Labor and Transfer Income and Older Women's Work: Estimates From the United States

This paper deals with the effects of labor and transfer incomes as determinants of older women's labor force participation. It examines the responsiveness of women aged 48-62 to the level of income available from both work and public transfer programs when deciding between work and nonwork options. The main focus is on whether the availability and generosity of disability-related transfers affects the labor supply of these women. A maximum-likelihood model is estimated separately for heads of household and wives. The results suggest income opportunities have significant effect only on the work choices of wives. The responsiveness to the availability and generosity of public transfers is largest among older, disabled women who have low expected earnings.

Screening disability insurance applications

This paper investigates the effects of stricter screening of disability insurance applications. A large-scale experiment was setup where in two of the 26 Dutch regions case workers of the disability insurance administration were instructed to screen applications more stringently. The empirical results show that stricter screening reduces long-term sickness absenteeism and disability insurance applications. We find evidence for direct effects of stricter screening on work resumption during the period of sickness absence and for self-screening by potential disability insurance applicants. Stricter screening seems to improve targeting efficiency, without inducing negative spillover effects to the inflow into unemployment insurance. The costs of stricter screening are only a small fraction of the monetary benefits.Disability insurance; experiment; policy evaluation; sickness absenteeism; self-screening

Curing the Dutch Disease: Lessons for United States Disability Policy

In the 1990s, the United States reformed welfare programs targeted on single mothers and dramatically reduced their benefit receipt while increasing their employment and economic wellbeing. Despite increasing calls to do the same for working age people with disabilities in the U.S., disability cash transfer program rolls continue to grow as their employment rates fall and their economic well-being stagnates. In contrast to the failure to reform United States disability policy, the Netherlands, once considered to have the most out of control disability program among OECD nations, initiated reforms in 2002 that have dramatically reduced their disability cash transfer rolls, while maintaining a strong but less generous social minimum safety net for all those who do not work. Here we review disability program growth in the United States and the Netherlands, link it to changes in their disability policies and show that while difficult to achieve, fundamental disability reform is possible. We argue that shifts in SSI policies that focus on better integrating working age men and women with disabilities into the work force along the lines of those implemented for single mothers in the 1990s, together with SSDI program changes that better integrate private and public disability insurance programs along the lines of the reforms in the Netherlands, offer the best hope of improving their employment rates and economic well-being as well as reducing SSDI/SSI program growth.

Correcting for Selection Bias and Missing Response in Regression using Privileged Information

When estimating a regression model, we might have data where some labels are missing, or our data might be biased by a selection mechanism. When the response or selection mechanism is ignorable (i.e., independent of the response variable given the features) one can use off-the-shelf regression methods; in the nonignorable case one typically has to adjust for bias. We observe that privileged data (i.e. data that is only available during training) might render a nonignorable selection mechanism ignorable, and we refer to this scenario as Privilegedly Missing at Random (PMAR). We propose a novel imputation-based regression method, named repeated regression, that is suitable for PMAR. We also consider an importance weighted regression method, and a doubly robust combination of the two. The proposed methods are easy to implement with most popular out-of-the-box regression algorithms. We empirically assess the performance of the proposed methods with extensive simulated experiments and on a synthetically augmented real-world dataset. We conclude that repeated regression can appropriately correct for bias, and can have considerable advantage over weighted regression, especially when extrapolating to regions of the feature space where response is never observed

Steklov problem on differential forms

In this paper we study spectral properties of Dirichlet-to-Neumann map on differential forms obtained by a slight modification of the definition due to Belishev and Sharafutdinov. The resulting operator $\Lambda$ is shown to be self-adjoint on the subspace of coclosed forms and to have purely discrete spectrum there.We investigate properies of eigenvalues of $\Lambda$ and prove a Hersch-Payne-Schiffer type inequality relating products of those eigenvalues to eigenvalues of Hodge Laplacian on the boundary. Moreover, non-trivial eigenvalues of $\Lambda$ are always at least as large as eigenvalues of Dirichlet-to-Neumann map defined by Raulot and Savo. Finally, we remark that a particular case of $p$-forms on the boundary of $2p+2$-dimensional manifold shares a lot of important properties with the classical Steklov eigenvalue problem on surfaces.Comment: 18 page

