The Effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Migration

The expansion of Medicaid to low‐income nondisabled adults is a key component of the Affordable Care Act's strategy to increase health insurance coverage, but many states have chosen not to take up the expansion. As a result, for many low‐income adults, there has been stark variation across states in access to Medicaid since the expansions took effect in 2014. This study investigates whether individuals migrate in order to gain access to these benefits. Using an empirical model in the spirit of a difference‐in‐differences, this study finds that migration from non‐expansion states to expansion states did not increase in 2014 relative to migration in the reverse direction. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out a migration effect that would meaningfully affect the number of enrollees in expansion states, which suggests that Medicaid expansion decisions do not impose a meaningful fiscal externality on other states.     

Welcome Mats and On‐Ramps for Older Adults: The Impact of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansions on Dual Enrollment in Medicare and Medicaid

For many low‐income Medicare beneficiaries, Medicaid provides important supplemental insurance that covers out‐of‐pocket costs and additional benefits. We examine whether Medicaid participation by low‐income adults age 65 and up increased as a result of Medicaid expansions to working‐age adults under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Previous literature documents so‐called “welcome mat” effects in other populations but has not explicitly studied older persons dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. We extend this literature by estimating models of Medicaid participation among persons age 65 and up using American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2017 and state variation in ACA Medicaid expansions. We find that Medicaid expansions to working‐age adults increased Medicaid participation among low‐income older adults by 1.8 percentage points (4.4 percent). We also find evidence of an “on‐ramp” effect; that is, low‐income Medicare beneficiaries residing in expansion states who were young enough to gain coverage under the 2014 ACA Medicaid expansions before aging into Medicare were 4 percentage points (9.5 percent) more likely to have dual Medicaid coverage relative to similar individuals who either turned 65 before the 2014 expansions or resided in non‐expansion states. This on‐ramp effect is an important mechanism behind welcome mat effects among some older adults.     

Comment on Chester Hartman and David Robinson's “evictions: The hidden housing problem"—protection or protraction?

Abstract

Since the 1960s, judges and legislatures have made it increasingly difficult for landlords to evict tenants even in those instances where tenants have breached their leases. Sometimes, the growth of tenant protections has actually harmed law‐abiding tenants by raising costs to landlords and allowing rule‐breakers to remain in their apartments. Most landlords and tenants should want a system of laws that provides for both fair and efficient eviction procedures. Tenants should be entitled to legal representation when they are threatened with eviction, but their attorneys should not use the legal system to obtain free accommodations for their clients.

In the end, efforts to improve the housing of low‐ and moderate‐income households should rely not on setting up impediments to eviction, but rather on increasing tenants’ ability to afford housing and reducing the cost of housing development and operation.     

What Can We Learn About the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program by Looking at the Tenants?

Abstract

Several recent studies have found that homeownership has positive effects on children's development. This article extends these studies by testing whether these effects depend on neighborhood conditions. This extension is important because many low‐income families that become homeowners under current policies promoting homeownership for the poor are likely to purchase homes in troubled or distressed neighborhoods.

Homeownership in almost any neighborhood is found to benefit children, while neighborhood effects are weak. This suggests that the children of most low‐income renters would be better served by programs that help their families become homeowners in their current neighborhoods instead of helping them move to better neighborhoods while remaining renters. However, the positive effects of homeownership on children are weakened in distressed neighborhoods, especially those that are residentially unstable and poor. Thus, helping low‐income families purchase homes in good neighborhoods is likely to have the best effects on children.     

Personnel Reform in the States: A Look at Progress Fifteen Years after the Winter Commission

Trends in states’ civil service reforms since the Winter Commission’s report was published in 1993 are described and evaluated in the context of its recommendations. The authors argue that the commission’s reform agenda relies on a public service bargain that requires public employees, elected officials, and other stakeholders to respect, trust, and support each other’s efforts to serve the public interest. Its recommendations for modernizing state and local personnel systems are discussed and related to the “reinvention” and New Public Management initiatives of the past 20 years. Many of these ideas have been adopted by state governments, but there is no single reform model that has been followed across the states. Some states, such as Georgia and Florida, have engaged in radical reforms that include replacing traditional merit systems with at‐will employment models. The general pattern involves decentralization, deregulation, and limitation of employee protections. While many of the management‐oriented changes advocated by the Winter Commission are staples of states’ civil service reforms, its emphasis on a “trust and lead” strategy based on public service values, partnership, and leadership in the public interest has not received much attention. In general, objective evaluations of states’ reforms are needed to determine whether their purposes are being achieved.     

