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Syracuse University

Center for Policy Research

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

States’ Covid-19 Restrictions Were Associated With Increases In Drug Overdose Deaths In 2020, Douglas A. Wolf, Shannon M. Monnat, Jennifer Karas Montez, Emily E. Wiemers, Elyse Grossman May 2024

States’ Covid-19 Restrictions Were Associated With Increases In Drug Overdose Deaths In 2020, Douglas A. Wolf, Shannon M. Monnat, Jennifer Karas Montez, Emily E. Wiemers, Elyse Grossman

Center for Policy Research

Drug overdoses surged in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health experts raised concerns in the pandemic’s early months about how the pandemic and the policies enacted to stem it might increase overdose risk. This brief summarizes the findings of a paper that used national data to identify how states’ COVID-19 policies affected drug overdose rates among U.S. adults ages 25-64 during the first year of the pandemic. Results show that counties located in states that adopted more aggressive in-person activity restrictions experienced larger increases in 2020 than counties located in states with fewer limitations. State economic support policies …


Risk Perception, Dread, And The Value Of Statistical Life: Evidence From Occupational Fatalities, Perry Singleton May 2024

Risk Perception, Dread, And The Value Of Statistical Life: Evidence From Occupational Fatalities, Perry Singleton

Center for Policy Research

In a model of occupational safety, biased perceptions of risk decrease welfare, which may justify government regulation. Bias is examined empirically by the correlation between subjective and objective risk, the former measured by self-reported exposure to death on the job. The correlation is negligible among workers with no high school diploma, consistent with underestimating risk in more dangerous occupations, and strongest among more educated workers when objective risk is specific to harmful and noxious substances, which in psychological studies rank high in dread. Biased perceptions of risk may also lead to biased estimates of value of statistical life. VSL estimates …


Adopting The Standard Medical Deduction Increased State Snap Enrollment And Benefits, Yuwei Zhang, Jun Li, Dongmei Zuo, Colleen Heflin Feb 2024

Adopting The Standard Medical Deduction Increased State Snap Enrollment And Benefits, Yuwei Zhang, Jun Li, Dongmei Zuo, Colleen Heflin

Center for Policy Research

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a critical safety net program that helps reduce food insecurity among low-income households in the United States. However, many eligible households do not participate in SNAP due to burdensome administrative requirements. To make it easier for more older adults and people with disabilities to participate in SNAP, many states have adopted the Standard Medical Deduction (SMD) to simplify administrative requirements. This brief summarizes findings from a study that examined the associations between state SMD adoption and SNAP participation and benefits from 2004 to 2019.


Waiving Snap Interviews During The Covid-19 Pandemic Increased Snap Caseloads, Colleen Heflin, William Clay Fannin, Leonard M. Lopoo, Siobhan O'Keefe Jan 2024

Waiving Snap Interviews During The Covid-19 Pandemic Increased Snap Caseloads, Colleen Heflin, William Clay Fannin, Leonard M. Lopoo, Siobhan O'Keefe

Center for Policy Research

Food insecurity in the United States reached historically high rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus substantially increasing demand for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To facilitate access to SNAP during the pandemic, the federal government granted state SNAP offices the option to waive the interview requirement – an administrative burden associated with the SNAP certification process. This brief summarizes findings from a recent study that used data from SNAP offices across 10 states to examine the impact of SNAP interview waivers on SNAP caseloads from January 5th to April 30th of 2021. Findings reveal that counties that implemented the …


Tax Streams, Land Rents, And Urban Land Allocation, Yugang Tang, Zhihao Su, Yilin Hou, Zhendong Yin Jan 2024

Tax Streams, Land Rents, And Urban Land Allocation, Yugang Tang, Zhihao Su, Yilin Hou, Zhendong Yin

Center for Policy Research

This paper examines the fiscal motives behind municipal governments' decisions to allocate commercial and residential land when two categories of land use are subject to different fiscal revenue alternatives: business-related tax and/or land rent. We use urban parcel-level land transfers during China’s peak period of urbanization, match commercial parcels with residential parcels, and find significant price discounts on commercial parcels relative to adjacent residential parcels. The observed discounts arise from the future tax flows from commercial use, i.e., expected taxes from developed commercial land reduce its transfer price. We conduct a structural estimation to examine the implications on land use …


