendance and literacy after the intervention this result is robust to controlling for a variety of alternative factors including differential trends across areas changing crop prices shifts in certain educational and health policies and the effect of malaria eradication no significant contemporaneous results are found for adults who should have benefited less from the intervention owing to their substantially lower prior infection rates a long term follow up of affected cohorts indicates a substantial gain in income that coincided with exposure to hookworm eradication i also find evidence that eradication increased the return to schooling

a structural model of multiple welfare program participation and labor supply work on estimating the labor supply effects of high marginal tax rates in welfare programs has been hindered by the difficulty of estimating the effects of participation in multiple welfare programs simultaneously the authors solve this problem by applying methods of simulation estimation to a model of labor supply and multiple program participation the results show asymmetric wage and tax rate effects with fairly large wage elasticities of labor supply but very inelastic responses to moderate changes in cumulative marginal tax rates implying that high welfare tax rates do not necessarily induce major reductions in work effort copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

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

explaining the decline in the u s employment to population ratio a review of the evidence this paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment to population ratio between 1999 and 2018 population aging has had a large effect on the overall employment rate over this period but within age group declines in employment among young and prime age adults also have played a central role among the factors with effects that we can quantify based on existing evidence labor demand factors in particular increased import competition from china and the penetration of robots into the labor market are the most important drivers of observed within group declines in employment labor supply factors most notably increased participation in disability insurance programs have played a less important but not inconsequential role increases in the real value of state minimum wages and in the share of individuals with prison records also have contributed modestly to the decline in the aggregate employment rate in addition to the factors whose effects we roughly quantify we identify a set of potentially important factors about which the evidence does not yet allow us to draw clear conclusions these include the challenges associated with arranging child care improvements in leisure technology changing social norms increased use of opioids the growth in occupational licensing and declining labor market fluidity our evidence driven ranking of factors should be useful for guiding future discussions about the sources of decline in the aggregate employment to population ratio and consequently the likely efficacy of alternative policy approaches to increasing employment rates

take up and targeting experimental evidence from snap this paper develops a framework for evaluating the welfare impact of various interventions designed to increase take up of social safety net programs in the presence of potential behavioral biases we calibrate the key parameters using a randomized field experiment in which 30 000 elderly individuals not enrolled in but likely eligible for the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap are either provided with information that they are likely eligible provided with this information and also offered assistance in applying or are in a status quo control group only 6 percent of the control group enrolls in snap over the next 9 months compared to 11 percent of the information only group and 18 percent of the information plus assistance group the individuals who apply or enroll in response to either intervention receive lower benefits and are less sick than the average enrollee in the control group the results are consistent with the existence of optimization frictions that are greater for needier individuals suggesting that the poor targeting properties of the interventions reduce their welfare gains

the food stamp participation and labor supply of married couples an empirical analysis of joint decisions this paper examines the effect of the food stamp program on intrafamily labor supply and program participation decisions married couples simultaneously choose the labor supply of the husband and wife and whether to participate in the food stamp program using data from the survey of income and program participation the author estimates a nested multinomial logit model simulations indicate smaller labor supply effects to changes in the food stamp benefit than the previous research which focused on single parents married couple program participation is found to be relatively responsive to changes in food stamp benefits

optimal price discounting and lot sizing policies for perishable items in a supply chain under advance payment scheme and two echelon trade credits abstract many researchers have assumed that a retailer announces price discount to motivate market sales when he has competition in markets unanticipated surplus in inventory or change in the production run of a product but in real life situations there are retailers who announce price discount offer under advance payment ap scheme prior to the selling period due to the advancement of internet and on line money transactions the ap scheme is common and useful to decrease the estimation error in demand and to increase the market sales when the items are arrived to the inventory the priority will be given to the customers who use ap scheme this paper considers a supply chain where the supplier provides the retailer a full trade credit period for payments whereas the retailer offers the partial trade credit to his customers i intend to develop an economic order quantity eoq based model with perishable items in order to investigate the retailer s inventory system as a cost minimization problem under ap scheme and two echelon trade credit option mathematical theorems are developed to determine optimal price discounting and lot sizing policies and a lot of managerial phenomena are obtained through numerical examples

