Welfare Reform when Recipients are Forward-Looking

Welfare Reform, Time Limit, Dynamic Programming

The Dynamics of Prenatal WIC Participation and the Role of Past Participation

The special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides food vouchers, nutritional counseling, and health care referrals to low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women and their young children. This paper uses non-parametric and parametric duration models to study the factors that influence the timing of prenatal WIC participation among eligible women. The estimates show that black and Hispanic women, women with low levels of education, women who participate in other welfare programs and who have no insurance, and women who are overweight participate in WIC earlier than others. Thus, there appears to be negative selection on observables across a number of dimensions. The model is extended to allow past WIC participation to influence current WIC participation, and past participation is found to be the most important determinant of current participation. This result suggests that policies reach out to women who have not received WIC before may be especially beneficial. Finally, policy simulations show that recent policy changes requiring income documentation while also making recipients of other programs automatically eligible for WIC have off-setting effects with a small net increase in participation.Duration Analysis, WIC Program

Software for Parallel Computing: the LAM Implementation of MPI

Many econometric problems can benefit from the application of parallel computing techniques, and recent advances in hardware and software have made such application feasible. There are a number of freely available software libraries that make it possible to write message passing parallel programs using personal computers or Unix workstations. This review discusses one of these—the LAM (Local Area Multiprocessor) implementation of MPI (the Message Passing Interface)

WIC Eligibility and Participation: The Roles of Changing Policies, Economic Conditions, and Demographics

This paper studies WIC eligibility and participation. These outcomes are related to economic conditions, Medicaid, cash welfare, and WIC policies, and demographic characteristics. The analysis uses state level data from 1983 to 2006, a period that covers significant expansion in the Medicaid program, the transition from AFDC to TANF, and significant changes in economic conditions. The results show that take-up has increased more than eligibility over this time period. Separating eligibility and participation is important because a number of state characteristics have opposite effects on these outcomes. Economic conditions, the Medicaid expansions, and immigration in the post-TANF period are shown to be associated with WIC eligibility and participation

The Timing of Prenatal WIC Participation

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides food vouchers, nutritional counseling, and health care referrals to low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women and their young children. This paper uses duration models to study the factors that influence the timing of prenatal WIC participation among pregnant women. The estimates show that Hispanic women, women with low levels of education, women who have no private insurance, and women who are overweight participate in WIC earlier than others. WIC program rules such as allowing applicants to self-declare income and linking WIC eligibility to Medicaid eligibility are related to earlier participation for women experiencing their first pregnancies. Extending the analysis to women pregnant for the second time shows a strong relationship between WIC participation during the first pregnancy and the timing, and likelihood, of participation during the second pregnancy

Maximum Likelihood Estimation Using Parallel Computing: An Introduction to MPI

The computational difficulty of econometric problems has increased dramatically in recent years as econometricians examine more complicated models and utilize more sophisticated estimation techniques. Many problems in econometrics are `embarrassingly parallel' and can take advantage of parallel computing to reduce the wall clock time it takes to solve a problem. In this paper I demonstrate a method that can be used to solve a maximum likelihood problem using the MPI message passing library. The econometric problem is a simple multinomial logit model that does not require parallel computing but illustrates many of the problems one would confront when estimating more complicated models

Factors Associated with Reductions in Alcohol Use between High School and College: An Analysis of Data from the College Alcohol Study

Background: The consumption of alcohol by college students is a significant public health concern, and a large amount of literature explores this issue. Much of the focus is on the prevalence and correlates of binge drinking. Relatively few studies explore reductions in drinking, and these generally focus on reductions that occur during college. Aims: We examined the transition between high school and college and sought to understand the characteristics and behaviors of students that are related to reductions in the consumption of alcohol during this transition. Methods: We used data from all four rounds of the Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Survey and logistic regression models to relate the status of reduced alcohol consumption to five groups of variables: demographic and parental variables, other substance use, social environment, student activities, and alcohol policies. Results: A number of characteristics were related to reductions in drinking. Students whose fathers did not attend college were more likely to reduce alcohol consumption (odds ratio [OR] =1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI] =1.06–1.55), whereas students who prioritize parties (OR =0.35; CI =0.30–0.43) and who have recently smoked cigarettes (OR =0.52; CI =0.41–0.64) or marijuana (OR =0.52; CI =0.40–0.67) or whose fathers are moderate (OR =0.73; CI =0.55–0.96) or heavy (OR =0.72; CI =0.53–0.96) drinkers were less likely to reduce alcohol consumption. Conclusion: The results highlight the importance of family background and social environment on reductions in drinking

A time allocation study of university faculty.

Many previous time allocation studies treat work as a single activity and examine trade-offs between work and other activities. This paper investigates the at-work allocation of time among teaching, research, grant writing and service by science and engineering faculty at top US research universities. We focus on the relationship between tenure (and promotion) and time allocation, and we find that tenure and promotion do affect the allocation of time. The specific trade-offs are related to particular career paths. For example, full professors spend increasing time on service at the expense of teaching and research while longer-term associate professors who have not been promoted to full professor spend significantly more time teaching at the expense of research time. Finally, our results suggest that women, on average, allocate more hours to university service and less time to research than do men

If at first you don’t succeed: applying for and staying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

We examine households’ applications to and participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program using administrative records from South Carolina. We model application resolutions with multinomial logit (MNL) specifications where the possible outcomes are acceptance, denial due to income ineligibility, denial due to a failure to provide sufficient information and denial due to other reasons. For cases with successful applications, we model the durations of participation spells using competing risk hazard specifications that distinguish among exits that result from missed recertifications, financial ineligibility, incomplete or missing information and other reasons. The application and hazard outcomes depend on past programme behaviour and observed characteristics. The results indicate that a household’s application and participation history affect its subsequent application success and programme tenure

Does the child welfare system serve the neediest kinship care families?

Little is known about how kinship care arrangements within the child welfare system compare to kinship placements outside the child welfare system. The purpose of this study is to better understand the characteristics that influence whether a child is placed in public or private kinship care. Using national level data, we employ bivariate analysis and logistic regression to evaluate how child, caregiver and state characteristics are related to the placement of children in public versus private kinship care. Our findings suggest that the child welfare system indeed serves the most vulnerable children. Children with disabilities, children with behavioral problems, and infants are all more likely in public kinship care compared to their counterparts. However, evidence on whether the most disadvantaged kinship caregivers are in public arrangements is mixed. On the one hand, kinship caregivers in public care are older, less educated, less likely employed, and more likely to have ever been on welfare. On the other hand, public kinship caregivers are less likely than private caregivers to live below the federal poverty line or experience food insecurities