Maintaining neutrality in the Minister's office

How do non-partisan advisors in Ministers’ offices maintain political neutrality while immersed in a highly politicised environment? Private Secretaries are ubiquitous non-partisan public service representatives in the political environment of Ministers’ offices. There has been significant research undertaken the role of political advisors in Ministers’ offices, yet the contribution of these non-partisan advisors has not yet been described in academic literature. The risk of Private Secretaries being overly responsive to politicians and undertaking political tasks rather than maintaining neutrality is ever present. Further, they must actively manage the risk of free and frank advice being obstructed by political advisors. This article presents views about political neutrality gleaned from interviews with Private Secretaries who have worked in Ministers’ offices in New Zealand during the period of 1997–2018. It presents new insights into the tensions within a key setting of the core executive.     

Child Support and the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansions

A quickly developing literature has shown that the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansions have improved health insurance coverage, health, and financial well‐being among low‐income adults without dependent children. This population includes noncustodial parents. With substantial overlap in the population that is typically obligated to pay child support and the population that has strongly benefited from the expansions, there may be potential implications for child support enforcement. In this paper, I examine the effect of public health insurance eligibility to low‐income adults on child support outcomes. I find that the ACA Medicaid expansions increased child support distributed to custodial families as arrears by 8.5 percent. Evidence also suggests current support distributions increased by about 2 percent. There were no significant effects on paying toward a child support order. Among unmarried mothers, the likelihood of child support receipt increased by 8 percent. These results imply that access to public health insurance can increase the ability of noncustodial parents to pay child support.     

Budget Slack,Institutions, and Transparency

Economic theory suggests that it is optimal for governments to use precautionary saving as a countercyclical tool. However, the availability of surplus funds often triggers political pressure for tax cuts and spending increases. Mechanisms for alleviating that pressure include limiting the transparency of slack resources and limiting politicians’ discretion to use slack resources for purposes other than stabilization. This article investigates the extent to which these two mechanisms are substitutes. In particular, the authors examine whether the widespread adoption of budget stabilization funds (BSFs) in the U.S. states over the past several decades has been accompanied by a decline in conservative revenue forecast bias. Using panel data from 47 states over a 22‐year period, they find that the adoption of a BSF reduces revenue underestimation by approximately two‐thirds; however, the size of the effect depends in part on how much a state saves in the BSF and the rules governing BSF deposits and withdrawals. The results suggest that BSFs have the unintended effect of increasing fiscal transparency.