did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates a reconciliation and new results application of the coase theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across us states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization i show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock i find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade that said this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century both administrative data on the flow of new divorces and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion these results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage with an eye to their partner s divorce threat

the medicaid notch labor supply and welfare participation evidence from eligibility expansions i assess the impact of losing public health insurance on labor market decisions of women by examining a series of medicaid eligibility expansions targeted toward young children these targeted expansions severed the historical tie between afdc and medicaid eligibility the reforms allowed a mother s earnings to increase without losing public health insurance for her young children increasing the income limit for medicaid resulted in a decrease in afdc participation and an increase in labor force participation among these women the effects were large for ever married women and negligible for never married women

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

welfare for the elderly the effects of ssi on pre retirement labor supply abstract this paper studies pre eligibility age labor market disincentives created by the supplemental security income ssi program asset and income limits might induce individuals nearing the eligibility age to work less we exploit states supplementation of federal ssi benefits to estimate the effects of ssi on pre retirement labor supply using sipp data we find some evidence that generous ssi benefits reduce the pre retirement labor supply and earnings of men who are likely to participate in ssi after retirement as they near the eligibility age especially men who are eligible for early social security benefits which may be used to offset their reduced labor income

participation and crowd out assessing the effects of parental medicaid expansions abstract in this paper we examine the effects of recent parental medicaid eligibility expansions on medicaid participation and private insurance coverage we present a new approach for estimating these policy effects that explicitly models the particular policy instrument over which legislators have control income eligibility thresholds our approach circumvents estimation problems stemming from misclassification or measurement error moreover it allows us to assess how the policy effects may vary at different initial threshold levels using data from the survey of income and program participation we find three main results first the eligibility expansions result in significant increases in medicaid participation a typical expansion increases medicaid participation by about four percent of baseline coverage rates second the participation effect is larger for lower initial thresholds and the effect decreases as medicaid thresholds increase third we find no statistically significant evidence of crowd out regardless of initial threshold level

the effect of expanding medicaid eligibility on supplemental security income program participation abstract low income adults without dependent children have historically had few paths to obtain public health insurance unless they qualified for supplemental security income ssi cash benefits because of a disability however in states that expand their medicaid programs childless adults may obtain medicaid without undergoing an intensive ssi disability review process and with substantially higher income and assets than the ssi program allows this expanded availability of medicaid coverage independent of ssi participation creates an opportunity to increase earnings and savings without jeopardizing health insurance coverage in this paper we use the natural experiments created by state decisions to expand medicaid to nondisabled nonelderly adults without dependent children to study the effect of decoupling medicaid eligibility and cash assistance using a difference in differences study design we collected data on the income eligibility limits enrollment caps and coverage characteristics of state medicaid expansions to childless adults from 2001 to 2013 we combine these data with the nationally representative american community survey to estimate the effects of state expansion on ssi participation we find relative declines in ssi participation of 0 17 percentage points on average after the introduction of medicaid coverage for childless adults a 7 relative decrease this finding suggests the potential for small but important efficiency gains from separating ssi and medicaid eligibility

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

using the medicare buy in program to estimate the effect of medicaid on ssi participation aaron s yelowitz this article assesses the importance of receiving supplemental health insurance on participation in supplemental security income ssi for the elderly the implementation of the qualified medicare beneficiary qmb program offered a substitute for medicaid and expanded health insurance eligibility to a higher income level using a sample of elderly respondents aged 66 to 75 i find that the qmb program reduced ssi participation more than half of the qmb participants were previously covered by ssi and medicaid the calculations suggest that the qmb program was not as expensive as it might first appear because of reductions in ssi expenditure jel h53 138 j14 i introduction the supplemental security income ssi program in the united states provides assistance to elderly blind and disabled individuals who are poor it is federally financed and administered by the social security administration although much more attention has been focused on the former aid to families with dependent children afdc program which primarily targets poor single parent families more money was spent on cash relief for ssi recipients in 1993 23 6 billion compared to 22 3 billion 1 in addition to cash ssi recipients receive supplemental health insurance coverage for medicare similar to private medigap policies through the medicaid program this provides a second important benefit to ssi recipients in fiscal year 1993 medicaid expenditure for elderly categorically needy ssi recipients amounted to 14 1 billion 2 several studies have examined the importance of health insurance for working age adults in the labor market 3 in addition the effects of recent medicaid expansions for younger populations have been extensively studied 4 little is known however about the quantitative importance of medicaid on the ssi participation of the elderly the key obstacle in assessing this effect is that until recently medicaid eligibility had been closely related to ssi eligibility in most states this study analyzes the introduction of the qualified medicare beneficiary qmb program enacted in different states from 1987 to 1992 which offered supplemental health insurance coverage to the elderly without the need to participate in ssi the qmb program offered some of the same medicare cost sharing benefits that an elderly ssi recipient would receive from medicaid including the payment of medicare premiums deductibles and copayments 5 moreover the qmb program expanded medicaid coverage to individuals with higher inc omes and assets than the ssi program 6 the primary goal of this article is to document the link between the qmb program and the decision to participate in ssi i find that raising the income limit in qmb program significantly reduces ssi participation particularly among african americans and the less educated the coefficient estimates suggest that in the absence of the qmb buy in program ssi participation would have been 45 higher in 1992 than it actually was the caseload growth in the elderly ssi population would have looked very similar to the caseload growth of the disabled 851 population a group not eligible for qmb in addition the qmb program was considerably less expensive than one would infer from simply calculating the increased health care expenditure because of reductions in ssi expenditure for cash benefits the rest of the article is arranged as follows section ii outlines some relevant features of the ssi medicaid and qmb programs in particular it reviews how the income eligibility limits for qmb and ssi are computed the difference between those limits is a measure of how closely are medicaid and ssi linked it will subsequently be used as the key independent variable in the regression analysis this section also shows the cross sectional and time series variation in the qmb program section iii models the potential effects on ssi participation of the introduction of the qmb program and considers the role of information

