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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 45.
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Working Paper
Toxic exposure in America: estimating fetal and infant health outcomes
We examine the effect of toxic exposure on U.S. infant and fetal mortality rates between 1989 and 2002 from toxic pollution released by facilities reporting to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Unlike previous studies, we control for toxic pollution from mobile sources and from non-TRI reporting facilities. We find significant adverse effects of TRI exposure on infant mortality. There is evidence that health effects vary across media: air and water having a larger impact than land pollution. And, within air, we find that releases of carcinogens are particularly problematic for infant health ...
Working Paper
Foreign aid, illegal immigration, and host country welfare
This paper analyzes the effect of foreign aid on illegal immigration and host country welfare using a general equilibrium model. We show that foreign aid may worsen the recipient nation?s terms of trade. Furthermore, it may also raise illegal immigration, if the terms of trade effect on immigration flows dominates the other effects identified in our analysis. Empirical analysis of the effect of foreign aid on illegal immigration to the United States broadly supports the predictions of our theoretical model. Foreign aid worsens the recipient?s terms of trade. While the terms of trade effect ...
Journal Article
Lessons from the income maintenance experiments: an overview
Journal Article
The current status of our social welfare system
Working Paper
The effects of welfare reform and related policies on single mothers' welfare use and employment
This paper examines how changes in tax policy, welfare programs, public health insurance, and economic conditions during the 1990s affected welfare use and employment among single mothers. Drawing on panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I give new estimates of the effects of specific policy changes and use those estimates to explain changes in economic behavior. The results suggest that Welfare Reform policies, the EITC, and improved economic conditions, in that order, were the primary determinants of changes in welfare use and employment between 1993 and 1999.
Working Paper
The state of the safety net in the post-welfare reform era
The passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill led to sweeping changes to the central U.S. cash safety net program for families with children. Importantly, along with other changes, the reform imposed lifetime time limits for receipt of welfare de facto ending the entitlement nature of cash welfare for poor families with children in the United States. Despite dire predictions about poverty and deprivation, the previous research shows that caseloads declined and employment increased, with no detectible increase in poverty or worsening of child-well-being. We re-evaluate these results in light of ...
Speech
From Bagehot to Bernanke and Draghi: emergency liquidity, macroprudential supervision and the rediscovery of the lender of last resort function
Remarks at the Committee on International Monetary Law of the International Law Association Meeting, Madrid, Spain.
Report
Globalization and the gains from variety
Since the seminal work of Krugman, product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United States. In this paper, we show that the unmeasured growth in product variety from U.S. imports has been an important source of gains from trade over the last three decades (1972-2001). Using extremely disaggregated data, we show that the number of imported product varieties has increased by a factor of four. ...
Report
Short-run fiscal policy: welfare, redistribution, and aggregate effects in the short and long run
This paper quantifies the effects of two short-run fiscal policies, a temporary tax cut and a temporary rebate transfer, that are intended to stimulate economic activity. A reduction in income taxation provides immediate incentives to work and save more, raising aggregate output and consumption. A temporary rebate is mostly saved and increases consumption marginally. Both policies improve the overall welfare of households, and the rebate policy especially benefits low-income households. In the long run, however, the debt accumulated to finance the stimulus and a higher tax to service the debt ...