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Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Impact factor: 1.541 5-Year impact factor: 2.153 Print ISSN: 0276-8739 Online ISSN: 1520-6688 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)

Subjects: Economics, Public Administration

Most recent papers:

  • The Effects of Tulsa's Pre‐K Program on Middle School Student Performance.
    William T. Gormley,, Deborah Phillips, Sara Anderson.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. August 23, 2017
    As states have upgraded their commitment to pre‐K education over the past two decades, questions have arisen. Critics argue that program effects are likely to fade out or disappear over time, while supporters contend that program effects are likely to persist under certain conditions. Using data from Tulsa Public Schools, three neighboring school districts, and the state of Oklahoma, and propensity score weighting, we estimate the effects of Tulsa's universal, school‐based pre‐K program on multiple measures of academic progress for middle school students. We find enduring effects on math achievement test scores, enrollment in honors courses, and grade retention for students as a whole, and similar effects for certain subgroups. We conclude that some positive effects of a high‐quality pre‐K program are discernible as late as middle school.
    August 23, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22023   open full text
  • Scraping by: Income and Program Participation After the Loss of Extended Unemployment Benefits.
    Jesse Rothstein, Robert G. Valletta.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. August 03, 2017
    Many Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients do not find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, even when benefits are extended during recessions. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panel data covering the 2001 and 2007 to 2009 recessions and their aftermaths, we identify individuals whose jobless spells outlasted their UI benefits (exhaustees) and examine household income, program participation, and health‐related outcomes during the six months following UI exhaustion. For the average exhaustee, the loss of UI benefits is only slightly offset by increased participation in other safety net programs (e.g., food stamps), and family poverty rates rise substantially. Self‐reported disability also rises following UI exhaustion. These patterns do not vary dramatically across household demographic groups, broad income level prior to job loss, or the two business cycles. The results highlight the unique, important role of UI in the U.S. social safety net.
    August 03, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22018   open full text
  • Do Higher Minimum Wages Benefit Health? Evidence From the UK.
    Otto Lenhart.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. August 03, 2017
    This study examines the link between minimum wages and health outcomes by using the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in the United Kingdom in 1999 as an exogenous variation of earned income. A test for health effects by using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey for a period of ten years was conducted. It was found that the NMW significantly improved several measures of health, including self‐reported health status and the presence of health conditions. When examining potential mechanisms, it was shown that changes in health behaviors, leisure expenditures, and financial stress can explain the observed improvements in health.
    August 03, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22006   open full text
  • Child Health in Elementary School Following California's Paid Family Leave Program.
    Shirlee Lichtman‐Sadot, Neryvia Pillay Bell.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 25, 2017
    We evaluate changes in elementary school children health outcomes following the introduction of California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, which provided parents with paid time off following the birth of a child. Our health outcomes—overweight, ADHD, and hearing‐related problems—are characterized by diagnosis rates that only pick up during early elementary school. Moreover, our health outcomes have been found to be negatively linked with many potential implications of extended maternity leave—increased breastfeeding, prompt medical checkups at infancy, reduced prenatal stress, and reduced non‐parental care during infancy. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) within a difference‐in‐differences framework, our results suggest improvements in health outcomes among California elementary school children following PFL's introduction. Furthermore, the improvements are driven by children from less advantaged backgrounds, which is consistent with the notion that California's PFL had the greatest effect on leave‐taking duration after childbirth mostly for less advantaged mothers who previously could not afford to take unpaid leave.
    July 25, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22012   open full text
  • Emission Standards, Public Transit, and Infant Health.
    Nicole S. Ngo.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 21, 2017
    Transit buses are an integral part of urban life. They reduce externalities generated from private vehicles and increase geographic mobility. However, unlike most private vehicles in the United States, they use diesel fuel and emit higher amounts of toxic pollutants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set emission standards for transit buses starting in 1988 that have been continually updated, but their public health and economic impacts are unclear due to scarce emissions data. I construct a novel panel dataset for the New York City (NYC) Transit bus fleet between 1990 and 2009 and examine the impact of bus pollution on infant health by using bus vintage as a proxy for emissions. I exploit the variation in vintage as older buses are retired and replaced with newer, lower‐emitting buses forced to adhere to stricter emission standards. I then assign maternal exposure to bus vintage at the census block level. Findings suggest that maternal exposure to the oldest, unregulated buses is associated with modest reductions in birth weight and gestational age relative to newer buses that abide by emissions policies. I then conduct a back‐of‐the‐envelope cost‐benefit calculation and find net economic benefits of $53.3 million resulting from improved emission standards for the 2009 birth cohort in NYC. Since the treatment in this study clearly maps to federal emissions policies, these results are the first to provide credible evidence that transit bus emission standards had a positive effect on infant health.
    July 21, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22015   open full text
  • The Economic Impact of Smoke‐Free Policies on Restaurants, Cafés, and Bars: Panel Data Estimates From European Countries.
    Luca Pieroni, Luca Salmasi.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 19, 2017
    In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the economic outcomes of restaurants, bars, and cafés have been affected by the introduction of anti‐smoking regulations in Europe. We use an unexploited panel database to collect a comprehensive set of information on financial indicators regarding the balance sheets of private and public companies in various economic sectors. The results show that smoke‐free policies did not significantly affect the firms’ economic performance, irrespective of the balance sheet indicators analyzed. Moreover, the results are robust to various econometric specifications and suggest that the recent enforcement of anti‐smoking legislation in Europe has improved public health without a corresponding negative impact on revenues and employment in the hospitality industry.
    July 19, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22016   open full text
