Trading-Off Reproductive Technology and Adoption: Does Subsidizing in Vitro Fertilization Decrease Adoption Rates and Should It Matter?

For those facing infertility, using assisted reproductive technology to have genetically related children is a very expensive proposition. In particular, to produce a live birth through in vitro fertilization (IVF) will cost an individual (on average) between $66,667 and$114,286 in the U.S. If forced to pay these prices out of pocket, many would be unable to afford this technology. Given this reality, a number of states have attempted to improve access to reproductive technology through state-level insurance mandates that cover IVF. Several scholars, however, have worried that increasing access in this way will cause a diminution in adoptions and have argued against enactment of state mandates for that reason. In this paper, which was selected for presentation at the 2010 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, we push against that conclusion on two fronts. First, we interrogate the normative premises of the argument and expose its contestable implicit assumptions about how the state should balance the interests of existing children waiting for adoption and those seeking access to reproductive technology in order to have genetically related children. Second, we investigate the unexamined empirical question behind the conclusion: does state subsidization of reproductive technologies through insurance mandates actually reduce adoption; that is, is there a trade-off between helping individuals conceive and helping children waiting to be adopted? We call the claim that there is such an effect the “substitution theory.” Using the differential timing of introduction of state-level insurance mandates relating to IVF in some states and differences in the forms these mandates take, we employ several different econometric techniques (differences-in-differences, ordinary least squares, two-stage least squares) to examine the effect of these mandates on IVF utilization and adoption. Contrary to the assumption of the substitution theory, we find no strong evidence that state support of IVF through these mandates crowds out either domestic or international adoption. Appendix A re-analyses our results using the insurance mandate categorization of other studies in the literature

String Bracket and Flat Connections

Let $G \to P \to M$ be a flat principal bundle over a closed and oriented manifold $M$ of dimension $m=2d$. We construct a map of Lie algebras \Psi: \H_{2\ast} (L M) \to {\o}(\Mc), where \H_{2\ast} (LM) is the even dimensional part of the equivariant homology of $LM$, the free loop space of $M$, and \Mc is the Maurer-Cartan moduli space of the graded differential Lie algebra \Omega^\ast (M, \adp), the differential forms with values in the associated adjoint bundle of $P$. For a 2-dimensional manifold $M$, our Lie algebra map reduces to that constructed by Goldman in \cite{G2}. We treat different Lie algebra structures on \H_{2\ast}(LM) depending on the choice of the linear reductive Lie group $G$ in our discussion.Comment: 28 pages. This is the final versio

Unsupervised Bilingual POS Tagging with Markov Random Fields

In this paper, we give a treatment to the problem of bilingual part-of-speech induction with parallel data. We demonstrate that naïve optimization of log-likelihood with joint MRFs suffers from a severe problem of local maxima, and suggest an alternative – using contrastive estimation for estimation of the parameters. Our experiments show that estimating the parameters this way, using overlapping features with joint MRFs performs better than previous work on the 1984 dataset.

Effective Field Theory for Nuclear Physics

I summarize the motivation for the effective field theory approach to nuclear physics, and highlight some of its recent accomplishments. The results are compared with those computed in potential models.Comment: Talk delivered at Baryons '98, Bonn, Sept. 22, 1998. 15 pages, 9 figure

Large-N_c Quark Distributions in the Delta and Chiral Logarithms in Quark Distributions of the Nucleon

In a world with two quark flavors and a large number of colors (N_c), the polarized and unpolarized quark distributions in the delta are completely determined by those in the nucleon up to {\cal O}(1/N_c). In particular, we find q_{\Delta}(x) =[(1\pm 2T_z)u_N(x)+ (1\mp 2T_z)d_N(x)]/2 and \Delta q_\Delta(x) =[(5\pm 2T_z)\Delta u_N(x) + (5\mp 2T_z)\Delta d_N(x)]/10, where q = u, d and $T_z$ the charge state of a delta. The result can be used to estimate the leading chiral-logarithmic corrections to the quark distributions in the nucleon.Comment: 8 pages, revtex4, 1 figure include