Not Taking it on Faith: State and Religious Influences on European Court of Human Rights Judges in Freedom of Religion Cases

I analyze freedom of religion case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that the ECHR has been inconsistent and deferential to state governments. To account for this phenomenon, I consider two theoretical frameworks. First, I ask whether the religious affiliation of applicants matters when it comes to judges’ willingness to decide in their favor. Second, I consider whether ECHR judges are influenced by the preferences of the states that nominated them. Employing logistic regression analysis on an original dataset of 538 judge votes on 70 freedom of religion cases, I find that Muslim applicants are substantially less likely to receive favorable judge votes, and that judges are more likely to vote in favor of the states that nominated them. Additionally, I find that West European states are especially likely to receive favorable rulings, even when controlling for differences in state protections of religious liberty.     

Advanced Metering Infrastructure Deployment in the United States: The Impact of Polycentric Governance and Contextual Changes

Advanced metering infrastructure provides the first building block in smart grids by empowering customers and utilities with real‐time information regarding energy use. It is a key element in the U.S. government's push for electric grid modernization. Using a panel dataset for 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia over the years 2007–2012, we evaluate the impacts of a polycentric governance system and socioeconomic contexts on states' performance in smart metering deployment. We find that the advanced metering technological change in the United States has been exclusively created by the interdependencies and interactions between different layers of government. High‐tech industry is the only socioeconomic factor that has a negative impact on smart meter deployment, whereas other factors, such as pressures from energy consumers and environmental groups, and electric grid conditions, have negligible impacts.     

Recent Data Trends Show Welfare Reform to Be a Mixed Success: Significant Policy Changes Should Accompany Reauthorization

The conventional wisdom is that the 1996 federal welfare reform law has been a stunning success. Welfare caseloads have declined significantly and employment among disadvantaged single mothers has increased more than anticipated. Also, more low‐income children were living with married couples in the late 1990s. However, welfare reform was enacted in the midst of exceptional economic, demographic, and other policy changes and it is impossible to disentangle the impact of federal welfare reform from these other factors. This article describes these factors and puts the income gains and losses among families with children between 1996 and 2000 into the historical context of the past twenty‐five years. This analysis provides substantial evidence that welfare reform may have “worked” for many low‐income families with children while failing other low‐income families. Furthermore, despite recent increases in poverty following the 2001 recession, welfare caseloads continued to decline, indicating a fundamental flaw in what has traditionally been a countercyclical program. Data also suggest that the significant increase over the 1990s in the share of low‐income children living with married couples has been reversed following the recent recession. These findings suggest that the 1996 welfare law needs to be considerably retooled.     

Rethinking corporate restructuring

A giant wave of corporate restructuring has rolled through the global corporate landscape ever since the early 1980s, and to date there are still no signs of it slowing down. Much of the restructuring took place under the banner of increasing corporate financial performance, but a significant by‐product of the deep‐rooted organisational change it involves is additional strain on the organisation's relationships with employees, communities, taxpayers, governments and other stakeholders. This commentary paper first assesses four qualitatively different types of corporate restructuring and the corresponding techno‐rational explanations and justifications for their occurrence. Next, it demonstrates how these restructuring transactions can frustrate a firm's relationships with market and non‐market parties. It then goes beyond the techno‐rational perspective by discussing four types of public affairs instruments, and framing them as facilitating measures which companies can take to appease actors that have the potential to inhibit organisational restructuring efforts. The authors thus rethink corporate restructuring by focusing on the crucial role that public affairs activities can play in the management of the market and non‐market pressures associated with the redesign of organisational structures and portfolios. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

On the equity effects of taxing imputed rent: Evidence from Australia

Abstract

Taxation of net imputed rent from owner‐occupied housing (and mortgage interest deductibility) has been advocated in Australia on grounds of both efficiency and equity. The current tax system (no taxation or deductibility) favors owner‐occupied housing over business investments, and in the owner‐occupied sector it favors high‐income, low‐debt households over others. Nevertheless, imputed rent taxation has been criticized on the empirical grounds that its direct burden would fall more heavily on low‐income households than high‐income households.

