Life expectancy and health status of the aged

There are several research issues which need further exploration if we are to better understand the implications of what appears to be increased levels of morbidity. Three general areas require additional research: the time of onset of chronic illness, the progression rate of illness, and the overlap and interaction between chronic and non-chronic conditions as well as multiple chronic conditions in a single individual. A major reason for the present uncertainty about morbidity is that information is unavailable regarding the incidence of chronic illness. However, incidence of chronic disease is difficult to measure unless there are either clear clinical indications or functional limitations. Work by survey researchers in defining initial reports of functional limitations associated with chronic illness would be very helpful. Furthermore, an understanding of incidence is necessary to further our understanding of the rate of progression of illness. The concept of a progression rate of illness makes sense only if we can have agreed upon measures of the onset of the illness. Both of these issues clearly require the use of longitudinal data. In fact any serious attempt to predict changes in health status over time as well as to relate changing patterns of mortality with changing patterns of morbidity will require a longitudinal data base. The difficulty in establishing a longitudinal data base is not only the time and expense of follow given set of individuals over a prolonged period of time, but also the problem of having a sample large enough to include individuals with specific chronic conditions of illness. One way to resolve the problem of sufficient sample size may be to do a combined survey which includes both a national probability sample of individuals as well as a sample of individuals with specific chronic diseases. Monitoring a group of individuals known to have specific chronic conditions would provide information about the progression and impact of the disease over time. Including a national probability sample of the entire population would provide information on the impact over time of changing health conditions for the entire population. While screening for specific conditions is an expensive procedure, it is likely to be far cheaper than including a sample size large enough to provide reliable estimates for specific conditions based on a national probability sample. Because the effects of postponed social security benefit eligibility will not be felt for many years, the opportunity for fruitful research is great. For now, we will summarize what we know from current research.     

Using Preferred Applicant Random Assignment (PARA) to Reduce Randomization Bias in Randomized Trials of Discretionary Programs

Randomization bias occurs when the random assignment used to estimate program effects influences the types of individuals that participate in a program. This paper focuses on a form of randomization bias called “applicant inclusion bias,” which can occur in evaluations of discretionary programs that normally choose which of the eligible applicants to serve. If this nonrandom selection process is replaced by a process that randomly assigns eligible applicants to receive the intervention or not, the types of individuals served by the program—and thus its average impact on program participants—could be affected. To estimate the impact of discretionary programs for the individuals that they normally serve, we propose an experimental design called Preferred Applicant Random Assignment (PARA). Prior to random assignment, program staff would identify their “preferred applicants,” those that they would have chosen to serve. All eligible applicants are randomly assigned, but the probability of assignment to the program is set higher for preferred applicants than for the remaining applicants. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of the method, the cost in terms of increased sample size requirements, and the benefit in terms of improved generalizability to the population normally served by the program.     

Income of new retired workers by age at first benefit receipt: findings from the New Beneficiary Survey

Using data from the New Beneficiary Survey (NBS) of the Social Security Administration (SSA), this article examines how income sources and total monthly income received by newly retired social security beneficiaries vary with the age at which the first benefit check was received. The NBS respondents who received a first benefit at age 65 or older were better off economically than were those who received a first benefit at ages 62-64. At the time of the interview, 18-30 months after receiving a first benefit, these older beneficiaries had higher levels of total income and were more likely to have income from earnings and assets. Pension receipt rates did not vary by the age at which the first social security benefit was received except for married women retired workers, for whom the rate was higher at the older ages. The largest proportion of aggregate income (slightly more than one-third) was derived from social security benefits. More than 90 percent of the NBS Medicare-only respondents--a sample of nonbeneficiaries who were eligible for monthly cash benefits but had established their entitlement only for the purpose of enrolling in the Medicare program--reported earnings income. They had lower rates of pension receipt and higher rates of asset income receipt than the retired workers. The Medicare-only respondents had substantially higher incomes than did retired workers, and most of their aggregate income was from earnings. The NBS retirees were generally in better financial condition than a group of social security beneficiaries aged 65 or older from all benefit categories in the Current Population Survey Income Supplement with whom they were compared.     