Powerful Water Masers in Active Galactic Nuclei

Luminous water maser emission in the 6_(16)-5_(23) line at 22 GHz has been detected from two dozen galaxies. In all cases the emission is confined to the nucleus and has been found only in AGN, in particular, in Type 2 Seyferts and LINERs. I argue that most of the observed megamaser sources are powered by X-ray irradiation of dense gas by the central engine. After briefly reviewing the physics of these X-Ray Dissociation Regions, I discuss in detail the observations of the maser disk in NGC 4258, its implications, and compare alternative models for the maser emission. I then discuss the observations of the other sources that have been imaged with VLBI to date, and how they do or do not fit into the framework of a thin, rotating disk, as in NGC 4258. Finally, I briefly discuss future prospects, especially the possibility of detecting other water maser transitions.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figures. Refereed and greatly expanded version of my review talk at the ASA meeting in Lorne, July 2001. To appear in Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australi

A Cautionary Tale of European Disability Policies: Lessons for the United States

Variations in the size of the population receiving disability payments across countries cannot be explained by simple differences in health. Rather, the process to disability is shaped by both social and medical factors. When governments ignore this reality, a policy generated disability epidemic is possible. This paper compares disability policies in The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and the United States. It argues that the extraordinary increase in Dutch disability rolls in the 1970s was caused by a general government policy to reduce official unemployment. And that by the end of the 1980s, this policy had left Holland with a hidden unemployment rate that was twice its official rate and three times the unemployment rates in the United States and Germany

Rapid reduction of sigma(1)-Receptor binding and F-18-FDG uptake in rat gliomas after in vivo treatment with doxorubicin

sigma-Receptors are strongly overexpressed in most rodent and human tumors and are proliferation markers. To evaluate the potential of a radiolabeled sigma(1)-ligand for therapy monitoring, we compared early changes of C-11-1-(3,4-dimethoxyphenethyl)-4-(3-phenylpropyl)piperazine (C-11-SA4503) binding and F-18-FDG uptake in gliomas after in vivo chemotherapy. Methods: C6 cells (2.5 x 10(6)) were subcutaneously injected into the right shoulder of male Wistar rats. After 7 cl, the tumor volume was 0.60 +/- 0.08 cm(3). Animals then received either saline or doxorubicin (8 mg/kg, intraperitoneally). One control and 1 treated rat were imaged simultaneously, 24 or 48 h after treatment, under pentobarbital anesthesia. Rodents (n = 20) were scanned first with C-11-SA4503 (25 MBq, intravenously) followed more than 100 min afterward by 18F-FDG (20 MBq, intravenously), using a dedicated small-animal PET camera (60-min protocol, tumors in the field of view). Tumor homogenates were prepared and subjected to sigma-receptor assays. The biodistribution of 18F-FDG was assessed. Results: Tumors appeared 4-5 d after inoculation and grew exponentially. No significant reduction of tumor growth was visible within 48 h after doxorubicin treatment. Both PET tracers visualized the tumors and showed reduced uptake after chemotherapy (C-11-SA4503: 26.5% +/- 6.5% at 24 h, 26.5% +/- 7.5% at 48 h; 18F-FDG: 22.6% +/- 3.2% at 24 h, 27.4% +/- 3.2% at 48 h; ex vivo F-18-FDG: 22.4% +/- 5.4% at 24 h, 31.7% +/- 12.7% at 48 h). sigma(1)-Receptor density in treated tumors was also reduced (from 172 +/- 35 to 125 +/- 28 fmol/mg of protein). Conclusion: Both C-11-SA4503 binding and 18F-FDG uptake declined in gliomas after chemotherapy. Decreased binding of C-11-SA4503 corresponded to a loss of (sigma(1)-receptors from the tumors. Changes in tracer uptake preceded the morphologic changes by at least 48 h