Has U.S. health care for the elderly become more equitable during the past several decades? When inequality is measured by Medicare expenditures, the answer is yes. During 1987-2001, low income households experienced an increase of 78 percent ($2624) in per capita expenditures, double the...

In the last two decades, U.S. policies have moved from the use of incentives to the use of sanctions to promote work effort in social programs. Surprisingly, except for anecdotes, there is very little systematic evidence of the extent to which sanctions applied to the abusive use of social...

We use a novel retail panel with detailed transaction records to study the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on household spending. We use administrative data to motivate three approaches to causal inference. The marginal propensity to consume SNAP-eligible food...

This paper exploits the original introduction of Medicaid (1966-1970) and the federal mandate that states cover all cash welfare recipients to estimate the effect of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health, labor supply, program participation, and income. Cohorts born closer to Medicaid...

The increase in the prevalence of obesity worldwide has led to great interest in the economic consequences of obesity, but valid and powerful instruments for obesity, which are needed to estimate its causal effects, are rare. This paper contributes to the literature by using a novel instrument:...

Instrumental Variables (IV) methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand. Inference for other populations requires some sort of homogeneity assumption. This paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests all...

In the Self Sufficiency Program (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full time work. The subsidy was available for three years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple...

This paper provides an analysis of child care subsidies under welfare reform. Previous studies of child care subsidies use data from the pre-welfare-reform period, and their results may not apply to the very different post-reform environment. We use data from the 1999 National Survey of...

We examine multi-generational impacts of positive in utero and early life health interventions using state-year variation in public health insurance expansions that targeted low-income pregnant women and children. We use restricted use Vital Statistics Natality files to create a unique dataset...

Increased availability of public health insurance for children has led to two potentially contradictory concerns for public policy: that expanded availability of public insurance may lead families to decline private insurance and that additional public coverage may not reach many uninsured...