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The Effects Of Time In Prison And Time On Parole On Recidivism, Mariyana Zapryanova

Economics: Faculty Publications

In the United States, every year roughly 600,000 people are released from prison, two-thirds of them without having served their full sentence behind bars. Yet little is known about how release before full completion of sentence affects recidivism. I exploit the distinction between sentence and time served in prison to better understand how custodial and noncustodial sanctions affect recidivism. In particular, I study the effects of time in prison and time on parole on recidivism. Relying on two instrumental variables that provide independent variation in sentence and time served in prison, I do not find evidence that parole time affects …

Temperature And Human Capital In India, Teevrat Garg, Maulik Jagnani, Vis Taraz

Economics: Faculty Publications

We estimate the effects of temperature on human capital production in India. We show that high temperatures reduce math and reading test scores among school-age children. Agricultural income is one mechanism driving this relationship— hot days during the growing season reduce agricultural yields and test scores with comparatively modest effects of hot days in the nongrowing season. The roll-out of a workfare program, by providing a safety net for the poor, substantially weakens the link between temperature and test scores. Our results imply that absent social protection programs, higher temperatures will have large negative i

Chess As A Testing Grounds For The Oracle Approach To Ai Safety, James Miller, Roman V. Yampolskiy, Olle Häggström, Stuart Armstrong

Economics: Faculty Publications

To reduce the danger of powerful super-intelligent AIs, we might make the first such AIs oracles that can only send and receive messages. This paper proposes a possibly practical means of using machine learning to create two classes of narrow AI oracles that would provide chess advice: those aligned with the player's interest, and those that want the player to lose and give deceptively bad advice. The player would be uncertain which type of oracle it was interacting with. As the oracles would be vastly more intelligent than the player in the domain of chess, experience with these oracles might …

The Impact Of The Aca Medicaid Expansion On Disability Program Applications, Lucie Schmidt, Lara D. Shore-Sheppard, Tara Watson

Economics: Faculty Publications

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded the availability of public health insurance, decreasing the relative benefit of participating in disability programs but also lowering the cost of exiting the labor market to apply for disability benefits. In this paper, we explore the impact of expanded access to Medicaid through the ACA on applications to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs. Using the fact that the Supreme Court decision of June 2012 made the Medicaid expansion optional for the states, we compare changes in county-level SSI and SSDI caseloads in contiguous county pairs across a …

Federalizing Benefits: The Introduction Of Supplemental Security Income And The Size Of The Safety Net, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Lucie Schmidt

Economics: Faculty Publications

In 1974, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) federalized cash welfare programs for the elderly, blind, and individuals with disabilities, imposing a national minimum benefit, and differentially raising payment levels in states that paid below its benefit floor. We show that this increased disability participation, but shrank non-disability cash transfer programs. For every four new SSI recipients, three came from other welfare programs. Each dollar of per capita SSI income increased total per capita transfer income by just over 50 cents. Federalizing part of a patchwork safety net need not increase redistribution by as much as traditional models of fiscal federalism suggest.

Affective Empathy In Non-Cooperative Games, Jorge Vásquez, Marek Weretka

Economics: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we examine strategic settings in which players have interdependent preferences. Players' utility functions depend not only on the strategy profile being played, but also on the realized utilities of other players. Thus, players' realized utilities are interdependent, capturing the psychological phenomena of affective empathy and emotional contagion. We offer a solution concept for these empathetic games and show that the set of equilibria is non-empty and, generically, finite. Motivated by psychological evidence, we then analyze sympathetic and antipathetic games. In the former, players' utilities increase in others' realized utilities, capturing unconditional friendship; in the latter, the opposite …

A Win Win: College Athletes Get Paid For Their Names, Images, And Likenesses And Colleges Maintain The Primacy Of Academics, Jayma Meyer, Andrew S. Zimbalist

Economics: Faculty Publications

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Fair Pay to Play Act (SB 206) into law on September 30, 2019. The bill made it illegal for California's universities to prohibit college athletes from receiving compensation for use of their Names, Images, and Likenesses ("NILs"). Lawmakers soon introduced similar bills in other states1 and in Congress.

In this Article, we explain the history and role of amateurism in college athletics (Part I); the legal landscape of amateurism and paying college athletes, including NIL payments (Part II); the potential scope of NIL payments (Part III); and the NCAA NIL Committee’s recommendations (Part IV). …

Temperature And Economic Activity: Evidence From India, Anuska Jain, Róisín O'Sullivan, Vis Taraz

Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the impact of temperature on economic activity in India, using state-level data from 1980–2015. We estimate that a 1 ◦C increase in contemporaneous temperature (relative to our sample mean) reduces the economic growth rate that year by 2.5 percentage points. The adverse impact of higher temperatures is more severe in poorer states and in the primary sector. Our analysis of lagged temperatures suggests that our effects are driven by the contemporaneous effect of temperature on output; we do not find evidence of a permanent impact of contemporaneous temperatures on future growth rates.

Ban The Box, Convictions, And Public Employment, Terry Ann Craigie

Economics: Faculty Publications

Ban the Box (BTB) policies mandate deferred access to criminal history until later in the hiring process. However, these policies chiefly target public employers. The study is the first to focus on the primary goal of BTB reform, by measuring the impact of BTB policies on the probability of public employment for those with convictions. To execute the analyses, the study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort (2005–2015) and difference-in-difference (DD) estimation. The study finds that BTB policies raise the probability of public employment for those with convictions by about 30% on average. Some scholars …