In this paper, we incorporate home production into a quantitative model of unemployment, and show that realistic levels of home production have a significant impact on the optimal unemployment insurance rate. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we first show that unemployed workers spend an additional 10 hours per week in home production compared to employed workers, which is roughly a 50% increase. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics(PSID) data on housework to confirm that this difference is robust to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity between employed and unemployed adults. Moti-vated by this fact, we augment an incomplete markets model of unemployment with a home production technology, which allows unemployed workers to use their extra non-market time as partial insurance against the drop in income due to unemployment. In the benchmark model, we find that the optimal replacement rate in the presence of home production is roughly 40% of wages, which is 40% lower than the no-home production models optimal replacement rate of 65%. The 40% optimal rate is also close to the estimated rate in practice. The fact that home production makes a significant difference in the optimal unemployment insurance is robust to a variety of parameterizations and alternative model environments.

This paper studies the sensitivity of estimates on various assumptions about aggregation in modeling the school’s effect in child educational production. By controlling for the endogeneity of school qualities in the production function, we evaluate the performance of a “correct” aggregation educational production model versus simple aggregation educational production model in predicting the school resources’ effect on academic outcome. Monte Carlo simulations on different modeling specifications shows that simple aggregation of school resources over a geographic area causes serious specification errors, and thus generates biased estimates for the marginal contribution of the school resources to test scores. The two aggregation models are empirically estimated, and we find that having heterogeneity control in the production function reduces the estimated effect of school characteristics on test score. We also find that the “Correct” Aggregation model and Simple Aggregation Model perform differently in the empirical study.

The author of the article discusses the application of GIS systems for historical research as well as for presenting the research results. The fi rst part of the article contains defi nitions of GIS and a short history of the method development in the second half of the 20thcentury. Afterwards the article focuses on scant sources on the subject in the Polish language and slightly less so in English. Since an essential aspect of the issue is the software employed for the research, the author presents its short characteristics and systematization. The most interesting historical GIS projects, which may become an inspiration for other researchers in Poland, are also described in the body of the article. The author warns against excessive enthusiasm for this methodology, emphasizing that its proper application requires interdisciplinary knowledge comprising historical cartography, IT and spatial analysis. Alongside the use of GIS in space-related historical research, one should also bear in mind that it is an attractive tool for presenting the results and it may contribute to spread such results among a wider audience through the Internet.

When public opinion changes, how closely do policies follow? Central to democratic theory, the principle of popular sovereignty implies some degree of dynamic policy responsiveness: new policies should be enacted when mass opinion becomes supportive of that new policy. But, for a successful democracy, public opinion must also be attentive to what government does; citizens have to react to policy changes otherwise there is little incentive for elected officials to respond to public opinion. While dynamic models of policy responsiveness have been tested at the national level, much less is known about the American states. This is an important shortcoming, particularly in light of evidence that state public opinion is directly responsible for policy differences across the fifty states. Moreover, because states differ in their institutional and political contexts, testing models of dynamic responsiveness at the state level provides many opportunities to specify the conditions when policy responsiveness is higher or lower. I advance our knowledge about dynamic policy responsiveness at the sub-national level by measuring the longitudinal variation in state public opinion on different policy areas and linking these measures to various policy outputs at the state level. Specifically, I show that multilevel regression coupled with imputation and post-stratification can be used to measure public opinion over time when augmented by a small (e.g., three year) moving average. I use this approach to estimate yearly state public opinion on global attitudes (e.g., party identification and ideology) as well as specific attitudes (e.g., the death penalty, abortion, education spending, welfare spending, and smoking bans). I then use these measures to explore the dynamic properties of state public opinion and to test models of policy responsiveness at the sub-national level. In regard to the former, I find that the dynamic pattern of public opinion varies across issues. For instance, preferences towards the death penalty, welfare spending, and anti-smoking legislation are dynamic with heterogeneous iv trends, preferences towards education spending are dynamic with homogeneous trends, and abortion attitudes are fairly stable. Through various time series analyses, I find that state opinion plays a critical role in policy changes at the sub-national level for three issue areas: education, welfare, and antismoking legislation. Moreover, I provide additional evidence that the impact of public opinion on policy is causal. To give just one example, I estimate that if support for education spending increases by three percentage points, spending per classroom increases by over $500 immediately (assuming 25 students per classroom). State opinion also plays a large role in whether a state adopts a new policy, such as a smoking ban in restaurants. I also find that the causal relationship between public opinion and policy is a two-way street, although how opinion responds to policy changes depends on the issue. For education and welfare, policy changes exhibited a negative relationship on public opinion, albeit, only in the long term. On the other hand, attitudes towards anti-smoking legislation become more supportive as states enact additional restrictions. These analyses suggest that state opinion responds in rational and reasonable ways to policy changes. The broader impacts of the study are embodied in the original dataset that is publicly available, along with the details of the methodology used to generate and validate dynamic measures of state public opinion. The methods of estimation can be extended to measure other preferences at the state level over time, as well as other attitudes such as tolerance, trust, efficacy or confidence which may also exhibit over time change across states.