snap expansions and participation in government safety net programs this paper investigates the interactions between health and nutritional assistance programs such as medicaid snap wic and school lunch programs exploiting variation in snap eligibility across states and over time i find strong evidence of program interactions when a state moves from the federal rule to the most extensive snap eligibility rule enrollment in free school lunch and wic increases by 4 1 and 7 9 percentage points respectively i estimate that the federal government spends an additional 74 cents on the school lunch program and wic for each dollar spent on snap due to the expansion

a unified welfare analysis of government policies we conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half century in the united states focusing on policies in social insurance education and job training taxes and cash transfers and in kind transfers for each policy we use existing causal estimates to calculate both the benefit that each policy provides its recipients measured as their willingness to pay and the policy s net cost inclusive of long term impacts on the government s budget we divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy s marginal value of public funds or its mvpf comparing mvpfs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their impact on social welfare our results suggest that direct investments in low income children s health and education have historically had the highest mvpfs on average exceeding 5 many such policies have paid for themselves as governments recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers we find large mvpfs for education and health policies amongst children of all ages rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood we find smaller mvpfs for policies targeting adults generally between 0 5 and 2 expenditures on adults have exceeded this mvpf range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children we relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy and we discuss how the mvpf provides lessons for the design of future research

long run impacts of childhood access to the safety net a growing economics literature establishes a causal link between in utero shocks and health and human capital in adulthood most studies rely on extreme negative shocks such as famine and pandemics we are the first to examine the impact of a positive and policy driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood in particular we focus on the introduction of a key element of the u s safety net the food stamp program which was rolled out across counties in the u s between 1961 and 1975 we use the panel study of income dynamics to assemble unique data linking family background and county of residence in early childhood to adult health and economic outcomes the identification comes from variation across counties and over birth cohorts in availability of the food stamp program our findings indicate that the food stamp program has effects decades after initial exposure specifically access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of metabolic syndrome obesity high blood pressure and diabetes and for women an increase in economic self sufficiency overall our results suggest substantial internal and external benefits of the safety net that have not previously been quantified

a comparison between two pricing and lot sizing models with partial backlogging and deteriorated items abstract recently abad 2003 optimal pricing and lot sizing under conditions of perishability finite production and partial backordering and lost sale european journal of operational research 144 677 685 studied the pricing and lot sizing problem for a perishable good under finite production exponential decay partial backordering and lost sale in this article we extend his model by adding not only the backlogging cost but also the cost of lost goodwill we then analytically compare the net profits per unit time between abad s 2003 model and goyal and giri s 2003 the production inventory problem of a product with time varying demand production and deterioration rates european journal of operational research 147 549 557 model in abad s model the cycle starts with an instant production to accumulate stocks then stops production to use up stocks and finally restarts production to meet the unsatisfied demands by contrast in goyal and giri s model the cycle begins with a period of shortages then starts production until accumulated inventory reaches certain level and finally stops production and uses up inventory our theoretical results show that there is no dominant one between these two models furthermore we provide certain conditions under which one model has more net profit per unit time than the other finally we give several numerical examples to illustrate the results

the drivers of income inequality in rich countries rising income inequality has recently come centre stage as a core societal concern for rich countries the diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market forces versus institutions and policy choices this survey provides a critical review and synthesis of recent research the focus is on income inequality across the entire distribution rather than only on what has been happening at the very top we pay particular attention to including what has been learned from the analysis of micro data to ensuring that the coverage is not unduly us centric and to analyses of the interrelations between the different drivers of inequality the marked differences in inequality trends across countries and time periods reflect how global economic forces such as globalisation and technological change have interacted with differing national contexts and institutions major analytical challenges stand in the way of a consensus emerging on the relative importance of different drivers in how income inequality has evolved in recent decades

an optimal production inventory model for deteriorating items with multiple market demand the global markets of today offer more selling opportunities to the deteriorating items manufacturers but also pose new challenges in production and inventory planning from a production management standpoint opportunities to exploit the difference in the timing of the selling season between geographically dispersed markets for deteriorating items are important to improving a firm s profitability in this paper we examined the above issue with an insightful production inventory model of a deteriorating items manufacturer selling goods to multiple markets with different selling seasons we also provided a solution procedure to find the optimal replenishment schedule for raw materials and the optimal production plan for finished products a numerical example was then used to illustrate the model and the solution procedure finally sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution with respect to major parameters was carried out

