The decades‐long rise of economic inequality in the U.S. has led to a growing body of literature examining the role of policy in shaping income differences. We examine one such policy: occupational licensing regulations. Licensing can restrict employment and reduce market competition, which can then inflate wages for those in licensed professions. Existing research demonstrates that occupational licensure

Reforms that reduce spousal support after divorce are generally thought to reduce the bargaining power of alimony recipients as well as their incentives to participate in the traditional model of household specialization. Using the U.S. Time Use Survey and exploiting a series of recent reforms in several U.S. states that reduced the rights of eligible spouses, we find that wives surprised by the reforms

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Goldhaber, D., & Goodman Young, M. (2024). Course grades as a signal of student achievement: Evidence of grade inflation before and after COVID-19. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 43, 1270–1282. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22618 In the final paragraph of the “Evolution in Grades and Test Results Over Time” section, the text “Thirty-one percent to 39% (depending on subject) of Level 1 students

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The United States deported nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants under the Secure Communities (SC) interior immigration enforcement program between 2008 and 2014. This paper uses variation in the intensity of deportations across immigrants’ country of origin and city of residence to assess the labor market consequences of SC on foreign‐born women. We find no effect on the total number of employed

Since 2014, millions of Venezuelans have fled to neighboring countries. There is only one accessible land crossing along the Brazil–Venezuela border (Pacaraima) and the Brazilian highway system limits migrants to one route through the Amazon for almost 1000 km. Using this event as a quasi‐random treatment, we find that refugee migration increased malaria incidence in Pacaraima, but this was limited

The last few decades have seen rapid growth in the size of the Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (VADC) program, which provides tax‐free cash benefits to veterans with disabilities connected to military service. Given this recent growth, VADC is on pace to eclipse Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) to become the largest U.S. disability program by expenditures. Although there are decades

On the labor markets, recent decades were characterized by structural supply‐side reforms in many countries. Following its hawkish reforms from the 2000s, Germany has recently made a dovish turnaround. Conditions in basic income support for unemployed became more generous, combined with a focus on qualification and development. Before, a temporary moratorium on sanctions had been imposed, providing

Many public service organizations engage in commercialization, or market‐oriented strategies designed to generate non‐public revenue for the organization. Managers and policymakers sometimes choose to “buy” these commercialization strategies by setting up separate organizations, ostensibly to avoid inefficiencies associated with coordinating market activity within an organization designed for public

The 2014 Medicaid expansion excluded Americans who were 65 years old and older, but they could still be affected via spillover effects. Using Medicare administrative data, we test for spillovers in Medicare spending and Medicaid coverage among low‐income Medicare beneficiaries. We analyze two cohorts: those under 65 in 2014, who could have been induced by the expansion to take up Medicaid before joining

Peck, L.R. (2024). Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program by Christopher Bosso. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023, 257 pp., $24.95 (US) (Hardcover). ISBN 978–0520392816. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 43(2), 644–648. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22576 The book review misspelled the book author's name. The author is Christpher Bosso (not

The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of the socioeconomic effects of earthquakes. We begin with a thorough literature review. Following this, we assess policy measures taken in response to major earthquakes, drawing on existing research to formulate insights and recommendations that policymakers can use to effectively navigate the risks in the aftermath of such disasters.

We conducted a randomized control trial to study the impact of two information messages aimed at reducing the stigma associated with mental illness on the willingness to seek mental health care among adults in Nepal. The first intervention shares information about the prevalence of mental health issues and the efficacy of treatment. The second intervention shares information about the mental health

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We build a vehicle purchase and disposal model to analyze a policy that links a new electric vehicle (EV) purchase subsidy with a used gasoline vehicle scrappage requirement. We evaluate the policy based on changes in sales, scrappage, subsidy dollars spent, and emissions reductions. We find that linking a purchase subsidy with a scrappage requirement is expected to result in fewer new EV sales and

In 2012, the Obama administration issued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by executive order. Since then, more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived as children have benefited from renewable 2‐year reprieves from deportation and work permits. In 2017, the Trump administration announced it would end DACA—an announcement immediately followed by court challenges. We

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W. Bradford Wilcox and Alan Hawkins (hereafter, WH) introduce a marriage paradox: in the United States, the benefits to marriage are increasing and its social value remains high, but people are increasingly disinclined to get married. Why? My response is that the gains to marriage are uneven and uncertain, and for today's adults, getting and staying married is largely predicated on costly prior personal

There is no longer any question that men, women, children, and even communities are better off, on average, when marriage grounds and guides the context of family life (Kearney, 2023; Wilcox, 2024). In communities and households where marriage is the norm, for instance, the American Dream is stronger (Chetty et al. 2014; Wilcox, 2024), rates of child poverty are lower and college graduation higher

