Who are temporary nurses?

Using data from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, the authors compare the characteristics of temporary and permanent registered nurses. They compare their findings for the nursing profession with characteristics of temporary and permanent workers in other occupations. They also look at the role of geography in a registered nurse’s decision to become a temporary worker.Nurses - Supply and demand ; Nurses - Statistics ; Temporary employees

Community Health Centers have reduced mortality rates of older Americans at significantly lower cost than Medicare

Federally-funded Community Health Centers (CHCs) today provide primary care and medication on a sliding pay scale to more than 20 million Americans. In new research, Martha Bailey and Andrew Goodman-Bacon show CHCs had large effects on health at relatively modest costs. The establishment of this program in the 1960s resulted in sharp and persistent reductions in age-adjusted mortality rates–effects concentrated among the most disadvantaged Americans. Reductions in mortality rates through this expansion cost one third to one eighth what the same mortality reduction cost through Medicare. These findings bode well for the current expansion of the CHC program under the Affordable Care Act

Federalizing Benefits: the Introduction of Supplemental Security Income and the Size of the Safety Net

In 1974, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) federalized cash welfare programs for the elderly, blind, and individuals with disabilities, imposing a national minimum benefit, and differentially raising payment levels in states that paid below its benefit floor. We show that this increased disability participation, but shrank non-disability cash transfer programs. For every four new SSI recipients, three came from other welfare programs. Each dollar of per capita SSI income increased total per capita transfer income by just over 50 cents. Federalizing part of a patchwork safety net need not increase redistribution by as much as traditional models of fiscal federalism suggest

Welfare Caseloads and the 2001 Recession

This paper investigates the effects of welfare reform policies on the number of families receiving welfare (caseloads) since the 2001 recession. 1996\u27s welfare reform legislation was passed amidst the longest economic expansion in US history, making it hard for researchers to estimate the role of policy. Furthermore, caseload research has not sufficiently explored the effects of specific policy choices within a broader reform package. This paper uses state panel data to examine the effects of specific policies on caseloads since the recession. Results indicate that since the 2001 recession, generous financial incentives to work reduced the number of families on welfare, while time limits and punishments for non-compliance had no impact. Taken as a whole, welfare reform helped move low-income women off of welfare in the 90s boom and subsequent recession

Three Essays in Health Policy Evaluation.

The first chapter of this dissertation examines the effect of the introduction of Medicaid between 1966 and 1970 on infant and child mortality rates. I exploit the federal requirement that Medicaid cover all cash welfare recipients, which meant that Medicaid eligibility inherited large cross-state differences in welfare receipt that had emerged decades before. I use a difference-in-differences model that compares state-level infant and child mortality rates before and after Medicaid (first difference) in states with higher and lower initial welfare-based eligibility (second difference). The results show that mortality rates in higher- and lower-eligibility states were indistinguishable prior to Medicaid, but immediately after states adopted Medicaid programs, nonwhite mortality rates fell by eight percent in high-eligibility states relative to low-eligibility states. Using newly-entered administrative data from 1963-1976, I show that children’s public insurance use increased by about six percentage points in the high-eligibility states relative to low-eligibility states. Medicaid can account for at eight percent of the aggregate decline in nonwhite child mortality from 1965 to 1979. The second chapter examines the effect of Medicaid implementation on income-based disparities in children’s insurance coverage, health care use and medical spending. I document strong income disparities in health care use in the early 1960s and show that these disparities fell dramatically in the period after Medicaid implementation. I also use the 1963 and 1970 waves of the Survey of Health Services Utilization and Expenditure to show that after Medicaid, income disparities in insurance coverage and primary care use fell disproportionately in areas with higher pre-existing rates of welfare-based Medicaid eligibility. The third chapter, written with Martha Bailey, estimates the effect of the Community Health Center (CHC) program on older adult mortality rates. CHCs were initially established between 1965 and 1974 and provided (rather than financed) primary care. We use data from the National Archives to construct measures of the county-level roll out of CHCs between 1965 and 1974 our estimates show that mortality for residents 50 and older fell sharply by two percent after CHC establishment, and that the effects persist for at least 15 years.PhDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108847/1/ajgb_1.pd

Variable X-linked recessive hypopituitarism with evidence of gonadotropin deficiency in two pre-pubertal males

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66192/1/j.1399-0004.1977.tb01309.x.pd

Efficient Quantum Circuits for Schur and Clebsch-Gordan Transforms

The Schur basis on n d-dimensional quantum systems is a generalization of the total angular momentum basis that is useful for exploiting symmetry under permutations or collective unitary rotations. We present efficient (size poly(n,d,log(1/\epsilon)) for accuracy \epsilon) quantum circuits for the Schur transform, which is the change of basis between the computational and the Schur bases. These circuits are based on efficient circuits for the Clebsch-Gordan transformation. We also present an efficient circuit for a limited version of the Schur transform in which one needs only to project onto different Schur subspaces. This second circuit is based on a generalization of phase estimation to any nonabelian finite group for which there exists a fast quantum Fourier transform.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Symmetric coupling of four spin-1/2 systems

We address the non-binary coupling of identical angular momenta based upon the representation theory for the symmetric group. A correspondence is pointed out between the complete set of commuting operators and the reference-frame-free subsystems. We provide a detailed analysis of the coupling of three and four spin-1/2 systems and discuss a symmetric coupling of four spin-1/2 systems.Comment: 20 pages, no figure

BIGRE: a low cross-talk integral field unit tailored for extrasolar planets imaging spectroscopy

Integral field spectroscopy (IFS) represents a powerful technique for the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets through high contrast imaging, since it allows to obtain simultaneously a large number of monochromatic images. These can be used to calibrate and then to reduce the impact of speckles, once their chromatic dependence is taken into account. The main concern in designing integral field spectrographs for high contrast imaging is the impact of the diffraction effects and the non-common path aberrations together with an efficient use of the detector pixels. We focus our attention on integral field spectrographs based on lenslet-arrays, discussing the main features of these designs: the conditions of appropriate spatial and spectral sampling of the resulting spectrograph's slit functions and their related cross-talk terms when the system works at the diffraction limit. We present a new scheme for the integral field unit (IFU) based on a dual-lenslet device (BIGRE), that solves some of the problems related to the classical TIGER design when used for such applications. We show that BIGRE provides much lower cross-talk signals than TIGER, allowing a more efficient use of the detector pixels and a considerable saving of the overall cost of a lenslet-based integral field spectrograph.Comment: 17 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Lensless Fourier-Transform Ghost Imaging with Classical Incoherent Light

The Fourier-Transform ghost imaging of both amplitude-only and pure-phase objects was experimentally observed with classical incoherent light at Fresnel distance by a new lensless scheme. The experimental results are in good agreement with the standard Fourier-transform of the corresponding objects. This scheme provides a new route towards aberration-free diffraction-limited 3D images with classically incoherent thermal light, which have no resolution and depth-of-field limitations of lens-based tomographic systems.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, comments are welcom