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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Health Insurance Coverage And The Disability Insurance Application Decision, Jonathan Gruber, Jeffrey D. Kubik
Health Insurance Coverage And The Disability Insurance Application Decision, Jonathan Gruber, Jeffrey D. Kubik
Economics - All Scholarship
We investigate the effect of health insurance coverage on the decision of individuals to apply for Disability Insurance (DI). Those who qualify for DI receive public insurance under Medicare, but only after a two-year waiting period. This raises concerns that many disabled are going uninsured while they wait for their Medicare coverage. Moreover, the combination of this waiting period and the uncertainty about application acceptance may deter those with health insurance on their jobs, but no alternative source of coverage, from leaving work to apply for DI.
Data from the Health and Retirement Survey show that, in fact, uninsurance does …
Lethal Elections: Gubernatorial Politics And The Timing Of Executions, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Lethal Elections: Gubernatorial Politics And The Timing Of Executions, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Economics - All Scholarship
We document the existence of a gubernatorial election cycle in state executions, suggesting that election year political considerations play a role in determining the timing of executions. Our analysis indicates that states are approximately 25 percent more likely to conduct executions in gubernatorial election years than in other years. We also find that elections have a larger effect on the probability that an African American defendant will be executed in a given year than on the probability that a white defendant will be executed, and that the overall effect of elections is largest in the South. These findings raise concerns …
Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Economics - All Scholarship
An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. If policy changes constitute responses on the part of political decision-makers to changes in a variable of interest, then standard analyses that treat policy changes as natural experiments may yield biased estimates of the impact of the policy (Besley and Case 2000). We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases conventional fixed effects estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticities of demand for cigarettes and beer using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in state excise …
Cost-Benefit Analysis: Why Relative Economic Position Does Not Matter, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi
Cost-Benefit Analysis: Why Relative Economic Position Does Not Matter, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi
Economics - All Scholarship
The current debate over cost-benefit concerns in agencies' evaluations of government regulations is not so much whether to consider costs and benefits at all but rather what belongs in the estimated costs and benefits themselves. Overlaid is the long-standing concern that the distribution of costs and benefits needs some consideration in policy evaluations. In a recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Robert Frank and Cass Sunstein proposed a relatively simple method for adding distributional concerns to policy evaluation that enlarges the typically constructed estimates of the individual's willingness to pay for safer jobs or safer products. One …