Using micro‐level data from the 1986 Income Distribution Survey, we show that the burden does not fall more heavily on low‐income households when net imputed rent is included in owners’ incomes and when life cycle effects are controlled for. Moreover, for married couples aged 25 to 54, the taxation of imputed rental income would be not only progressive, but more progressive than the taxation of other household income.     

State Renewable Energy Governance: Policy Instruments,Markets, or Citizens

Since the 1990s, state governments in the United States have diversified policy instruments to encourage the electric power industry to deploy renewable sources for electricity generation. This study identifies the trends and variations in renewable energy (RE) policy governance among states and examines the effectiveness of policy instruments in the deployment of RE sources for electricity production. This study explores 18 state legislative, RE‐related regulations, programs, or financial incentives existing between 2001 and 2010 in 48 states in the United States. Renewable energy policies were classified into three types of policy approaches: command‐and‐control, market‐based, and information instruments. Results suggest that authoritative approaches are more likely to be effective in the governmental intervention toward a pre‐existing market, and information instruments and citizen participation became important in the power industry in the 2000s. In addition, it gives us some evidence that federal assistance under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 influenced the overall growth of the renewable electricity industry, in addition to state government–led policy designs.     

The effects of welfare reform on the academic performance of children in low‐income households

During the 1990s, U.S. welfare policy underwent dramatic reforms aimed at promoting employment and reducing dependence. Although the immediate effects on adult labor supply and family income have been studied extensively, this paper is the first to evaluate the long‐run effects on children's well‐being. Using a decade of national math achievement data and controlling for contemporaneous changes in education policy and environment, we associate welfare reform with relative test score improvements for low‐income students. Greater gains occur in states with larger initial welfare caseloads and larger caseload reductions.© 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

On the distribution of federal taxes and expenditures,and the new war between the states

As federal government expenditures have grown, there has been an increasing awareness of the distribution of taxes and expenditures across states. States in the Northeast have claimed that sunbelt states have been getting more than their fair share of federal spending, with the sunbelt states denying the charge. A theory of political coalitions is developed to explain why the sunbelt should be unable to receive differentially high expenditures, although the sunbelt may pay less than a proportional amount in taxes because of its relatively low income. An empirical test shows that the data are in agreement with this theory.     

Americanising Brexit Britain's Welfare State?

Will the British welfare state revert to an Americanisation trajectory or retain features of the European model after April 2019? After a period of historically prolonged austerity and substantial working age welfare reform, with the UK facing yet another renegotiation of the social contract in a post‐Brexit world, the question of whether there remains space for an alternative to the ‘American’ model is of crucial importance. We argue that there has been a blurring of differences across the American and European welfare states in terms of working age benefits, as most countries have adopted aspects of work‐based conditionality reforms, which attach the receipt of benefits to the active pursuit of work and, to varying extents, the underlying politics of US welfare reform, where there are large coalitions supportive of more punitive policies towards low‐income adults and minorities. These trends are taking place against the backdrop of a second major shift: increasing restrictions on benefits for immigrants. This double narrowing of the welfare state, making benefits conditional for citizens and excluding those who are not citizens, seemingly sets the agenda for a more restrictive post‐Brexit welfare state. The experience of the last two decades suggests, however, that the adoption of the American model has not been wholesale; steering a middle path between punitive conditional American benefits and more traditionally generous universal benefits is on the agenda across advanced welfare states.     

The Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit An Analysis of the First Ten Years

Abstract

The Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) has been the de facto federal rental housing production program since its creation in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In this article, using a detailed database on 2,554 LIHTC projects, we analyze the costs of building these projects, where they are built, their financial viability, whom they serve, who finances them, and the size of the subsidies provided to them.

The LIHTC is a flexible program that has built different types of housing in various markets. While LIHTC projects serve low‐ and moderate‐income households, their rents are beyond the reach of many poor households without additional subsidy. Revenues just cover costs for many LIHTC projects. Over time, considerably more of each tax‐credit dollar has ended up in the projects, and returns to equity investors have dropped significantly, perhaps reflecting an increased understanding of project risks. We estimate that LIHTC projects developed by nonprofits are 20.3 percent more expensive than those developed by for‐profits.     