External Validity in Policy Evaluations That Choose Sites Purposively

Evaluations of the impact of social programs are often carried out in multiple sites, such as school districts, housing authorities, local TANF offices, or One‐Stop Career Centers. Most evaluations select sites purposively following a process that is nonrandom. Unfortunately, purposive site selection can produce a sample of sites that is not representative of the population of interest for the program. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model of purposive site selection. We begin with the proposition that a purposive sample of sites can usefully be conceptualized as a random sample of sites from some well‐defined population, for which the sampling probabilities are unknown and vary across sites. This proposition allows us to derive a formal, yet intuitive, mathematical expression for the bias in the pooled impact estimate when sites are selected purposively. This formula helps us to better understand the consequences of selecting sites purposively, and the factors that contribute to the bias. Additional research is needed to obtain evidence on how large the bias tends to be in actual studies that select sites purposively, and to develop methods to increase the external validity of these studies. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

SSI case closures.

In 1990, about 800,000 persons receiving payments from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program had their cases closed and their payments stopped. The most frequently cited reasons for these case closures were excess income and death. Of those cases closed for reasons other than death, about 43 percent eventually returned to payment status. This study presents an analysis of a 1-percent sample of SSI recipients whose cases were closed during 1990. Longitudinal data on closures were collected by merging a series of monthly 1-percent sample files containing SSI administrative data. These are the first published data on reasons for SSI case closures.     

Trends in City Conditions During the 1970s: A Survey of Demographic and Socioeconomic Changes

Changes in the demographic and socioeconomic conditions of 627cities between 1970 and 1980 are examined using simple comparisonof means and correlational analytic techniques. Cities are groupedaccording to their type (Central city; suburb), regional location,and rate of population growth (decline). Major changes occurredin employment patterns, income levels, economic bases, racialcomposition, and social pathologies (crime rates)—allmeasures of urban stress. These conditions tended to clusterin certain types of cities: large, declining central citiesof the Northeast and Midwest. But population decline and regionallocation were not found to be independent determinants of urbandistress. National and regional economic trends, especiallychanges in the vitality of the metropolitan area in which acity is located. were the primary determinants.     

Opting for White: choice,fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America

Historically, racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent assumed the development of a Black identity in accordance with the one-drop rule. However, empirical research on the multiracial population suggests that there exists wide variation in racial identification. We explore the interpretive power of Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization model to explain racial identity construction among a sample of 259 mixed-race respondents. We highlight case studies of individuals who have constructed a White identity in order to illustrate how structural changes in race relations have increased the range of racial identities available to multiracial people. While we observe variation in racial identification among our respondents, their “choices” continue to be differentially available due to their physical appearance and social context.     

Jobs of persons working after receiving retired-worker benefits

This article describes the jobs of new Social Security retired-worker beneficiaries about 2 years after they received their first benefit payment and compares the characteristics of these jobs with those of jobs they were in before they received a benefit. The data are from the Social Security Administration's 1982 New Beneficiary Survey (NBS). The NBS data show that more than one-fifth of the new retired-worker beneficiaries were working 18-30 months after receipt of their first benefit payment. Most of the respondents usually worked less than full time at modest hourly wages rates--often for fewer hours and at lower wages than on the jobs they were in before benefit receipt. Thus, their annual earnings generally also were modest. The working NBS respondents were employed in all categories of occupations, but the majority were in white-collar jobs, often in the same major occupational or industrial category that they had been in before benefit receipt. When job changes had occurred, the tendency was to move into work in the service industries. Those individuals who were working were only slightly more likely to be self-employed in the postbenefit period than they had been in the prebenefit period.     

Selection Bias and Continuous-Time Duration Models: Consequences and a Proposed Solution

This article analyzes the consequences of nonrandom sample selection for continuous-time duration analyses and develops a new estimator to correct for it when necessary. We conduct a series of Monte Carlo analyses that estimate common duration models as well as our proposed duration model with selection. These simulations show that ignoring sample selection issues can lead to biased parameter estimates, including the appearance of (nonexistent) duration dependence. In addition, our proposed estimator is found to be superior in root mean-square error terms when nontrivial amounts of selection are present. Finally, we provide an empirical application of our method by studying whether self-selectivity is a problem for studies of leaders' survival during and following militarized conflicts.     

Measuring Exposure to Political Advertising in Surveys

Research on the influence of negative political advertising in America is characterized by fundamentally conflicting findings. In recent years, however, survey research using estimates of exposure based on a combination of self-reported television viewing habits and Campaign Media Analysis Group data (a database of all advertisements broadcast on national and cable television in the top 75 media markets) has argued that exposure to negative political advertising boosts interest in the campaign and turnout. This paper examines the measurement properties of self-reports of television viewing. I argue that the errors from common survey formats may both be nonrandom and larger than previously acknowledged. The nonrandom error is due to the tendency of politically knowledgeable individuals to be more sensitive to question format. Thus the inferences drawn about the relationship between political knowledge, exposure to negative ads, and political behavior are also sensitive to the measures used to estimate exposure. I demonstrate, however, that one commonly used measure of exposure—the log of estimated exposure—is not only more theoretically defensible but also alleviates some of the more serious problems due to measurement error.