Stronger Regulations On Air Pollution Could Reduce Cardiovascular Disease Mortality Rates, Yue Sun Dec 2023

Stronger Regulations On Air Pollution Could Reduce Cardiovascular Disease Mortality Rates, Yue Sun

Center for Policy Research

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States, but there are large disparities in CVD death rates across the country. Air pollution also plays an important role in shaping geographic disparities in CVD mortality, as air pollutants can become absorbed in human circulation systems, and cause inflammation, damage nervous systems, and trigger poor CVD outcomes. This brief reports the results of a study that used data on air pollution and from death certificates to estimate the association between fine particulate matter and cardiovascular disease mortality rates in the U.S. in 2016-2018. Results show that cutting …


Behavioral Science Interventions Could Increase Snap Comprehension And Awareness Among Military Families, Colleen Heflin, Hannah Patnaik, Leonard M. Lopoo, Siobhan O'Keefe Nov 2023

Behavioral Science Interventions Could Increase Snap Comprehension And Awareness Among Military Families, Colleen Heflin, Hannah Patnaik, Leonard M. Lopoo, Siobhan O'Keefe

Center for Policy Research

Food insecurity is more common among military families than the general population, and the transition from active service to civilian life is a time of heightened risk. The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to support food security among low-income families. Many eligible military and veteran families do not enroll in SNAP due to a lack of information, stigma, and administrative barriers. This brief highlights findings from a survey experiment conducted in 2022 and 2023 to assess how small changes to SNAP informational flyers, such as simplifying information provided about SNAP, highlighting that other veterans use SNAP, and emphasizing …


The Mundlak Spatial Estimator, Badi H. Baltagi Sep 2023

The Mundlak Spatial Estimator, Badi H. Baltagi

Center for Policy Research

The spatial Mundlak model first considered by Debarsy (2012) is an alternative to fixed effects and random effects estimation for spatial panel data models. Mundlak modelled the correlated random individual effects as a linear combination of the averaged regressors over time plus a random time-invariant error. This paper shows that if spatial correlation is present whether spatial lag or spatial error or both, the standard Mundlak result in panel data does not hold and random effects does not reduce to its fixed effects counterpart. However, using maximum likelihood one can still estimate these spatial Mundlak models and test the correlated …


Treatment For Mental Health And Substance Use: Spillovers To Police Safety, Monica Deza Sep 2023

Treatment For Mental Health And Substance Use: Spillovers To Police Safety, Monica Deza

Center for Policy Research

We study the effect of community access to mental health and substance use treatment on police officer safety, which we proxy with on-duty assaults on officers. Police officers often serve as first-responders to people experiencing mental health and substance use crises, which can place police officers at risk. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on the number of treatment centers that offer mental health and substance use care, we estimate two-way fixed-effects regressions and find that an additional four centers per county (the average annual increase observed in our data) leads to a 1.3% reduction …


Covid-19 Has Strengthened The Relationship Between Alcohol Consumption And Domestic Violence, Monica Deza, Aaron Chalfin, Shooshan Danagoulian Sep 2023

Covid-19 Has Strengthened The Relationship Between Alcohol Consumption And Domestic Violence, Monica Deza, Aaron Chalfin, Shooshan Danagoulian

Center for Policy Research

A large body of evidence documents a link between alcohol consumption and violence involving intimate partners and close family members. Recent scholarship suggests that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders, there has been a marked increase in domestic violence. This research considers an important mechanism behind the increase in domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic: an increase in the riskiness of alcohol consumption. We combine 911 call data with newly available high-resolution microdata on visits to bars and liquor stores in Detroit, MI and find that the strength of the relationship between visits to alcohol …


Unemployment, Alcohol, And Tobacco Use: Separating State Dependence From Unobserved Heterogeneity, Monica Deza Sep 2023

