The impact of AFDC on birth decisions and program participation

A longitudinal study examining how the level of AFDC benefits and the per-child increment affect births. Although the findings support the "AFDC benefits cause births" hypothesis, the author shows that eliminating the new-birth increment would reduce total program costs by less than 3 percent, since both the per-dollar effect of benefits on births and the per-child increments themselves are small.Demography ; Welfare

Growth and poverty revisited

An explanation of an alternative analysis of poverty based on consumption rather than on annual income, which disputes the documented breakdown in progress against poverty in the 1980s and concludes that the poor appear to benefit from a growing economy now as much as in previous decades.Gross domestic product ; Poverty

Does means-testing welfare discourage saving? Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Women

An empirical test of AFDC's asset limit, finding that after correcting for the potential endogeneity of policy, a $1 difference in limits implies a difference in potential AFDC recipients' wealth of 30 cents. ; This paper uses a stochastic cost frontier to examine the scale economies, cost efficiencies, and technological change of three payments instruments--check, automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, and Fedwire processing--provided by the Federal Reserve over the period 1990-94.Saving and investment ; Welfare

Rocket plume spectrometry: A system permitting engine condition monitoring, as applied to the technology test bed engine

The appearance of visible objects in the exhaust plume of space shuttle main engines (SSME) during test firings is discussed. A program was undertaken to attempt to identify anomalous material resulting from wear, normal or excessive, of internal parts, allowing time monitoring of engine condition or detection of failure precursors. Measurements were taken during test firings at Stennis Space Center and at the Santa Suzanna facility in California. The results indicated that a system having high spectral resolution, a fast time response, and a wide spectral range was required to meet all requirements, thus two special systems have been designed and built. One is the Optical Plume Anomaly Detector (OPAD). The other instrument, which is described in this report, is the superspectrometer, an optical multichannel analyzer having 8,192 channels covering the spectral band 250 to 1,000 nm

Understanding differences in regional poverty rates

An examination of the huge variation in U.S. regional poverty rates, showing that although demographic, policy, and cost-of-living factors all play a role, economic differences are key.Income ; Regional economics

SSI, Labor Supply, and Migration

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the United States creates incentives for potential aged recipients to reduce labor supply prior to becoming eligible, and past research finds evidence of such behavior for older men. There may be a migration response to across-state variation in SSI benefits, which is of interest in its own right and can bias estimates of the effects of SSI benefits on labor supply. We fail to find evidence that older individuals migrate in response to SSI benefits, or that the labor supply disincentive effects of SSI are spurious and instead reflect migration behavior.Supplemental Security Income; Migration; Labor supply

Measure Factors, Tension, and Correlations of Fluid Membranes

We study two geometrical factors needed for the correct construction of statistical ensembles of surfaces. Such ensembles appear in the study of fluid bilayer membranes, though our results are more generally applicable. The naive functional measure over height fluctuations must be corrected by these factors in order to give correct, self-consistent formulas for the free energy and correlation functions of the height. While one of these corrections -- the Faddeev-Popov determinant -- has been studied extensively, our derivation proceeds from very simple geometrical ideas, which we hope removes some of its mystery. The other factor is similar to the Liouville correction in string theory. Since our formulas differ from those of previous authors, we include some explicit calculations of the effective frame tension and two-point function to show that our version indeed secures coordinate-invariance and consistency to lowest nontrivial order in a temperature expansion.Comment: 24 pp; plain Te

The Effects of Changes in State SSI Supplements on Pre-Retirement Labor Supply

Because the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program is means-tested, with both income limits and asset limits, those on the margin of eligibility for the elderly component of the program face incentives to reduce labor supply (or earnings) prior to becoming eligible. Our past research relying on cross-state variation in SSI benefits found evidence consistent with the predicted negative labor supply effects. However, a reliance on cross-state variation necessitated reliance on less-than-ideal control samples. In contrast, this paper uses CPS data covering a 22-year period, which permit identification of the effects of SSI from within-state, time-series variation in SSI benefits, using a better control sample. The evidence points consistently to negative effects of more generous SSI payments on the labor supply of likely SSI participants aged 62-64. The implied elasticities of labor supply with respect to benefits, for those with a high probability of SSI participation, are generally in the range of 0.2 to 0.3, looking at both employment and hours of work.