Between August and November 2009, the Urban Institute and Social Sciences Research Solutions conducted a survey of households in the District of Columbia for the DC Department of Health Care Finance. The 2009 DC Health Insurance Survey (DC-HIS) includes interviews with 4,717 households. The sample covered only non-institutionalized residents and did not include homeless residents. The survey used a combination of random digit dial (RDD) telephone and address-based sampling in order to contact households with and without landline telephones. The combined response rate was 34.1 percent. The survey data was analyzed by the Urban Institute.1 In this brief, we present estimates of health insurance coverage among District residents and explore differences in the characteristics of nonelderly adult residents (ages 18 to 64) with employer-sponsored insurance and those with public insurance coverage using data from the 2009 DC-HIS.

This data brief is the fourth in a series that profiles childrenof immigrants using up-to-date census data andother sources.1 The first brief highlighted the fastgrowth of the immigrant population and important demographictrends. The second described the family circumstancesof children of immigrants, and the third highlightedthe circumstances of young children age 0 to 8. The currentbrief focuses on immigrant families incomes, economic wellbeing,and use of public benefits.

This paper estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on adult health outcomes and educational attainment. I utilize an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a change in the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states. Identification is achieved by the fact that different birth cohorts were exposed to different degrees to the original formula and the new formula, along with the fact that the change of the formula affected states differentially by per capita income. Participation in the program as a child appears to have few long-run effects on health, but the effects on educational attainment are sizable. These results may suggest that subsidized lunches induced children to attend school but displaced food consumption from other sources. Alternatively, the program may have had short-run health effects that dissipated over time but that facilitated higher educational attainment. (C) 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Micronutrient deficiencies that reduce the health of children risk impeding human capitalinvestments critical for economic development. While the developed world has largely eliminatedthe most pernicious of these deficiencies, they remain widespread in poorer countries. This studylooks at the effects of the introduction of fortified milk, which contributed to the decline of one suchmicronutrient deficiency in the United States: vitamin D. At the time of vitamin D milksintroduction in the early 1930s, vitamin D deficiency, manifested most prominently in the form ofrickets, affected large numbers of children. Using previously unexamined historical sources, Icompile and introduce an original dataset describing the rollout of vitamin D fortified milk acrossthe United States throughout the decade. I then use this dataset to examine the impact of fortifiedmilk on schooling. The gradual expansion of vitamin D milk, along with natural variation insusceptibility to vitamin D deficiency due to geographic and racial factors, permits the identificationof fortifications impact from other regional and temporal trends. Using a difference-in-differencein-difference (DDD) estimator, I find that the availability of vitamin D milk increased schooling forthe group at highest risk for vitamin D deficiency: African-American children from cities with lowsunlight. A variety of sensitivity tests supports the validity of the results. They indicate that largescale food fortification initiatives merit further consideration from economists and policy makersconcerned with achieving development outcomes.

Various attempts have been made to explain the sources of long-term discriminatory activity-behavior which does not seem to be profit-maximizing, and yet persists in the face of market competition. Research interest has focused on the effect of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and whether it has served to decrease employment discrimination or merely exposed firms to costly litigation. Following in the footsteps of Becker (1957), this paper develops a model of employment discrimination that arises as the result of consumer preference as opposed to employer or employee tastes. It predicts that many or all firms in a local industry will conspire to halt discriminatory activity simultaneously during periods of rising costs to discrimination, effectively forming a type of cartel. I perform an empirical test based on employment data collected in the period following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The results provide suggestive evidence of the model's validity, and confirm the importance of viewing the question of discrimination through a regional lens.

This brief highlights the life circumstances of youngchildren age 0 to 8 growing up in immigrant families.