A central aspect of poverty measurement is identifying the people and places experiencing financial hardships. This paper explores this relationship using the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Financial Well‐Being Scale, which reflects individuals’ self‐assessments of financial challenges. Using this measure, for every 1 percentage point increase in a state's official poverty rate for working‐age

Does marriage improve well-being for parents and children? It can certainly appear that way. In the contemporary United States, children who grow up with married parents perform better in school, enjoy better physical and emotional health, more often begin and finish college, and enter stable employment at higher rates compared to peers who grow up in other family arrangements (Brown, 2010). Married

Marriage has fallen upon hard times in the United States in the last 6 decades. Demographically, in the wake of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ongoing decline in the marriage rate, this social institution has lost significant ground as the anchor of adulthood and foundation of family life (Cherlin, 2009; Wilcox, 2024). Culturally, support for the values and virtues that sustain

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Is public housing bad for children? The net effect of moving into public housing on children's academic outcomes is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on changes to neighborhood and school characteristics. Drawing on detailed individual‐level longitudinal data on New York City public school students, we exploit plausibly random variation in the precise timing of entry into public housing

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The accountability of police to the public is imperative for a functioning democracy. The opinions of police executives—pivotal actors for implementing oversight policies—are an understudied, critical component of successful reform efforts. We use a pre‐registered survey experiment administered to all U.S. municipal police chiefs and county sheriffs to assess whether police executives’ attitudes towards

There is widespread speculation and some evidence that grades and grading standards changed during the pandemic, making higher grades relatively easier to achieve. In this paper we use longitudinal data from students in Washington State to investigate middle and high school grades in math, science, and English pre- and post-pandemic. Our descriptive analysis of the data reveals that—in accordance with

There is growing concern that some public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this issue in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for‐profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charters’ reliance on for‐profit operators affects student achievement and attendance. The

When people lose their job, labor market programs help them get back to work. But administrative burdens can hinder enrollment in such programs. We report results from a mixed-method project to increase enrollment in employment services during the first 3 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we interviewed jobseekers and frontline staff to uncover administrative burdens. Second we worked with staff

Reducing socioeconomic health inequalities is a key goal of most health systems. A challenge in this regard is that healthcare providers may have incentives to avoid or undertreat patients who are relatively costly to treat. Due to the socioeconomic gradient in health, individuals with low socioeconomic status (SES) are especially likely to be negatively affected by such attempts. To counter these

This paper estimates the effect of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a temporary legalization policy, on the incomes and property ownership of Salvadoran recipients over 20 years. We compare likely undocumented Salvadoran immigrants eligible for TPS to a control group of likely undocumented immigrants ineligible for TPS in an event study design that allows us to observe the policy's effects over 2

We examine how physicians’ practice locations are affected by Medicaid expansions. We focus on the dramatic Medicaid eligibility expansions for pregnant women that took place between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. Following a recently‐developed estimation strategy, we identify the change in OB/GYN supply due to the expansions in an event‐study framework. We find that OB/GYN counts per capita

School districts serving newcomer English Learners (ELs) generally offer short-term intensive English programs designed to teach foundational language skills and guide students’ integration into the U.S. school system. Despite the growing popularity of newcomer programs, however, there is limited rigorous evidence of their efficacy. In this paper, we present evidence on the causal effect of an intensive

There is no shortage of proposals for U.S. health insurance reform. In our recent book, We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Einav & Finkelstein, 2023), we offered one more. It grew out of our internal debates over healthcare reform, between two academic economists who work (often together) on U.S. health policy but have not yet been involved in making that policy. We started by trying

We are pleased that Jason Furman responded to our proposal by recommending that the book (on which we base the proposal) should be “required reading by specialists and non-specialists alike” and noting that he “would be perfectly happy if [our] proposal were adopted.” Both comments are extremely gratifying to receive from a skilled and insightful economist, and particularly from someone who was involved—at

We experimentally analyze the effects of an intervention to induce the renewal of identification cards on access to a government social program in Panamá. On‐time renewals and access to government transfers increased by 10 and 3.6 percentage points, respectively. Simple reminders about expiration dates generated larger effects than also enabling individuals to renew their documents through an online

Many U.S. states and countries around the world use non-monetary sanctions, including public disclosure, license suspension, and withholding of other government-provided benefits or privileges, to encourage tax compliance. Little is known about the effectiveness of these programs. Using administrative tax microdata from California's “Top 500” program, we study whether notices warning of the imminent

Population registries are the gateway to public services, benefits, and rights. However, despite clear formal rules and procedures, people eligible for registration may still face administrative burdens in obtaining access. In this article, we study the case of the municipal registration of people who experience homelessness in Belgium and the Netherlands—a group that typically suffers from administrative

Previous studies have confirmed the causal effect of performance information on citizen satisfaction, but they were primarily conducted in survey experimental settings that featured hypothetical and abstract scenarios and primed respondents to look at certain aspects of performance information. Whether the causal effects hold in the real world, which is a much more complex information environment,