The impact of child SSI enrollment on household outcomes

We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to investigate the impact that child Supplemental Security Income (SSI) enrollment has on household outcomes, including poverty, household earnings, and health insurance coverage. The longitudinal nature of the SIPP allows us to control for unobserved, time‐invariant differences across households by measuring outcomes in the same household in the months leading up to and immediately following the first reporting of child SSI income. Our regression analyses demonstrate that for every $100 increase in household SSI income, total household income increases by roughly $72, reflecting some modest offset of other transfer income and conditional household earnings. Our analyses further demonstrate that child SSI enrollment is associated with a statistically significant and persistent reduction in the probability that a child lives in poverty of roughly 11 percentage points. Additional analyses suggest that program enrollment has virtually no impact on health insurance coverage because most new SSI recipients have health insurance from Medicaid or another source at the time of enrollment. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

protagonists and victims: women leading the fight for a democratic Colombia

This paper offers an account of the relationship between gender, class and notions of happiness. It draws on recent research conducted into the experiences of working class women who play the UK National Lottery. In particular, it explores the notion that gambling offers working class women the opportunity to dream of the ‘good life’ – of enhancing their lives and of making ‘improvements’ to their own and their families’ well-being. In this paper, the discourse of happiness will be examined, and the tacit assumption that working class women in particular are prone to turning to gambling as a last ditch attempt to personal and emotional fulfilment will be challenged. The paper argues that developing understandings of culture and consumption practices is imperative for producing a more complex understanding of the subjective realities of working class women's everyday lives. By engaging with feminist accounts of respectability, daydream and fantasy, the paper will present a thorough exploration of National Lottery play in working class women's everyday experiences of happiness.     

Federal Aid to Local Governments in the West: An Irony of the Reagan Revolution

Despite the fact that the Reagan election was viewed as a power shift toward the West, the decade of the 1980s produced cruel disappointment. The region was generally left out of the economic recmery of the nation because of the bust in the agricultural and mineral industries. These state and local gmernments which sufferfrom high costs and low resources were particularly dependent on the national gmernment at the very time when the Reagan Administration was cutting federal aid and transferring power to the states. Unlike Nixon's New Federalism which helped the state and local governments of the West, Reagan's policies caused their relative position in federal aid flows to deteriorate. Although the Reagan revolution in cutting domestic programs was viewed as the embodiment of western rugged individualism, the region lost in terms of federal aid to small rural local governments.     

Litigation: a threat to obstetric practice?

Claims that the practice of obstetrics is in crisis appear regularly in the media, but evidence for the claims is scarce. This article examines a range of evidence from Australia and overseas and explores the relationship between obstetric practice and litigation. While anecdotal evidence abounds, there is no hard evidence to confirm that litigation is the threat to obstetric practice that many practitioners strongly believe it is. It is likely that such practitioners respond by practising defensive medicine but this is very difficult to measure.     

Learning the structure of a simple rent-seeking game

This paper considers a form of the Tullock imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking game in which the contestants are uncertain about the value of a bias parameter in the probability of winning function. Beliefs about this unknown parameter are not constrained to be static; we consider two methods by which the players' prior beliefs on this parameter can be updated. First, we allow for information to emerge by considering the case in which the game is played twice, with the outcome of the first game known before the second begins. The identity of the winner of the first contest represents information which emerges endogenously that can be used to revise beliefs on the unknown bias parameter. Second, information can be produced outside of the model by an external agency; this gives rise to exogenous learning. We consider the consequences for rent-seeking in each of these two cases.     

Pressure and the division of a public budget

This paper considers the division of a public budget among competing interests. The planner determines the optimal allocation by maximizing a weighted social welfare function. These weights reflect society's attitudes to different recipient groups, and are not constrained to be constant. By exerting “pressure”, the recipients can attempt to manipulate the weights and hence influence the division of the budget. The amount of resources used on pressure, and the effects on the preference weights are calculated. An important parameter in the model is the elasticity of pressure, for which an appropriate estimate is presented from the case of competition for a share of a health services budget in Norway.