International Institutions and Domestic Compensation: The IMF and the Politics of Capital Account Liberalization

Certain governments have been faster than others in relaxing their restrictions on the cross‐border movement of capital. How can we explain the timing and extent of financial liberalization across countries since the 1970s? We argue that IMF stabilization programs provide a window of opportunity for governments to initiate financial reforms, but that policy makers are more likely to seize this opportunity when welfare expenditures are high. Large loans from the IMF shield policy makers from the costs of financial reform, while welfare expenditures provide credibility to the government's ex ante promises of compensation to individuals who are harmed by the reforms. We test this hypothesis on data for 87 countries from 1975 to 2002. We employ a spatial autoregressive error sample selection model which accounts for the nonrandom participation of countries in IMF programs as well as the processes of international policy diffusion. The results provide strong support for the interactive effect of IMF programs and domestic welfare expenditures on financial liberalization.     

Independent central banks, regime type, and fiscal performance: the case of post-communist countries

This article analyzes the effect of central bank independence on fiscal deficits. Previous literature finds a negative relationship between bank independence and deficits in OECD countries. No such relationship is found for developing countries. We argue that independent and conservative central bankers prefer budget discipline due to the long run connection between deficits and inflation and can enforce their preference through interest rate hikes and refusal to lend to the government. The claim, however, is that the legislated independent status of the central bank is cheap talk in the absence of democratic institutions. We test empirically the conditional effect of central bank independence on a sample of 23 democratic and undemocratic post-communist countries from 1990 to 2002. Results show that independent central banks restrain budget deficits only in democracies. Also, democracies that have not granted independence to their central banks have the worst fiscal discipline.     

Explaining voter turnout: A meta-analysis of national and subnational elections

Research about voter turnout has expanded rapidly in recent years. This article takes stock of this development by extending the meta-analysis of Geys (2006) in two main ways. First, we add 102 studies published between 2002 and 2015 to the initial sample of 83 studies. Overall, we document only minor changes to the original inferences. Second, since different processes might conceivably play at different levels of government, we exploit the larger sample to separately analyse the determinants of voter turnout in national versus subnational elections. We find that campaign expenditures, election closeness and registration requirements have more explanatory power in national elections, whereas population size and composition, concurrent elections, and the electoral system play a more important role for explaining turnout in subnational elections.     

First year impact of SSI on economic status of 1973 adult assistance populations

During 1973, interviews were conducted with more than 11,000 adult assistance recipients in the Survey of the Low-Income Aged and Disabled. The sample members were reinterviewed during the last 3 months of 1974, approximately 1 year after the implementation of SSI. This article analyzes the impact of SSI on the economic status of the 1973 adult assistance populations. The analysis considers the United States sample as well as samples for five individual States. Most of the 1973 adult assistance recipients were automatically transferred to SSI on January 1, 1974. The majority realized an improved economic situation during 1974, at least in part because of their transferral to SSI. There was significant improvement for the residents of each of the separate States considered because of increased assistance payments, but SSI generally proved most beneficial to the poorest persons transferred from the State public assistance programs.     

The effectiveness of savings and loan political action committees

In recent years, political action committees (PACs) have played an increasingly important role, both in contributing to candidates and in influencing voting patterns. Savings and loan PACs are numerous throughout the country and consist of PACs affiliated with individual institutions and trade associations. The question which is addressed in this research paper is the effectiveness which savings and loan related PACs have had on influencing voting patterns. Because of savings and loan allegiance to the real estate industry, voting patterns on a selected set of nine cogressional bills pertaining to various facets of real estate are used to test PAC effectiveness. These bills were voted on by the House of Representatives during the 1978–80 congressional term. A twenty-one simultaneous equation model which employs probit transformations, maximum likelihood estimation procedures, and two stage least squares, is built to test relationships among the endogenous variables of congressional votes, electoral margin, PAC contributions, and constituent and congressional ideology. In addition to testing the effectiveness of savings and loan PAC contributions, the results of the study shed light on savings and loan PAC performance relative to that of real estate PACs, labor PACs, home builder PACs, business PACs, and other PAC groupings. The model is also used to identify some determinants of PAC contribution patterns. As a related issue, the role of ideology as a predictor of voting patterns is re-examined. Findings indicate that savings and loan PACs have only been marginally successful in influencing real estate voting patterns when compared to the other PAC groups. Results also indicate that few variables could be identified as determinants of savings and loan contributions, whereas other more established PACs had determinants which were consistently significant. Overall, findings imply that PAC contribution procedures of the savings and loan industry could benefit by imitating or purchasing the expertise of more experienced PAC groups.     