Unemployment, Alcohol, And Tobacco Use: Separating State Dependence From Unobserved Heterogeneity, Monica Deza

Center for Policy Research

Previous literature presents mixed evidence on the effect of alcohol consumption on labor market outcomes. On one hand, heavy alcohol consumption has been shown to have detrimental effects on labor market outcomes. On the other hand, moderate consumption is positively associated with wages and employment. Despite substantial reduced form evidence, previous literature has not been able to separately identify the causal pathways linking moderate versus heavy alcohol use to labor market performance due to the lack of natural experiments that only target moderate versus heavy drinking, as well as limitations of available structural methods that model state dependence and unobserved …


Covid-19 Mortality Rates Were Higher In States That Limited Governments From Enacting Public Health Emergency Orders, Xue Zhang, Mildred Warner, Gen Meredith Aug 2023

Covid-19 Mortality Rates Were Higher In States That Limited Governments From Enacting Public Health Emergency Orders, Xue Zhang, Mildred Warner, Gen Meredith

Center for Policy Research

State and local governments enacted various public health emergency policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in lower infection and death rates than would have occurred without these policies. However, some states limited emergency public health authority of state executives, state governors, and state and local officials during the pandemic. This brief summarizes the results of a study that used data from the Center for Public Health Law Research and Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker to explore which states passed laws that limited emergency public health authority during the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of those limitations on COVID-19 death …


Beyond The “Model Minority” Mirage: How Does Positive Bias Affect Asian Students And Other Students Of Color?, Ying Shi, Maria Zhu Jul 2023

Beyond The “Model Minority” Mirage: How Does Positive Bias Affect Asian Students And Other Students Of Color?, Ying Shi, Maria Zhu

Center for Policy Research

Asian Americans are often perceived as a “model minority” in classrooms. While this stereotype seems positive, it may raise expectations for Asian students and bolster negative stereotypes for students in other minority groups due to teacher bias. This brief summarizes findings from a study that used data from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC) from 2007 to 2013 to identify the presence of positive bias in teachers’ assessments towards Asian American students in grades 3-8 and its effects on other minority groups. The authors find that teachers rate Asian students’ academic skills more favorably than similar White students …


Affirmative Action Is A Successful Policy For Diversity In College Graduation, Amy Lutz, Pamela R. Bennett, Rebecca Wang Jun 2023

Affirmative Action Is A Successful Policy For Diversity In College Graduation, Amy Lutz, Pamela R. Bennett, Rebecca Wang

Center for Policy Research

Affirmative action in higher education has become an active arena for policymaking and legal challenges in the United States. A question frequently raised about affirmative action is whether racial and ethnic minority students who benefit from affirmative action are successful in the academically demanding context of selective colleges. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, the authors analyzed racial-ethnic differences in cumulative GPAs for White, Black, and Latino students who were high school seniors in 2004 and subsequently attended selective colleges and universities. Results show that Black and Latino students were more likely to graduate from selective colleges than White …


How Did Healthcare Affordability Change For U.S. Adults With Intellectual Disability After The Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act?, Nastassia Vaitsiakhovich May 2023

How Did Healthcare Affordability Change For U.S. Adults With Intellectual Disability After The Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act?, Nastassia Vaitsiakhovich

Center for Policy Research

Individuals with intellectual disabilities are marginalized in the United States and have worse health outcomes than their peers without disabilities. Lower socioeconomic status and a reliance on social welfare benefits and public health insurance programs often create barriers to access to care. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to make healthcare services more accessible. This brief summarizes the findings from a recent study that examined patterns in healthcare affordability under the ACA or noninstitutionalized adults ages 18-64 with intellectual disabilities. The findings suggest that the ACA increased the likelihood that adults with intellectual disabilities would access medical, specialty, …


Moving Policies Toward Racial And Ethnic Equality: The Case Of The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hugo B. Jales, Judith Liu, Norbert L. Wilson May 2023

Moving Policies Toward Racial And Ethnic Equality: The Case Of The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hugo B. Jales, Judith Liu, Norbert L. Wilson