Comment on Jean L. Cummings and Denise DiPasquale's “The Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit: An Analysis of the First Ten Years”

Abstract

The Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit (housing credit) that Cummings and Di‐Pasquale portray is effective, efficient, and healthy. However, rapid changes in the industry have turned some of their data stale, and the absence of suitable context and information invalidate some key analyses and findings. Moreover, the researchers sometimes seem to see the glass as 10 percent empty instead of 90 percent full. A practitioners’ perspective is more positive.

The housing credit generates an array of public benefits while harnessing private investors’ business discipline. Genuinely low‐income tenants occupy the housing. The housing revitalizes low‐income communities. Properties are in good financial and physical condition. The housing credit is also cost effective. The economic fundamentals of producing low‐income rental housing, not the housing credit, necessitate substantial subsidies. A remarkably high proportion of the federal tax‐credit subsidy goes into the housing, and investor returns are modest. Nonprofit‐sponsored production appears to cost more because nonprofits are prominent in high‐cost locations and for other similar reasons, not because nonprofit developers are inefficient.     

Economic voting and welfare programmes: Evidence from the American states

While scholars have hypothesised that a strong welfare state should reduce voters' incentives to base their votes on economic outcomes, evidence for this proposition remains mixed. This article tests whether differences in welfare protections across American states affect the relationship between economic performance and support for the president's party in 430 state legislative elections from 1970 to 1989. Analysing the results of over 42,000 contests in which an incumbent was running for re‐election, it finds that while unemployment insurance programmes do not affect the importance of economic performance, the electoral fortunes of presidential co‐partisans are less strongly tied to the national economy in states with generous anti‐poverty programmes. Thus by reducing vulnerability to poverty, economic safety‐nets lower the salience of the economy and provide electoral cover for politicians during economic slowdowns.     

Did Age Discrimination Protections Help Older Workers Weather the Great Recession?

We examine whether stronger age discrimination laws at the state level moderated the impact of the Great Recession on older workers. We use a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences strategy to compare older and younger workers, in states with stronger and weaker laws, before, during, and after the Great Recession. We find very little evidence that stronger age discrimination protections helped older workers weather the Great Recession, relative to younger workers. The evidence sometimes points in the opposite direction, with stronger state age discrimination protections associated with more adverse effects of the Great Recession on older workers. We suggest that during an experience such as the Great Recession, severe labor market disruptions make it difficult to discern discrimination, weakening the effects of stronger state age discrimination protections. Alternatively, higher termination costs associated with stronger age discrimination protections may do more to deter hiring when future product and labor demand is highly uncertain.     

Availability of affordable healthy food in Hillsborough County,Florida

Prior research has indicated that low‐income neighborhoods in urban regions throughout the United States have limited access to healthy food, which partly explains the prevalence of diet‐related diseases. Our study provides new evidence on the relationship between access, prices of healthy food, and key demographic factors in Hillsborough County, Florida. The research team completed 65 surveys of grocery and convenience stores regarding availability and prices of 11 food items included in the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS‐S). Results from the regression analysis indicate that affordable healthy food is more likely to be found in grocery stores than in convenience stores. There is no significant evidence, however, that low‐income neighborhoods have less access to healthy food than the not‐low‐income ones. We also observe significant price differences among types of stores but not in grocery‐to‐convenience store ratios among income groups, suggesting that low‐income families are not exposed to higher food prices.     

Economic adversity and electoral participation of vulnerable socioeconomic groups

Do economic hardships affect electoral participation? Using cross-sectional data for 44 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America between 1996 and 2013, we find that individual-level attributes and structural factors shape voters’ reaction to economic adversity. This paper presents empirical evidence showing that economic downturns affect electoral participation. However, macroeconomic fluctuations have heterogeneous effects. While poorer and less educated citizens are more likely to increase their level of turnout during periods of economic adversity, the rate of participation of individuals with a higher socioeconomic status is not affected by economic downturns. Moreover, we demonstrate that the negative impact of economic hardships on the likelihood of electoral participation of the most vulnerable socioeconomic groups is mostly found in countries that are less inserted into the global economy and in states that offer weaker welfare protections.