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

government decision making and the incidence of federal mandates abstract this paper analyzes the effects of federally mandated program changes on state spending and revenues incorporating and evaluating the predictive value of several common theories of the state decision making process using several sources of exogenous increases in public medical spending i estimate that the entire state portion of the burden of mandated spending is borne by decreases in other public welfare spending while federal mandates may influence the composition of benefits at the state level it is much more difficult for them to change the total level of state transfers comparison of state reactions to different shocks suggests that these reductions are due in part to the substitutability of programs in the voter utility function but also in part to the stickiness of spending within budget categories states with greater racial differences between recipients and voters and states with less generous neighbors reduce other public welfare spending by even more alleviating the burden the medical expansions imposed on their taxpayers mandates may thus serve only to increase inequality across states

did expanding medicaid affect welfare participation in a widely cited 1995 paper aaron yelowitz concluded that medicaid eligibility expansions for children were associated with increased labor force participation and reduced welfare participation among single mothers the authors of the present study using data from the 1988 96 current population surveys re examine the evidence presented by yelowitz they find that yelowitz s results resulted from two factors he imposed a restriction on the parameter estimates not predicted by theory and rejected in the data and he used only one of two income tests that families must pass to be eligible for welfare the authors conclude that there is no evidence detectable in the cps data of a relationship between welfare or labor force participation and the medicaid income limits

the effect of means tested income support for the elderly on pre retirement saving evidence from the ssi program in the u s abstract we attempt to draw inferences about behavioral responses to means tested income support for the elderly by examining the effects on saving of the supplemental security income ssi program for the aged in the u s part of this program provides payments to the poor elderly operating as a means tested public retirement program we exploit state level variation in ssi benefits to estimate the effects of ssi on saving using data from the 1984 survey of income program participation we find evidence that high ssi benefits reduce saving among households with heads who are approaching the ssi eligibility age and are likely participants in the program

disability insurance rejection rates and the labor supply of older workers abstract we investigate the effects of trying to mitigate moral hazard in the disability insurance di program by raising the stringency of the screening process for applicants we do so by studying a dramatic increase in rejection rates for the di program in the late 1970s which varied substantially across the us states we find that each 10 rise in denial rates led to a statistically significant 2 8 fall in labor force non participation among 45 64 year old males we also find that the denial rate increases effectively targeted their incentive effects to more able individuals according to an anthropometric measure of disability

effects of the minimum wage on employment dynamics the voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment we argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels we show that commonly used specifications in this literature especially those that include state specific time trends will not accurately capture these effects using three separate state panels of administrative employment data we find that the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years this finding is supported using several empirical specifications

distinguishing income from substitution effects in disability insurance a set of studies conducted over the last 15 years has produced a near consensus that the social security disability insurance system ssdi has substantial disincentive effects on the labor supply of near elderly males diminishing labor force participation increasing the sensitivity of labor force exit decisions to adverse economic shocks and encouraging those nearing retirement to claim disability benefits and subsequently transfer into the social security retirement program yet efforts by the social security administration ssa to encourage labor supply among the disabled by removing the work disincentives built into ssdi have been almost entirely unsuccessful most notably in 1999 congress authorized the ticket to work program which provides an array of inducements for current ssdi beneficiaries to take up employment including permitting a trial work period of up to nine months providing 7 75 years of ongoing medicare eligibility following return to work and providing three years of automatic benefit reinstatement when claimants workplace earnings fall below a threshold level each of these steps reduces the implicit tax placed on labor supply by the ssdi program despite these lures fewer than 1 400 0 01 percent of the 12 2 million tickets issued to date have led to successful workforce integration autor and duggan 2006

disability insurance and health insurance reform evidence from massachusetts abstract as health insurance becomes available outside of the employment relationship as a result of the affordable care act aca the cost of applying for social security disability insurance ssdi potentially going without health insurance coverage during a waiting period totaling 29 months from disability onset will decline for many people with employer sponsored health insurance at the same time the value of ssdi and supplemental security income ssi participation will decline for individuals who otherwise lacked access to health insurance we study the 2006 massachusetts health insurance reform to estimate the potential effects of the aca on ssdi and ssi applications

