429 research outputs found
The Demand for Health Insurance among Uninsured Americans: Results of a Survey Experiment and Implications for Policy
Most existing work on the price elasticity of demand for health insurance focuses on employees' decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In the summer of 2008, we conducted a survey experiment to assess the willingness to pay for a health plan among a large sample of uninsured Americans. The experiment yields price elasticities substantially greater than those found in most previous studies. We use these results to estimate coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, with and without an individual mandate. We estimate that 39 million uninsured individuals would gain coverage and find limited evidence of adverse selection.health insurance, universal coverage, Affordable Care Act, price elasticity of demand
An Empirical Analysis of Imprisoning Drug Offenders
The number of prisoners incarcerated on drug-related offenses rose fifteen-fold between 1980 and 2000. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of the implications of that dramatic shift in public policy. We show that the increase in drug prisoners led to reductions in expected time served for other crimes, especially for less serious offenses. Reductions in time served, however, increased other crimes by no more than a few percent. Moreover, incarcerating drug offenders is found to be almost as effective in reducing violent and property crime as locking up other types of offenders. We estimate that cocaine prices are 10-15 percent higher today as a consequence of increases in drug punishment since 1985. Based on previous estimates of the price elasticity of demand for cocaine, this implies a reduction in cocaine consumed of as much as 20 percent.
Robin Hood and His Not-So-Merry Plan: Capitalization and the Self-Destruction of Texas' School Finance Equalization Plan
School finance schemes control the allocation of 30 billion a year, and is currently collapsing and likely to be abandoned. We show that the collapse was predictable. Robin Hood's design causes substantial negative capitalization, shrinking its own tax base. It relies only slightly on relatively efficient (pseudo lump sum) redistibution and heavily on high marginal tax rates. Although Robin Hood reduced the spending gap between Texas' property-poor and property-rich districts by 27,000 per pupil in property wealth. The magnitude of this loss is important: if the state had efficiently confiscated the same wealth and invested it, it would generate sufficient annual income to make all Texas schools spend at a high leval. The Robin Hood scheme is stringent but not bizarre: other states' systdms share its features to some degree. We provide estimates of the effects of school finance system parameters, which policy makers could use to design systems that are more efficient and stable.
The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap
Women are currently the majority of U.S. college students and of those receiving a bachelor%u2019s degree, but were 39 percent of undergraduates in 1960. We use three longitudinal data sets of high school graduates in 1957, 1972, and 1992 to understand the narrowing of the gender gap in college and its reversal. From 1972 to 1992 high school girls narrowed the gap with boys in math and science course taking and in achievement test scores. These variables, which we term the proximate determinants, can account for 30 to 60 percent of the relative increase in women%u2019s college completion rate. Behind these changes were several others: the future work expectations of young women increased greatly between 1968 and 1979 and the age at first marriage for college graduate women rose by 2.5 years in the 1970s, allowing them to be more serious students. The reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, was due in part to the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females.
Going Off Parole: How the Elimination of Discretionary Prison Release Affects the Social Cost of Crime
In order to lengthen prison terms, many U.S. states have limited parole boards' traditional authority to grant early releases. I develop a framework in which the welfare effects of this reform depend on (1) the elasticity of future recidivism with respect to time in prison, (2) the accuracy of boards in conditioning release dates on recidivism risk, and (3) the extent to which such conditioning encourages inmates to reform. Using micro-data from Georgia and quasi-experimental variation arising from policy shocks and institutional features of its criminal justice system, I find that longer prison terms decrease recidivism, boards assign higher-risk inmates to longer terms, and inmates' investment in rehabilitative activities falls -- and their recidivism rises -- when boards' discretion is limited. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the benefits of parole (the ability to ration prison resources based on recidivism risk and the creation of incentives) outweigh the costs (lost incapacitation due to shorter prison terms).
How does Risk-selection Respond to Risk-adjustment? Evidence from the Medicare Advantage Program
Medicare administers a traditional public fee-for-service (FFS) plan while also allowing enrolles to join government-funded private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.We model how selection and differential payments - the value of the capitation payments the firm receives to insure an individual minus the counterfactual cost of his coverage in FFS - change after the introduction of a comprehensive risk adjustment formula in 2004. Our model predicts that firm screening efforts along dimensions included in the model ("extensive-margin" selection) should fall, whereas screening efforts along dimensions excluded ("intensive-margin" selection) should increase. These endogenous responses to the risk-adjustment formula can in fact lead differential payments to increase. Using individual-level administrative data on Medicare enrollees from 1994 to 2006, we show that while MA enrollees are positively selected throughout the sample period, after risk adjustment extensive-margin selection decreases whereas intensive-margin selection increases. We find that differential payments actually rise after risk-adjustment, and estimate that they totaled $23 billion in 2006, or about six percent of total Medicare spending.Health Care Markets
Human Capital Spillovers in Families: Do Parents Learn from or Lean on their Children?