Center for Policy Research

We analyze the role played by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in alleviating or exacerbating inequality across racial and ethnic groups in food expenditures and in the resources needed to meet basic food needs (the “food resource gap”). To do this, we propose a simple framework that decomposes differences across groups in SNAP benefit transfer levels into three components: eligibility, participation, and generosity. This decomposition is then linked to differences in food expenditures and the food resource gap. Our results reveal that among the three components, differences in eligibility contribute the most to SNAP benefits differentials for Black and …


Medicaid-Insured Older Adults On Snap May Have Stronger Medication Adherence, Colleen Heflin, Chinedum O. Ojinnaka, Irma A. Arteaga, Leslie Hodges, Gabriella Alphonso Apr 2023

Medicaid-Insured Older Adults On Snap May Have Stronger Medication Adherence, Colleen Heflin, Chinedum O. Ojinnaka, Irma A. Arteaga, Leslie Hodges, Gabriella Alphonso

Center for Policy Research

For older adults with hypertension, medication adherence is critical to decreasing hospitalization, poor health outcomes, and healthcare costs. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the largest food and nutrition assistance program in the United States—could protect against medication non-adherence. This brief summarizes the findings from a recent study, which linked Missouri Medicaid administrative claims data to SNAP data from 2006 to 2014. The findings suggest that longer and consistent receipt of SNAP benefits was associated with higher levels of antihypertensive medication adherence among Medicaid-insured individuals aged 60 years and older.


The Two-Way Mundlak Estimator, Badi H. Baltagi Apr 2023

The Two-Way Mundlak Estimator, Badi H. Baltagi

Center for Policy Research

Mundlak (1978) shows that the fixed effects estimator is equivalent to the random effects estimator in the one-way error component model once the random individual effects are modeled as a linear function of all the averaged regressors over time. In the spirit of Mundlak, this paper shows that this result also holds for the two-way error component model once this individual and time effects are modeled as linear functions of all the averaged regressors across time and across individuals. Woolridge (2021) also shows that the two-way fixed effects estimator can be obtained as a pooled OLS with the regressors augmented …


Children In Economically Disadvantaged Households Have Lower Early Literacy Skills Than Their Higher-Income Peers, Michah W. Rothbart, Colleen Heflin, Gabriella Alphonso Mar 2023

Children In Economically Disadvantaged Households Have Lower Early Literacy Skills Than Their Higher-Income Peers, Michah W. Rothbart, Colleen Heflin, Gabriella Alphonso

Center for Policy Research

Literacy is critical for numerous developmental outcomes and wellbeing among children. Low literacy skills in childhood can also negatively affect individuals in adulthood. Using data from nearly 300,000 kindergarten students in Virginia (2014-2017), this study finds that children in households that participate in more than one social assistance program (such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Free or Reduced-Price Lunch) have lower literacy skills when they enter kindergarten than children whose households participate in fewer or no social programs.


Racial Disparities In School Poverty And Spending: Examining Allocations Within And Across Districts, Robert Bifulco, Sarah Souders Jan 2023

Racial Disparities In School Poverty And Spending: Examining Allocations Within And Across Districts, Robert Bifulco, Sarah Souders

Center for Policy Research

Using recently available school-level finance data, we compare exposure to low-income classmates and average per pupil spending for black, Hispanic, and white students. Using within metropolitan area comparisons, we find that the typical black and Hispanic students attend schools with much higher proportions of low-income students than the typical white student, and that per pupil spending in the typical black and Hispanic students’ schools is higher than in the typical white student’s school. Drawing on estimates of the additional spending required to provide low-income students equal educational opportunity, we find that it is unlikely that the additional spending in schools …


America And Hope In The Time Of Fentanyl And Meth: A Fireside Chat With Sam Quinones, Sam Quinones Jan 2023

America And Hope In The Time Of Fentanyl And Meth: A Fireside Chat With Sam Quinones, Sam Quinones

Center for Policy Research

For the 34th Annual Herbert Lourie Memorial Lecture on Health Policy, Sam Quinones sat down with Dr. Shannon Monnat for a fireside chat. He discussed how the drug-trafficking world has changed over the last twenty years, the rise of fentanyl and methamphetamine in the U.S., how drug use in the U.S. reflects American society, and what kind of policies will help with this epidemic.