Racial and ethnic inequality in homeownership remains stubbornly wide, even net of differences across groups in household-level sociodemographic characteristics. This article investigates the role of contextual forces in structuring disparate access to homeownership among minorities. Specifically, I combine household- and metropolitan-level census data to assess the impact of metropolitan housing stock, minority composition, and residential segregation on black and Hispanic housing tenure. The measure of minority composition combines both the size and rate of growth of the coethnic population to assess the impact on homeownership inequality of recent trends in population redistribution, particularly the increase in black migration to the South and dramatic dispersal of Hispanics outside traditional areas of settlement. Results indicate remarkable similarity between blacks and Hispanics with respect to the spatial and contextual infl uences on homeownership. For both groups, homeownership is higher and inequality with whites is smaller in metropolitan areas with an established coethnic base and in areas in which their group is less residentially segregated. Implications of recent trends in population redistribution for the future of minority homeownership are discussed

A direct consequence of imposing a ceiling on the price of a good for which secondary markets do not exist, is that, when there is excess demand, the good will not be allocated to the buyers who value it the most. The resulting allocative cost has been discussed in the literature as a potentially important component of the total welfare loss from price ceilings, but its practical importance has yet to be established empirically. In this paper, we address this question using data for the U.S. residential market for natural gas which was subject to price ceilings during 1954-1989 and is well suited for such an empirical analysis. Using a household-level, discrete-continuous model of natural gas demand, we estimate that the allocative cost in the U.S. residential market for natural gas averaged $3.6 billion annually, nearly tripling previous estimates of the net welfare loss to U.S. consumers. We quantify the evolution of this allocative cost and its geographical distribution during the postwar period, and we highlight implications of our analysis for the regulation of other markets.

Anticipating the future of population’s housing choices is difficult when structural trends are evolving fast. This paper proposes an empirical method that uses housing options of those who have recently moved in order to assess how the total housing tenure distribution would be in the near future. This methodology is able to figure out consolidated dynamic trends of the aggregate tenure structure and, at the same time, it takes into account cyclical or sudden swings. It is best applied to analyse future tenure of the more mobile age groups, such as young people, but in contexts of high residential mobility, it may also be used for other age groups.

Created in 1965, Medicaid is a joint state and federalprogram that provides health insurance to low-incomeindividuals who would not otherwise be able to obtaincoverage. Medicaid is administered and paid for bystate governments with the help of federal matchingfunds to provide health insurance for these residents.States determine the financial and non-financialeligibility requirements for their Medicaid programs,causing Medicaid eligibility rules to differ from state tostate.

We exploit the discontinuity in age when children start kindergarten generated by state eligibility laws to examine whether relative age is a significant determinant of ADHD diagnosis and treatment. Using a regression discontinuity model and exact dates of birth, we find that children born just after the cutoff, who are relatively old-for-grade, have a significantly lower incidence of ADHD diagnosis and treatment compared with similar children born just before the cutoff date, who are relatively young-for-grade. Since ADHD is an underlying neurological problem where incidence rates should not change dramatically from one birth date to the next, these results suggest that age relative to peers in class, and the resulting differences in behavior, directly affects a child's probability of being diagnosed with and treated for ADHD.

We use detailed microeconomic data to investigate why aggregate residential electricity consumption in California has been flat since 1980. Using unique micro data, we document the role that household demographics and ideology play in determining electricity demand. We show that building codes have been effective for homes built after 1983. We find that houses built in the 1970s and early 1980s were energy inefficient relative to houses built before 1960 because the price of electricity at the time of construction was low. Employing our regression estimates, we construct an aggregate residential electricity consumption time series index from 1980 to 2006. We show that certain micro determinants of household electricity consumption such as the phase in of building codes explain Californias flat consumption while other factors (such as rising incomes and increased new home sizes) go in the opposite direction. Because homes are long-lived durables, we have not yet seen the full impact of building codes on Californias electricity consumption.

What is the appropriate scale for port governance in North America? By standardizing freight technology, containerization has transformed freight trans- portation from a segmented, mode-specific, and regional system into a seamless, intermodal, and global system. The drive to provide global reach, deregula- tion, and increasing capital costs have concentrated carrier ownership in ocean shipping. These carriers have subsequently expanded the effective area of pro- duction for freight delivery by adopting continental strategies for freight move- ments. This scaling up of organization has permitted carriers to overcome ports historical geographical monopoly over their hinterlands and initiate competitive bidding to host the carriers terminal operations. This dissertation examines how this shift led to a particular competition between the ports of New York- New Jersey, Baltimore, and Halifax to host a Maersk-Sea Land terminal in the late 1990s.