I develop a model in which a child's acquisition of a given form of human capital incentivizes adults in his household to either learn from him (if children act as teachers then adults' cost of learning the skill falls) or lean on him (if children's human capital substitutes for that of adults in household production then adults' benefit of learning the skill falls). I exploit regional variation in two shocks to children's human capital and examine the effect on adults. The rapid introduction of primary education for black children in the South during Reconstruction not only increased literacy of children but also of adults living in the same household ("learning" outweighs "leaning"). Conversely, the 1998 introduction of English immersion in California public schools appears to have increased the English skills of children but discouraged adults living with them from acquiring the language ("leaning" outweighs "learning"). Whether family members learn from or lean on each other has implications for the externalities associated with education policies.
India\u27s Wayward Children: Do Affirmative Action Laws Designed to Compensate India\u27s Historically Disadvantaged Castes Explain Low Foreign Direct Investment by the Indian Diaspora
The Demand for Health Insurance Among Uninsured Americans: Results of a Survey Experiment and Implications for Policy
Most existing work on the price elasticity of demand for health insurance focuses on employees’ decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In the summer of 2008, we conducted a survey experiment to assess the willingness to pay for a health plan among a large sample of uninsured Americans. The experiment yields price elasticities substantially greater than those found in most previous studies. We use these results to estimate coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, with and without an individual mandate. We estimate that 39 million uninsured individuals would gain coverage and find limited evidence of adverse selection.
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Using structure to explore the sequence alignment space of remote homologs
The success of protein structure modeling by homology requires an accurate sequence alignment between the query sequence and its structural template. However, sequence alignment methods based on dynamic programming (DP) are typically unable to generate accurate alignments for remote sequence homologs, thus limiting the applicability of modeling methods. A central problem is that the alignment that would produce the best structural model is generally not optimal, in the sense of having the highest DP score. Suboptimal alignment methods can be used to generate alternative alignments, but encounter difficulties given the enormous number of alignments that need to be considered. We present here a new suboptimal alignment method that relies heavily on the structure of the template. By initially aligning the query sequence to individual fragments in secondary structure elements (SSEs) and combining high-scoring fragments that pass basic tests for 'modelability', we can generate accurate alignments within a set of limited size. Chapter 1 introduces the field of protein structure prediction in general and the technique of homology modeling in particular. One subproblem of homology modeling -- the sequence to structure alignment of proteins -- is discussed in Chapter 2. Particular attention is given to descriptions of the size, density and redundancy of alignment space as well as an explanation of the dynamic programming technique and its strengths and weaknesses. The rationale for developing alternative alignment techniques and the unique difficulties of these methods are also discussed. Chapter 3 explains the methodologies of S4 -- the alternative alignment program we developed that is the main focus of this thesis. The process of finding alternative alignments with S4 involves several steps, but can be roughly divided into two main parts. First, the program looks for combinations of high-similarity fragments that pass basic rules for modelability. These 'fragment alignments' define regions of alignment space that can be searched more thoroughly with a statistical potential for a single representative for that region. The ensemble of alignments that is thus created needs to be evaluated for accuracy against the correct alignment. Current methods for doing so, as well as adjustments to those methods to better suit the realm of remote homology alignments, are discussed in Chapter 4. A novel measure for determining similarity between alignments, termed the inter-alignment distance (IAD) also is developed. This measure can be used to assess quality, but is also well-suited to finding redundant alignments within an ensemble. In Chapter 5, the results of testing S4 on a large set of targets from previous CASP experiments are analyzed. Comparisons to the optimal alignment as well as two standard alternative alignment methods, all of which use the same similarity score as S4, demonstrate that S4's improvement in accuracy is due to better sampling and filtering rather than more sophisticated scoring. Models made from S4 alignments are also shown to significantly improve upon those made from optimal alignments, especially for remote homologs. Finally, an example of a sequence to structure alignment offers an in depth explanation of how S4 finds correct alignments where the other methods do not. Chapter 6 describes a set of three experiments that paired S4 with the model evaluation tool ProsaII in a homology modeling pipeline. There were two primary objectives in this project. First, we wanted to test different methods for finding remote homologs that could serve as input to S4. And second, we evaluated the use of ProsaII as a method for discriminating between good and bad models, and thus also between homologous and non-homologous templates. The first two experiments are essentially blind searches for homologous sequences and structures. The third experiment takes remote templates returned by PSI-BLAST and uses S4 and ProsaII to find alignments and determine whether the template is a structural homolog. While S4 was able to find homologs in the blind searches, the alignment/model quality and level of discrimination was found to be higher when the input to the pipeline came from a set of structures produced by a template selection method. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the consequences of this research and suggests future directions for its application
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