The Fiscal Sustainability Of Retiree Health Care Benefits Among New York State School Districts, Robert Bifulco, Minch Lewis, Iuliia Shybalkina Dec 2022

The Fiscal Sustainability Of Retiree Health Care Benefits Among New York State School Districts, Robert Bifulco, Minch Lewis, Iuliia Shybalkina

Center for Policy Research

We examine spending on retiree health care as a percentage of revenues for a sample of New York State school districts. The fiscal burden of these benefits grew from 2010 to 2021, and big city school districts have faced the largest burdens. Assuming CBO forecasts regarding growth in health care costs and continuation of recent trends in revenue growth, we project that the burden of retiree health care benefits will exceed 10 percent of revenue by 2050. Projected burdens are greatest big city and high need rural districts. We discuss cutting benefits and pre-funding as possible policy responses.


“Model Minorities” In The Classroom? Positive Evaluation Bias Towards Asian Students And Its Consequences, Ying Shi, Maria Zhu Dec 2022

“Model Minorities” In The Classroom? Positive Evaluation Bias Towards Asian Students And Its Consequences, Ying Shi, Maria Zhu

Center for Policy Research

The fast-growing demographic group of Asian Americans is often perceived as a “model minority.” This paper establishes empirical evidence of this stereotype in the context of education and then analyzes its consequences. We show that teachers rate Asian students’ academic skills more favorably than observationally similar White students in the same class, even after accounting for test performance and behavior. This contrasts with teachers’ lower likelihood of favoring Black and Hispanic students. Notably, teachers respond to the presence of any Asian student in the classroom by exacerbating Black-White and Hispanic-White assessment gaps. This suggests that the “model minority” stereotype can …


Robust Dynamic Space-Time Panel Data Models Using Ε- Contamination: An Application To Crop Yields And Climate Change, Badi H. Baltagi, Georges Bresson, Anoop Chaturvedi, Guy Lacroix Dec 2022

Robust Dynamic Space-Time Panel Data Models Using Ε- Contamination: An Application To Crop Yields And Climate Change, Badi H. Baltagi, Georges Bresson, Anoop Chaturvedi, Guy Lacroix

Center for Policy Research

This paper extends the Baltagi et al. (2018, 2021) static and dynamic ε-contamination papers to dynamic space-time models. We investigate the robustness of Bayesian panel data models to possible misspecification of the prior distribution. The proposed robust Bayesian approach de-parts from the standard Bayesian framework in two ways. First, we consider the ε-contamination class of prior distributions for the model parameters as well as for the individual effects. Second, both the base elicited priors and the ε-contamination priors use Zellner (1986)’s g-priors for the variance-covariance matrices. We propose a general “toolbox” for a wide range of specifications which includes the …


Cities In A Pandemic: Evidence From China, Badi H. Baltagi, Ying Deng, Jing Li, Zhenlin Yang Oct 2022

Cities In A Pandemic: Evidence From China, Badi H. Baltagi, Ying Deng, Jing Li, Zhenlin Yang

Center for Policy Research

This paper studies the impact of urban density, city government efficiency, and medical resources on COVID-19 infection and death outcomes in China. We adopt a simultaneous spatial dynamic panel data model to account for (i) the simultaneity of infection and death outcomes, (ii) the spatial pattern of the transmission, (iii) the inter-temporal dynamics of the disease, and (iv) the unobserved city- and time-specific effects. We find that, while population density increases the level of infections, government efficiency significantly mitigates the negative impact of urban density. We also find that the availability of medical resources improves public health outcomes conditional on …


Beyond The Classroom: The Broader Effects Of Public Preschool Expansion On Children’S Early Educational Experiences And Early Literacy Skills, Michah Rothbart, Taryn Morrissey Sep 2022

