The Child Care Tax Credit, Maternal Labor Supply, and Children’s Well-being

This dissertation is comprised of three essays on the Child Care Tax Credit program in the United States. I analyze how the Child Care Tax Credit affects the budget constraints faced by mothers, and how changes in mothers\u27 budget constraints affect maternal labor supply. Furthermore, I examine how the Child Care Tax Credit affects children\u27s well-being through mothers\u27 time allocation. Understanding the employment and time allocation adjustment of the women with young children, according to the tax programs and child care subsidies, is important for theoretical and practical reasons. Examining the influence of the tax subsidy on children\u27s cognitive and non-cognitive development can provide important information for policymakers. In the first chapter, I explore the effects of the Child Care Tax Credit on maternal labor supply. Childbearing is the main factor that affects the labor supply of women. Many studies show that the cost of child care services has a significant impact on the labor supply of women with young children. The Child Care Tax credit (CCTC) is a child care subsidy program that allows working parents to claim a tax credit for their child care expenses. In the study, I document a comprehensive legislative history of the CCTC enactments, amendments, and repeals at both federal and state levels. Using the CCTC variation generated by exogenous law changes and focusing on mothers between the ages of 20 to 55 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I estimate the effects of the CCTC on maternal labor supply. Using differences-in-differences estimation and policy shocks measured at the state level, I found that a \$1000 increase in the CCTC increases the maternal labor force participation rate by three percentage points. To incorporate the policy variation within a state, I construct an individual CCTC treatment variable for each woman using observable individual characteristics and state-specific regulation. I use the state-level CCTC treatment variable as the instrumental variable for the individual CCTC treatment variable and find that a \$1000 increase in CCTC increases the maternal labor force participation rate by six percentage points. The effects are more pronounced in married mothers than single mothers. In chapter two, I explore the effects of the Child Care Tax Credit on children\u27s long-term educational achievement. Since the CCTC is effective in encouraging mothers to join the labor force, the question that follows is: how would the CCTC affect the well-being of children? Potentially, there are two main channels in which the CCTC affects the well-being of children. The CCTC reduces the cost of child care services and encourages mothers to join the labor market. More family income can help the development of the children; this can be categorized as an income effect. The tax credit also affects the mother\u27s time allocation, and the change of time exposed to child care intensity also affects the development of the child. I document a comprehensive legislative history of the CCTC enactments, amendments, and repeals at both federal and state levels. Using the detailed CCTC legislative variation generated by exogenous law changes and applying the variation on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I examine the long-term effects of the CCTC policy exposure from early ages on the educational achievement of the child. Results show that CCTC policy exposure from early ages has negative effects on the educational achievement of the child in adulthood. In chapter three, I explore the relationship between the early ages Child Care Tax Credit policy exposure and children\u27s well-being measured at early ages. Using the detailed CCTC legislative variation generated by exogenous law changes and applying the variation on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child and Young Adult, I examine the short-term effects of the early age CCTC policy exposure on the educational achievement and behavioral problems of the child. Results show that early age CCTC policy exposure has negative effects on the reading score of the child, which shows evidence that the mother\u27s time allocation effect dominates the income effect of the tax credit for the marginal population

Towards Ground Truthing Observations in Gray-Box Anomaly Detection

Abstract—Anomaly detection has been attracting interests from researchers due to its advantage of being able to detect zero-day exploits. A gray-box anomaly detector first observes benign executions of a computer program and then extracts reliable rules that govern the normal execution of the program. However, such observations from benign executions are not necessarily true evidences supporting the rules learned. For example, the observation that a file descriptor being equal to a socket descriptor should not be considered supporting a rule governing the two values to be the same. Ground truthing such observations is a difficult problem since it is not practical to analyze the semantics of every instruction in every program to be protected. In this paper, we propose using taint analysis to automatically help the ground truthing. Intuitively, the same taint source of two values provides ground truth of the data dependence. We implement a host-based anomaly detector with our proposed taint tracking and evaluate the accuracy of rules learned. Results show that we not only manage to filter out incorrect rules that would otherwise be learned (with high support and confidence), but manage recover good rules that are previously believed to be unreliable. We also present overheads of our system and time needed for training

Numerical Investigation of the Combined Influence of Shield Tunneling and Pile Cutting on Underpinning Piles

In this study, the combined influence of shield tunneling and the old pile cutting process on underpinning piles is investigated through finite element method (FEM) modeling based on a shield tunnel project in Nanchang Metro Line 2, China. Numerical models have been developed to analyze the influence of intersection angles and the vertical distance between the underpinning foundation and tunnels on the mechanical responses of underpinning piles during tunnel excavation. Simulation results show that the bending moment of the underpinning piles decreases with increasing vertical distance between the pile and tunnel, and is inversely proportional to the intersection angle between the underpinning beam and tunnel. In addition, the maximum pile bending moment occurs in the buried depth of the tunnel axis, indicating a high risk of damage in this part. According to the simulation results, more attention should be given to the underpinning piles in case a small vertical distance and intersection angle are encountered

Physical Therapy Management Of A Manual Laborer With Chronic Rotator Cuff Tendinopathy: A Case Report

Background: Tendinopathy is characterized by tendon thickening, localized pain and chronic degeneration reflective of failed healing. 38% of manual laborers who participate in daily moderate to heavy lifting will experience Rotator Cuff Tendinopathy(RCT). There is a lack of research investigating the PT management of manual laborers who have RCT, but must continue to participate in harmful activities to fulfill occupational responsibilities. Purpose: The purpose of this case report was to describe the PT management of a patient with rotator cuff tendinopathy who, due to work requirements continued to participate in activities detrimental to the health of the supraspinatus and function of the shoulder girdle.https://dune.une.edu/pt_studcrposter/1036/thumbnail.jp

Salient Region Detection by UFO: Uniqueness, Focusness and Objectness

The goal of saliency detection is to locate important pix-els or regions in an image which attract humans ’ visual at-tention the most. This is a fundamental task whose output may serve as the basis for further computer vision tasks like segmentation, resizing, tracking and so forth. In this paper we propose a novel salient region detec-tion algorithm by integrating three important visual cues namely uniqueness, focusness and objectness (UFO). In particular, uniqueness captures the appearance-derived vi-sual contrast; focusness reflects the fact that salient regions are often photographed in focus; and objectness helps keep completeness of detected salient regions. While uniqueness has been used for saliency detection for long, it is new to integrate focusness and objectness for this purpose. In fac-t, focusness and objectness both provide important salien-cy information complementary of uniqueness. In our ex-periments using public benchmark datasets, we show that, even with a simple pixel level combination of the three com-ponents, the proposed approach yields significant improve-ment compared with previously reported methods. 1

Assembling convolution neural networks for automatic viewing transformation

Images taken under different camera poses are rotated or distorted, which leads to poor perception experiences. This paper proposes a new framework to automatically transform the images to the conformable view setting by assembling different convolution neural networks. Specifically, a referential 3D ground plane is firstly derived from the RGB image and a novel projection mapping algorithm is developed to achieve automatic viewing transformation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-ofthe-art vanishing points based methods by a large margin in terms of accuracy and robustness