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Articles 91 - 104 of 104
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …
Social Interaction And Stock Market Participation, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong, Jeremy C. Stein
Social Interaction And Stock Market Participation, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong, Jeremy C. Stein
Economics - All Scholarship
We investigate the idea that stock-market participation is influenced by social interaction. We build a simple model in which any given "social" investor finds it more attractive to invest in the market when the participation rate among his peers is higher. The model predicts higher participation rates among social investors than among "non-socials". It also admits the possibility of multiple social equilibria. We then test the theory using data from the Health and Retirement Study. Social households-defined as those who interact with their neighbors, or who attend church-are indeed substantially more likely to invest in the stock market than non-social …
Slippery When Wet: The Effects Of Local Alcohol Access Laws On Highway Safety, Reagan Anne Baughman, Michael Conlin, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, John V. Pepper
Slippery When Wet: The Effects Of Local Alcohol Access Laws On Highway Safety, Reagan Anne Baughman, Michael Conlin, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, John V. Pepper
Economics - All Scholarship
Using detailed panel data on local alcohol policy changes in Texas, this paper tests whether the effect of these changes on alcohol-related accidents depends on whether the policy change involves where the alcohol is consumed and the type of alcohol consumed. After controlling for both county and year fixed effects, we find evidence that: (i) the sale of beer and wine may actually decrease expected accidents; and (ii) the sale of higher alcohol-content liquor may present greater risk to highway safety than the sale of just beer and wine.
Tax Reform And Automatic Stabilization, Thomas J. Kniesner, James P. Ziliak
Tax Reform And Automatic Stabilization, Thomas J. Kniesner, James P. Ziliak
Economics - All Scholarship
A fundamental property of a progressive income tax is that it provides implicit insurance against shocks to income by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) in combination with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) greatly reduced the number of marginal tax brackets and the maximum marginal rate, which limits the stabilizing effect of the tax system on household consumption when pre-tax income fluctuates. We examine the effect of the federal income tax reforms of the 1980s on the associated degree of automatic stabilization of consumption. The empirical framework derives …
Workplace Safety Policy: Past, Present, And Future, Thomas J. Kniesner, John D. Leeth
Workplace Safety Policy: Past, Present, And Future, Thomas J. Kniesner, John D. Leeth
Economics - All Scholarship
With an annual budget of about $400 million, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is about 5 percent the size of the Environmental Protection Agency, another federal agency created by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the "Year of the Environment." Nearly all workers in the United States come under OSHA's juridction, with some notable exceptions, including miners, transportation workers, many public employees, and people who are self-employed. OSHA is currently responsible for ptoecting over 100 million workers at 6 million work sites with the help of only about 2,000 workplace health and safety inspectors. Nevertheless, suppoers of OSHA …
Quality Of The Business Environment Versus Quality Of Life In A Dynamic Model Of Urban Composition And Growth Do Firms And Households Like The Same Cities?, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Stuart A. Gabriel
Quality Of The Business Environment Versus Quality Of Life In A Dynamic Model Of Urban Composition And Growth Do Firms And Households Like The Same Cities?, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Stuart A. Gabriel
Economics - All Scholarship
Appropriately constructed measures of the quality of life and the quality of the business environment should be important determinants of the growth and composition of population across urban areas. This paper examines that question by extending theoretical measures of household quality of life to construct the first ever measure of the quality of the business environment? the value that firms place on the basket of amenities in a metropolitan area. An annual panel of quality of life and quality of business environment values for 37 cities in the United States is then constructed for the 1977 to 1995 period.