Beyond The Classroom: The Broader Effects Of Public Preschool Expansion On Children’S Early Educational Experiences And Early Literacy Skills, Michah Rothbart, Taryn Morrissey

Center for Policy Research

While previous research documents direct benefits of preschool for those who attend, less is known about how targeted expansions of public preschool to low-income households affects children’s early educational experiences, preschool attendance patterns, and school readiness in a broader community. This study uses administrative data from Virginia of first-time kindergarteners from 2011 to 2019 (about 630,000 students) and a discrete increase in targeted public pre-K (VPI+) to better understand the effects of expanding means-tested public preschool on patterns of prekindergarten participation and school readiness throughout the community. We find decreased probability that children in expansion districts spend no time in …


The Conditional Mode In Parametric Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yi Yang Aug 2022

The Conditional Mode In Parametric Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yi Yang

Center for Policy Research

We survey formulations of the conditional mode estimator for technical inefficiency in parametric stochastic frontier models with normal errors and introduce new formulations for models with Laplace errors. We prove the conditional mode estimator converges pointwise to the true inefficiency value as the noise variance goes to zero. We also prove that the conditional mode estimator in the normal-exponential model achieves near-minimax optimality. Our minimax theorem implies that the worst-case risk occurs when many firms are nearly efficient, and the conditional mode estimator minimizes estimation risk in this case by estimating these small inefficiency firms as efficient. Unlike the conditional …


Lasso For Stochastic Frontier Models With Many Efficient Firms, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yoonseok Lee Mar 2022

Lasso For Stochastic Frontier Models With Many Efficient Firms, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yoonseok Lee

Center for Policy Research

We apply the adaptive LASSO (Zou, 2006) to select a set of maximally efficient firms in the panel fixed-effect stochastic frontier model. The adaptively weighted L1 penalty with sign restrictions for firm-level inefficiencies allows simultaneous estimation of the maximal efficiency and firm-level inefficiency parameters, which results in a faster rate of convergence of the corresponding estimators than the least-squares dummy variable approach. We show that the estimator possesses the oracle property and selection consistency still holds with our proposed tuning parameter selection criterion. We also propose an efficient optimization algorithm based on coordinate descent. We apply the method to estimate …


Spatial Wage Curves For Formal And Informal Workers In Turkey, Badi H. Baltagi, Yusuf Soner Başkaya Feb 2022

Spatial Wage Curves For Formal And Informal Workers In Turkey, Badi H. Baltagi, Yusuf Soner Başkaya

Center for Policy Research

This paper estimates spatial wage curves for formal and informal workers in Turkey using individual level data from the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey (THLFS) provided by TURKSTAT for the period 2008-2014. Unlike previous studies on wage curves for formal and informal workers, we extend the analysis to allow for spatial effects. We also consider household characteristics that would affect the selection into formal employment, informal employment, and non-employment. We find that the spatial wage curve relation holds both for formal and informal workers in Turkey for a variety of specifications. In general, the wages of informal workers are more …


Bayesian Estimation Of Multivariate Panel Probits With Higher-Order Network Interdependence And An Application To Firms' Global Market Participation In Guangdong, Badi H. Baltagi, Peter H. Egger, Michaela Kesina Feb 2022

Bayesian Estimation Of Multivariate Panel Probits With Higher-Order Network Interdependence And An Application To Firms' Global Market Participation In Guangdong, Badi H. Baltagi, Peter H. Egger, Michaela Kesina

Center for Policy Research

This paper proposes a Bayesian estimation framework for panel-data sets with binary dependent variables where a large number of cross-sectional units is observed over a short period of time, and cross-sectional units are interdependent in more than a single network domain. The latter provides for a substantial degree of flexibility towards modelling the decay function in network neighborliness (e.g., by disentangling the importance of rings of neighbors) or towards allowing for several channels of interdependence whose relative importance is unknown ex ante. Besides the flexible parameterization of cross-sectional dependence, the approach allows for simultaneity of the equations. These features should …