the economics and nutritional impacts of food assistance policies and programs recent evidence on malnutrition and poverty raise important questions on the role of food assistance policies and programs in this review article we examine evidence on the economic and nutritional impacts of international food assistance programs faps and policies the returns on investments in faps are on average high but depend considerably on the targeting and cost structures as well as on food quality and role of complementary activities we disaggregate findings into four classes of recipients returns to faps are highest for children under two but faps oriented towards early childhood interventions are less well funded than are interventions aimed at school age children or at the broader largely adult population even though available evidence indicates that these latter classes of interventions offer considerably lower average returns in economic health and nutrition terms nonetheless fap effectiveness in achieving any of several objectives varies with a range of key factors including targeting additionality seasonality timeliness incentive effects social acceptability and political economy considerations

what did medicare do the initial impact of medicare on mortality and out of pocket medical spending abstract we study the impact of the introduction of one of the major pillars of the social insurance system in the united states the introduction of medicare in 1965 our results suggest that in its first 10 years the establishment of universal health insurance for the elderly had no discernible impact on elderly mortality however we find a substantial reduction in the elderly s exposure to out of pocket medical expenditure risk specifically we estimate that the introduction of medicare was associated with a 40 decline in out of pocket spending for the top quartile of the out of pocket spending distribution a stylized expected utility framework suggests that the welfare gains from such reductions in risk exposure alone may be sufficient to cover almost two fifths of the costs of medicare these findings underscore the importance of considering the direct insurance benefits from public health insurance programs in addition to any indirect benefits from an effect on health

non separable time preferences novelty consumption and body weight theory and evidence from the east german transition to capitalism abstract this paper develops a dynamic model to illustrate how diet and body weight change when novel food products become available to consumers we propose a microfounded test to empirically discriminate between habit and taste formation in intertemporal preferences moreover we show that novelty consumption and endogenous preferences can explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity by empirically studying the german reunification we find that east germans consumed more novel western food and gained more weight than west germans when a larger variety of food products became readily accessible after the fall of the wall the observed consumption patterns suggest that food consumption features habit formation

does head start improve children s life chances evidence from a regression discontinuity design this paper exploits a new source of variation in head start funding to identify the program s effects on health and schooling in 1965 the office of economic opportunity oeo provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop head start proposals the result was a large and lasting discontinuity in head start funding rates at the oeo cutoff for grant writing assistance we find evidence of a large drop at the oeo cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by head start as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment i introduction head start was established in 1965 as part of the war on poverty to provide preschool health and other social services to poor children age three to five and their families and currently serves over 900 000 children each year at a cost of around 7 billion hhs 2006 this paper provides new evidence on the effects of the head start program on schooling and health by drawing on a new source of variation in program funding spe

housing vouchers income shocks and crime evidence from a lottery abstract employing exogenous variation in randomized wait list positions assigned using a lottery we identify the causal effects of section 8 housing vouchers on arrests of adult household heads based on administrative records from houston we find that voucher receipt has no effect on the likelihood of arrest even among the groups with the highest propensities for crime the vouchers have no impact income effects for these adults are particularly large relative to neighborhood effects leading us to believe that this large income shock does little to alleviate financial pressures that could lead to crime