A …
Chronic Illness And Health Insurance-Related Job Lock, Eleaonr D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe
Chronic Illness And Health Insurance-Related Job Lock, Eleaonr D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe
Economics - All Scholarship
We examine job duration patterns for evidence of health insurance-related job lock among chronically ill workers or workers with a chronically ill family member. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we allow for more general insurance effects than in the existing literature to indicate the impact of health insurance and health status on workers' job durations. We use data for workers in Indiana predating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to examine the potential impact of HIPAA on job mobility. Chronic illness reduced job mobility by about 40 percent among the workers in our sample who relied on their …
Measuring The Career Concerns Of Security Analysts: Job Separations, Stock Coverage Assignments And Brokerage House Status, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong
Measuring The Career Concerns Of Security Analysts: Job Separations, Stock Coverage Assignments And Brokerage House Status, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong
Economics - All Scholarship
This paper examines the career concerns of security analysts using long histories of their earnings forecasts, job separations and stock coverage assignments. Our findings include the following. Relatively good (accurate) past forecast performance increases the probability that an analyst moves from a low status to a high status (large, prestigious) brokerage house, while relatively poor past forecast performance leads to movements down the brokerage house hierarchy. High status brokerage houses are more likely to discharge an analyst for poor past forecast performance than other houses. In addition, analysts with poor past forecast performances but who do not change employers are …
Generational Conflict, Human Capital Accumulation, And Economic Growth, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mary Lovely, Mehmet S. Tosun
Generational Conflict, Human Capital Accumulation, And Economic Growth, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mary Lovely, Mehmet S. Tosun
Economics - All Scholarship
Worldwide, dependency ratios are forecast to increase dramatically in the next 50 years. A great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding the changes in fiscal policies that "must" take place to accommodate these changes. In contrast, less effort has been concentrated on studying the fiscal shifts that will endogenously result from demographic pressures. An example of particular interest is the degree to which a more elderly population will support public spending for education. We use an overlapping-generations model to investigate the effect of this demographic transition on the endogenous determination of public spending for education. A demographic transition …
Does Chronic Illness Affect The Adequacy Of Health Insurance Coverage?, Eleanor D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe
Does Chronic Illness Affect The Adequacy Of Health Insurance Coverage?, Eleanor D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe
Economics - All Scholarship
Although chronically ill individuals need protection against high medical expenses, they often have difficulty obtaining adequate insurance coverage due to medical underwriting practices used to classify and price risks and to define and limit coverage for individuals and groups. Using data from healthy and chronically ill individuals in Indiana, we found that illness decreased the probability of having adequate insurance, particularly among single individuals. Chronic illness decreased the probability of having adequate coverage by about 10 percentage points among all individuals and by about 25 percentage points among single individuals. Preexisting condition exclusions were a major source of inadequate insurance. …
Productivity Growth And Convergence In Agriculture And Manufacturing, Will Martin, Devashish Mitra
Productivity Growth And Convergence In Agriculture And Manufacturing, Will Martin, Devashish Mitra
Economics - All Scholarship
The growth of agricultural productivity is widely believed to be low. But this study finds the productivity growth rate in agriculture to be higher than that in manufacturing, both on average and for groups of countries at different stages of development. This suggests that a large agricultural sector need not be a disadvantage for growth performance - and may be an advantage.
Martin and Mitra examine the growth and convergence of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing in a large sample of countries spanning many levels of development over the period 1967-92. There is a widely held but rarely …
Security Analysts' Career Concerns And Herding Of Earnings Forecasts, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Amit Solomon, Harrison G. Hong
Security Analysts' Career Concerns And Herding Of Earnings Forecasts, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Amit Solomon, Harrison G. Hong
Economics - All Scholarship
Several theories of reputation and herding (see, e.g., Scharfstein and Stein (1990)) suggest that herding among agents should vary with career concerns. Our goal in this paper is to document whether such a link exists in the labor market for security analysts. Specifically, we look at the relationship between an analyst's job tenure (a proxy for career concerns) and various measures of stock earnings forecast performance. We establish the following key results. (1) Older analysts are more likely to produce earnings forecasts of firms before younger ones. (2) Their forecasts also deviate more from the consensus forecast than their younger …
The Importance Of Sample Attrition In Life Cycle Labor Supply Estimation, Thomas J. Kniesner, James P. Ziliak
The Importance Of Sample Attrition In Life Cycle Labor Supply Estimation, Thomas J. Kniesner, James P. Ziliak
Economics - All Scholarship
We examine the importance of possible non-random attrition to an econometric model of life cycle labor supply including joint nonlinear taxation of wage and interest incomes and latent heterogeneity. We use a Wald test comparing attriters to nonattriters and variable addition testing based on formal models of attrition. Results from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are that non-random panel attrition is of little concern for prime-aged male labor supply estimation because the effect of attrition is absorbed into the fixed effects. Attrition is less econometrically influential than research design decisions typically taken for granted; the wage measure or instrument …
How Managed Care Affects Medicaid Utilization: A Synthetic Difference-In-Differences Zero-Inflated Count Model, Thomas J. Kniesner, Deborah A. Freund, Anthony T. Lo Sasso
How Managed Care Affects Medicaid Utilization: A Synthetic Difference-In-Differences Zero-Inflated Count Model, Thomas J. Kniesner, Deborah A. Freund, Anthony T. Lo Sasso
Economics - All Scholarship
We develop a synthetic difference-in-differences statistical design to apply to experimental data for adult women living in Hennepin County, Minnesota, to estimate the impact of Medicaid managed care on various modes of medical care use. Because the outcomes of interest are utilization counts with many persons using none of a particular mode of care we use count regression models that are adjusted for excessive zeros. We find no reductions in physician visits or hospital inpatient and emergency department care use, but reductions in hospital outpatient care. Simulations designed to judge the economic significance of our results suggest a program effect …