How did medicaid expansions affect labor supply and welfare enrollment? Evidence from the early 2000s

In the early 2000s, Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont expanded Medicaid to cover more low-income individuals, primarily childless adults. This change provides the researcher with an opportunity to analyze the effects of these expansions on labor supply and welfare enrollment. I use a large data set of 176 counties over 7 years, including 3 years of pre-expansion period, 1 year of implementation year, and 3 years of post-expansion period. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find the most-affected counties had a 1.4 percentage-point more decline in labor force participation rate in comparison to other counties. Furthermore, I observe a 0.32 h decrease in average weekly hours and a 1.1 % increase in average weekly wages. This indicates labor supply was affected more than labor demand. I also observe a 0.49 % increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) enrollment after the Medicaid expansions. These results are robust to an alternative identification of the most-affected counties, inclusion of counties from comparison states, limiting the control group to only high-poverty counties from comparison states, exclusion of county-specific time trends, and different configuration of clustered errors. My findings provide early insights on the potential effects of new Medicaid expansions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), since 82 % of those newly eligible are expected to be childless adults

Three essays in political economy

This is a comprehensive study of the U.S. political process from the perspective of media, voters and candidates. In the first chapter, I analyze the sources of media bias. In the second chapter, I focus on economically self-interested voting. The third chapter studies the effectiveness of negative campaigning. In the next three paragraphs, I summarize these three chapters With the advent of internet, many U.S. metropolitan areas have seen newspaper closures due to declining revenues. This provides the researcher with an opportunity to analyze the microeconomic sources of media bias. This paper uses a large panel data set of newspaper archives for 102 newspapers over 238 months (1990-2009). I find that, after controlling for the unemployment rate and the change in unemployment rate, conservative newspapers report 19% more unemployment news when the President is a Democrat rather than a Republican, before the closure of a rival newspaper in the same media market. This effect is 12% for liberal newspapers. After the closure, these numbers are 3.5% and 1%, respectively. This moderation of media bias after closure of a rival newspaper stands as newspaper size, newspaper fixed-effects or metropolitan area fixed-effects are included. I also find that newspapers in smaller metropolitan areas have a larger moderation in their bias. My findings provide support for theories in which media-bias is demand-driven, as surviving newspapers aim to increase their sales by gaining the former readers of a closed newspaper in the same media market. A long literature investigates the influence of income on voting behavior, but it focuses primarily on presidential elections. We ask whether economically self-interested voting is unique to the presidential elections, or if it also extends to House, Senate and gubernatorial elections. In addition, for each office, we look for the presence of absolute income effects and relative income effects. Voters do indeed appear to vote in an economically self-interested manner for each office, but we show that in all elections but presidential elections, this effect is largely generated by the correlation of income with political issue stances. Controlling for voter stances on a number of social and economic issues, there is little evidence of partisan differences in voting according to income outside of presidential elections. Our findings at once support previous studies, but illustrate that presidential elections are very much a special case in US socio-political behavior. Political candidates commonly use negative TV ads to attack their opponents. In very limited research on effectiveness of negative campaigning, endogeneity problem has not been addressed and trait ads were not separated from issue ads. In this project, I use instrumental variables estimates of the effectiveness of negative campaigning and distinguish between issue ads and trait ads. Using 162 U.S. Senate Elections between 1998 and 2008, I find that negative issue campaigning is effective for challengers in significantly reducing the incumbent???s vote, although this effect is not large enough to change the election outcome in lopsided elections. In competitive elections, I find that challenger???s negative issue ads can change the election outcome. I do not find any significant effects of negative issue ads by an incumbent, except for competitive elections. Both incumbents and challengers hurt themselves if they resort to negative trait ads (personal attacks)

The Binary Policy Model We would like to thank

Abstract We introduce a general framework in which politicians choose a sequence of binary policies. The two competing candidates are exogenously committed to particular positions on a subset of these issues, while they can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. We show that the binary policy model provides a tractable multidimensional model of candidate competition that can generate policy divergence and adoption of minority positions by candidates. We also use our framework to analyze plurality rule and runoff rule in elections with three candidates. JEL Classification Numbers: D72, D60

2010a): “The binary policy model

Abstract We introduce a tractable multi-issue model of electoral competition in which candidates are exogenously committed to particular positions on a subset of issues, while they can choose a sequence of binary positions for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. A majorityefficient position is defined as one where a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate better off, taking as given his fixed positions. We characterize conditions for majority-efficient positions to exist. In contrast to models where candidates can choose all relevant positions, the candidates' fixed positions in our framework imply that only some voters are swing voters. Whether candidates choose majority-efficient or majority-inefficient positions depends on properties of the distribution of these swing voters. We also use our framework to analyze plurality rule and runoff rule in elections with multiple candidates. JEL Classification Numbers: D72, D60. Keywords: Multidimensional policy, voting, citizen-candidate, normative analysis of political competition * Address of the authors: Department of Economics, University of Illinois, 1206 South 6th Street, Champaign, IL 61820 USA. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]. We would like to thank an associate editor and two referees for very helpful comments. We would also like to acknowledg