78 research outputs found
Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance
Using a 1993 Dutch policy reform and a regression discontinuity design, we find children of parents
whose disability insurance (DI) eligibility was reduced are 11% less likely to participate in DI themselves,
do not alter their use of other government programs, and earn 2% more as adults. The reduced transfers
and increased taxes of children account for 40% of the fiscal savings relative to parents in present
discounted value terms. Moreover, children of treated parents complete more schooling, have a lower
probability of serious criminal arrests and incarceration, and take fewer mental health drugs as adults
Intergenerational spillovers in disability insurance
Does participation in a social assistance program by parents have spillovers
on their children's own participation, future labor market attachment, and human
capital investments? While intergenerational concerns have figured prominently in
policy debates for decades, causal evidence is scarce due to nonrandom participation
and data limitations. In this paper we exploit a 1993 policy reform in the Netherlands
which tightened disability insurance (DI) criteria for existing claimants, and use rich
panel data to link parents to children's long-run outcomes. The key to our regression
discontinuity design is that the reform applied to younger cohorts, while older cohorts
were exempted from the new rules. We find that children of parents who were
pushed out of DI or had their benefits reduced are 11% less likely to participate in
DI themselves, do not alter their use of other government safety net programs, and
earn 2% more in the labor market as adults. The combination of reduced government
transfers and increased tax revenue results in a fiscal gain of 5,900 euros per treated
parent due to child spillovers by 2014. Moreover, children of treated parents complete
an extra 0.12 years of schooling on average, an investment consistent with an
anticipated future with less reliance on DI. Our findings have important implications
for the evaluation of this and other policy reforms: ignoring parent-to-child spillovers
understates the long-run cost savings of the Dutch reform by between 21 and 40% in
present discounted value terms
The mobilising effect of political choice
Political choice is central to citizensâ participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual-level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizensâ own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross-national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views
The Opinion-Policy Nexus in Europe and the Role of Political Institutions
A strong link between citizen preferences and public policy is one of the key goals and criteria of democratic governance. Yet, our knowledge about the extent to which public policies on specific issues are in line with citizen preferences in Europe is limited. This article reports on the first study of the link between public opinion and public policy that covers a large and diverse sample of concrete public policy issues in 31 European democracies. The findings demonstrate a strong positive relationship and a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and the state of public policy. Also examined is whether political institutions, including electoral systems and the horizontal and vertical division of powers, influence the opinionâpolicy link. The evidence for such effects is very limited, which suggests that the same institutions might affect policy representation in countervailing ways through different mechanisms
Anthropology, Museums and Contemporary Cultural Processes : An Introduction
The role of ethnographic museums was, to begin with, that of imparting information about foreign cultures. These were, often enough, described as the polar opposites of the civilized places in which ethnographic museums could be found. The museum objects metaphorically represented primitive stages in human development. They appeared like relics even if produced recently. Anthropology, ethnography, or ethnology was the academic discipline which concerned itself with primitive cultures. The ethnographic museum with its harvests of colonial booty therefore seemed like the self-evident medium for conveying anthropological information. Today the preconditions for this constellation have changed. Have museums become inappropriate to communicate anthropological knowledge
- âŠ