does disability insurance receipt discourage work using examiner assignment to estimate causal effects of ssdi receipt abstract we present the first causal estimates of the effect of social security disability insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants we use administrative data to matc

public health insurance labor supply and employment lock we study the effect of public health insurance on labor supply by exploiting a large public health insurance disenrollment in 2005 approximately 170 000 tennessee residents abruptly lost medicaid coverage using both across and within state variation in exposure to the disenrollment we estimate large increases in labor supply primarily along the extensive margin the increased employment is concentrated among individuals working at least 20 hours a week and receiving private employer provided health insurance we explore the dynamic effects of the disenrollment and find an immediate increase in job search behavior and a steady rise in both employment and health insurance coverage following the disenrollment our results are consistent with a significant degree of employment lock workers who are employed primarily to secure private health insurance coverage jel codes i1 j22 h75

migration the life cycle and state benefits how low is the bottom i show that among women likely to use welfare movers move to higher benefit states i also find that the probability likely welfare users will move at all is lower in higher benefit states this effect is concentrated early in the life cycle as theory predicts i construct a theoretical framework to measure the impact of welfare migration on optimal state benefits simulation results suggest little impact in higher benefit states but possibly a more substantial impact in other states finally evidence suggests little reason for concern due to welfare migration in using cross state variation in welfare generosity to identify incentive effects of the welfare system on other outcome variables

accounting for mismatch unemployment we investigate unemployment due to mismatch in the us over the past three decades we propose an accounting framework that allows us to estimate the overall amount of mismatch unemployment as well as the contribution of each of the frictions that caused the mismatch mismatch is quantitatively important for unemployment and the cyclical behavior of mismatch unemployment is very similar to that of the overall unemployment rate geographic mismatch is driven primarily by wage frictions mismatch across industries is driven by wage frictions as well as barriers to job mobility we nd virtually no role for worker mobility frictions

afdc ssi and welfare reform aggressiveness caseload reductions versus caseload shifting welfare reform has made receipt of cash benefits more difficult and less attractive for single mothers we examine whether reforms of afdc affected caseloads of another program supplemental security income ssi we exploit state variation in welfare reform over time and find that female headed households in states aggressively pursuing welfare reform were 21 6 percent more likely to receive ssi this implies that a decrease in caseloads in one program cannot be interpreted as an equal sized decrease in the number of families receiving public assistance in addition our results have policy implications for the well being of families affected by welfare reform time limits

the impact of economic conditions on participation in disability programs evidence from the coal boom and bust abstract we examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970 s and the coal bust of the 1980 s on disability program participation these shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor market participation increases disability program participation falls for the disability insurance program the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between 0 3 and 0 4 and for supplemental security income the elasticity is between 0 4 and 0 7 consistent with a model where qualifying for disability programs is costly the relationship between economic conditions and program participation is much stronger for permanent than for transitory economic shocks

the employment effects of terminating disability benefits abstract few social security disability insurance di beneficiaries return to the labor force making it hard to assess their likely employment in the absence of benefits using administrative data i examine the employment of individuals who lost di eligibility after the 1996 removal of drug and alcohol addictions as qualifying conditions approximately 22 started working at levels that would have disqualified them for di an employment response that is large relative to their work histories those who received di for 2 3 years had the largest response suggesting that a period of public assistance may maximize the employment of some disabled individuals

asset accumulation and labor force participation of disability insurance applicants abstract this paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of forward looking asset accumulation behavior among disability insurance applicants previously examined only in the theoretical literature using panel data from the rand health and retirement study i show that rejected applicants for social security disability insurance ssdi possess significantly more assets than accepted applicants immediately prior to application and exhibit lower attachment to the labor force these empirical results are consistent with the theoretical prediction in diamond and mirrlees 1978 and golosov and tsyvinski 2006 that certain individuals with high unwillingness to work maximize utility by planning in advance for their future disability insurance application because the existing empirical literature on disability insurance does not account for this intertemporal channel it may underestimate the total work disincentive effect of ssdi

why did the ssi disabled program grow so much disentangling the effect of medicaid the number of participants in the ssi program grew by 1 1 million from 1987 to 1993 this paper examines the role of medicaid on the ssi participation decision i use the rapid growth in average medicaid expenditure as a proxy for its value ols estimates of medicaid s effect may be biased because of omitted variables bias and measurement error i therefore apply two stage least squares to estimate medicaid s effect using average medicaid expenditure for blind ssi recipients as an instrument these estimates show that rising medicaid expenditure significantly increased ssi participation among adults with low permanent incomes explaining 20 of the growth

stock market returns and consumption this paper employs swedish data on households stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns we instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments with past portfolio weights unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume mpc of 23 percent for the bottom 50 of the wealth distribution and about 3 percent for the top 30 of the wealth distribution households consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all parts of the wealth distribution our findings are consistent with households treating capital gains and dividends as separate sources of income