inside the war on poverty the impact of food stamps on birth outcomes this paper evaluates the health impacts of a signature initiative of the war on poverty the introduction of the modern food stamp pro gram fsp using variation in the month fsp began operating in each u s county we find that pregnancies exposed to fsp three months prior to birth yielded deliveries with increased birth weight with the largest gains at the lowest birth weights we also find small but statistically insig nificant improvements in neonatal mortality we conclude that the sizable increase in income from fsp improved birth outcomes for both whites and african americans with larger impacts for african american mothers n this paper we evaluate the health consequences of a sizable improvement in the resources available to ameri ca s poorest in particular we examine the impact of the food stamp program fsp which in 2007 provided 34 billion in payments to about 13 million households on infant health our paper makes two distinct contributions first although the goal of the fsp is to increase the nutri tion of the poor few papers have examined its impact on health outcomes second building on work by hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 we argue that the fsp treatment represents an exogenous increase in income for the poor our analysis therefore represents a causal estimate of the impact of income on health an important topic with little convincing evidence due to concerns about endogeneity and reverse causality currie 2009 we use the natural experiment afforded by the nation wide rollout of the modern fsp during the 1960s and early 1970s our identification strategy uses the sharp timing of the county by county rollout of the fsp which was initially constrained by congressional funding authorizations and ultimately became available in all counties by 1975 speci fically we use information on the month the fsp began operating in each of the roughly 3 100 u s counties and examine the impact of the fsp rollout on mean birth weight low birth weight gestation and neonatal mortality throughout the history of the fsp the program para meters have been set by the u s department of agriculture usda and are uniform across states in the absence of the state level variation often leveraged by economists to eval uate transfer programs previous fsp research has typically resorted to strong assumptions as to the comparability of fsp participants and eligible nonparticipants currie 2003 not surprisingly the literature is far from settled as to what casual impact if any the fsp has on nutrition and health hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 use this county rollout to examine the impact of the fsp on food consumption using the psid they found that the introduction of the fsp increased total food spending and decreased out of pocket food spending importantly consistent with the predictions of canonical microeconomic theory the magnitude of the increase in food expenditures was similar to an equivalent sized income transfer implying that most recipient house holds were inframarginal that is they would spend more on the subsidized good than the face value of the in kind transfer as one of the largest antipoverty programs in the united states comparable in cost to the earned income tax credit eitc and substantially larger than temporary assistance to needy families tanf understanding fsp effects is valuable both in its own right and for what it reveals about the relationship between income and health 1

goal setting and energy conservation abstract this paper develops a theoretical model of consumer demand for an energy conservation program that involves non binding self set goals we present evidence from a northern illinois goal setting program aimed at reducing residential electricity consumption which is difficult to reconcile with standard preferences and is broadly consistent with a model of present biased consumers with reference dependent preferences we find that the need for commitment is correlated with program adoption higher pre adoption consumption and lower responsiveness to goals consumers choosing realistic goals persistently save substantially more achieving savings of nearly 11 than those choosing very low or unrealistically high goals

does welfare inhibit success the long term effects of removing low income youth from the disability rolls i estimate the effects of removing low income youth with disabilities from supplemental security income ssi on their earnings and income in adulthood using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews i find that youth who are removed from ssi at age 18 recover one third of the lost ssi cash income in earnings ssi youth who are removed and stay off ssi earn on average 4 400 annually and they lose 76 000 in present discounted observed income over the 16 years following removal relative to those who do not receive a review jel i30 i38 j14 supporters of welfare programs defend them as vital lifelines for those who face barriers to work while critics charge that these programs create perverse incentives to qualify and perpetuate dependency encapsulating this debate is the controversy over the us supplemental security income ssi program a program that provides cash payments and medicaid eligibility to low income children and adults with disabilities and the aged elderly after three decades of rapid expansion ssi is now the largest nonwork based cash welfare program in the united states paying about 50 billion each year to 8 million recipients including 1 3 million children 1 ssi has been singled out by policymakers and the media for potential perverse incentives

international differences in the family gap in pay the role of labor market institutions using the microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985 to 1994 and 1994 to 2002 we find that labour market institutions are traditionally associated with more compressed wage structures and a higher family gap our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but aggravate the human capital loss due to motherhood we also find evidence that policies that help women to continue in the same job after childbirth decrease the family gap of all the countries we study mothers in southern europe suffer the biggest family gap and our analysis indicates that this is due to the bad combination of labour market policies in these countries our results are robust to specification changes and indicate that the main reason for mothers to lag behind other women in terms of earnings is the loss of accumulated job market experience caused by career breaks around childbirth

work incentives and the food stamp program abstract labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction or expansion of a social welfare program impacts work effort although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects of afdc and the eitc relatively little is known about the work incentive effects of the food stamp program and none of the existing literature is based on quasi experimental methods we use the cross county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply earnings and family cash income consistent with theory we find reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced the reductions are concentrated among families headed by single woman