The Impact of Political Connections on Donations to Chinese NGOs

ABSTRACT

In this study, we explore the returns to political connections in non-corporate contexts within China, a country transitioning from a planned to market economy. Using China as an empirical case study, we investigate two separate, but related, hypotheses on the financial benefits of political connections for a sample of 1,435 Chinese foundations from 2005–2011. This extends Western donation determinants literature to a Chinese context and political guanxi (social relationships where individuals or organizations exchange future favors or gifts) research to non-corporate contexts. Our empirical results show that there is no relationship between the presence of state employees on an NGO's staff (a measure of political guanxi) and private donations. However, there is a small but positive relationship between the amount of government funding an NGO receives (a signal of legitimacy) and private donations. These findings suggest that, in post-communist countries such as China, donors may not be seeking future favors from their contributions and instead are interested in developing a robust civil society with legitimate, high-quality NGOs. Additionally, the similarity between Western donation determinants research findings and Chinese donation determinants, in this article, requires future comparative studies of both how and why donors make decisions.     

Wars of Attrition in Italian Government Coalitions and Fiscal Performance: 1948–1994

We test the ``war of attrition'' models of fiscalperformance on the sample of Italian governments from1948 to 1994. We control for conditioning phenomena,like government stability, majority size, central bankindependence, political budget cycle and externaleconomic constraints, as well as for business cycleindicators. We improve on the standard specificationsof war of attrition models by considering the role ofthe opposition and by using ex ante measures ofcoalitions fragmentation. Once these phenomena areaccounted for, data support the implications of ourversion of the war of attrition models.     

The devil may be in the details: how the characteristics of SCHIP programs affect take-up.

In this paper, we explore whether the specific design of a state's program has contributed to its success in meeting two objectives of the Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): increasing the health insurance coverage of children in lower income families and doing so with a minimum reduction in their private health insurance coverage (crowd-out). In our analysis, we use two years of Current Population Survey data, 2000 and 2001, matched with detailed data on state programs. We focus on two populations: the eligible population of children, broadly defined--those living in families with incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL)--and a narrower group of children, those who we estimate are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP. Unique state program characteristics in the analysis include whether the state plan covers families; whether the state uses presumptive eligibility; the number of months without private coverage that are required for eligibility; whether there is an asset test; whether a face-to-face interview is required; and specific outreach activities. Our results provide evidence that state program characteristics are significant determinants of program success.     

The governmentalization of living: calculating global health

Abstract

The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge ‘the state of world health’. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compilation and tabulation of vital statistics – death-rates, birth-rates, morbidity rates – contributed to the birth of the ‘population’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The population is reformatted from the middle of the twentieth century by ‘modified life tables’ made up of disability weightings, health state valuations, quality of life scores, disease burden estimates, etc. The problem of morbid death gives way to that of morbid living, made calculable through a metrics of ‘severity’, ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’. A series of new indices and scales (e.g. the QALY and DALY) has contributed to a governmentalization of living, in the course of which the social and personal consequences of living with disease come to be an object of political concern, and made knowable, calculable and thereby amenable to various strategies of intervention. We conclude by showing how this style of epidemiological thought has generated a new global visibility for brain disorders as their impact on individuals, health care systems and nations are calculated in novel ways.     

A political economic analysis of congressional voting patterns on NAFTA

This paper delves into the question of the determinants of Congressional voting on NAFTA. It uses a logit model to examine both House and Senate votes and is able to use district specific estimates in the former. It finds only very limited support for the thesis that narrowly defined employment gainers and losers were important determinants of Congressional voting patterns, though some substantial support that districts that were highly agricultural or already possessed a substantial Hispanic population and skilled labor force and had the most to gain from the general effects of NAFTA lead to a positive effect on the probability that a member of the House would vote affirmatively. Contributions from labor unions lowered the likelihood of affirmative votes. Political partisanship and ideological positions apparently had little effect on the votes. A Representative's political capital had a marginally significant effect on the probability on an affirmative vote, but it performed positively in the Senate and negatively in the House.