  • Worth the Wait? The Effect of Early Term Birth on Maternal and Infant Health.
    Kasey Buckles, Melanie Guldi.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 19, 2017
    Early term birth is defined as birth at 37 or 38 weeks gestation. While infants born early term are not considered premature, the medical literature suggests that they have an increased risk of serious adverse health outcomes compared to infants born at term (39 or 40 weeks). Despite these known harms, we document a rise in early term births in the United States from 1989 to the mid‐2000s, followed by a decline in recent years. We posit that the recent decline in early term births has been driven by changes in medical practice advocated by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, programs such as the March of Dimes’ “Worth the Wait” campaign, and by Medicaid policy. We first show that this pattern cannot be attributed to changes in the demographic composition of mothers, and provide some evidence that efforts to reduce early term elective deliveries (EEDs) through Medicaid policy were effective. We next exploit county‐level variation in the timing of these changes in medical practice to examine the effect of early term inductions (our proxy for EEDs) on infant and maternal health. We find that early term inductions lower birth weights and increase the risks of precipitous labor, birth injury, and required ventilation. Our results suggest that reductions in early term inductions can explain about one‐third of the overall increase in birth weights between 2010 and 2013 for births at 37 weeks gestation and above.
    July 19, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22014   open full text
  • U.S. Child Safety Seat Laws: Are they Effective, and Who Complies?
    Lauren E. Jones, Nicolas R. Ziebarth.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 24, 2017
    This paper assesses the effectiveness of child safety seat laws in the United States. Over the past 35 years, these laws have steadily increased mandatory child safety seat restraint ages. We exploit state‐year level variation in the age until which children are required to ride in child safety seats to estimate triple difference models using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 1975 to 2011. Our findings show that increasing the age thresholds is effective in increasing the actual age of children in safety seats. Across the child‐age distribution, restraint rates increase by between 10 and 30 percentage points or by between 50 and 170 percent, in the long run. We also estimate the impact of the child safety seat laws on the likelihood that a child dies in a fatal accident. We find that the laws saved up to 39 children per year. Finally, we find that the laws primarily induce compliant parents to switch from traditional seatbelt use to child safety seat use, with only small effects among parents who do not restrain their children.
    May 24, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.22004   open full text
  • Presidential Prescriptions for State Policy: Obama's Race to the Top Initiative.
    William G. Howell, Asya Magazinnik.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 22, 2017
    With increasing frequency, U.S. presidents have orchestrated relations between federal and state governments. A defining feature of this “executive federalism” is a pragmatic willingness to both borrow from and reconstitute very different types of past federalisms. A case in point is President Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, which sought to stimulate the adoption of specific education reforms in state governments around the country through a series of highly prescriptive but entirely voluntary policy competitions. This paper evaluates the results of such efforts. To do so, it draws on four original data sets: a nationally representative survey of state legislators, an analysis of State of the State speeches, another of state applications to the competitions themselves, and finally, an inventory of state policymaking trends in a range of education policies that were awarded under the competition. This paper then relies upon a variety of identification strategies to gauge the influence of RttT on the nation's education policy landscape. Taken as a whole the evidence suggests that RttT, through both direct and indirect means, augmented the production of state policies that were central components of the president's education agenda.
    May 22, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21986   open full text
  • Effects of ACA Medicaid Expansions on Health Insurance Coverage and Labor Supply.
    Robert Kaestner, Bowen Garrett, Jiajia Chen, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Caitlyn Fleming.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 11, 2017
    We examined the effect of the expansion of Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act on health insurance coverage and labor supply of low‐educated and low‐income adults. We found that the Medicaid expansions were associated with large increases in Medicaid coverage, for example, 50 percent among childless adults, and corresponding decreases in the proportion uninsured. There was relatively little change in private insurance coverage, although the expansions tended to decrease such coverage slightly. In terms of labor supply, estimates indicated that the Medicaid expansions had little effect on work effort despite the substantial changes in health insurance coverage. Most estimates suggested that the expansions increased work effort, although not significantly.
    May 11, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21993   open full text
  • Why Do Foundations Follow the Law? Evidence from Adoption of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.
    Brian Galle.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 11, 2017
    Employing a large panel of over one million firm‐years, I find evidence consistent with widespread compliance with law among U.S. private foundations despite the absence of many formal deterrence mechanisms. The research design exploits rolling state adoption of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, which lifted some existing limits on firm spending for a fraction of firms within each state. This allows the use of triple‐difference estimates that control for changes in local norms and economic conditions. UPMIFA increases firm spending, on average, implying that firms were complying with the pre‐UPMIFA regime. Interacting the triple‐difference factors with other predictors of compliance reveals no correlation between compliance and enforcement intensity, but some evidence that compliance is correlated with firm culture and reliance on accountants. These findings have potentially important implications for the governance of charitable organizations, and may speak more generally to drivers of compliance among other organizational forms.
    April 11, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21987   open full text
  • The Impact of Prenatal Exposure to Power Plant Emissions on Birth Weight: Evidence from a Pennsylvania Power Plant Located Upwind of New Jersey.
    Muzhe Yang, Rhea A. Bhatta, Shin‐Yi Chou, Cheng‐I Hsieh.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 04, 2017
    To examine the infant health impact of prenatal exposure to power plant emissions, we draw scientific evidence on the impacted region downwind of a large polluter, a coal‐fired power plant located on the border of two states and proven to be the sole contributor to the violation of air quality standards of the impacted region. Our results show that among all live singleton births that occurred during 1990 through 2006, those born to mothers living as far as 20 to 30 miles away downwind from the power plant (which is also an affluent region) during pregnancy are at greater risks of low birth weight (LBW) and very low birth weight (VLBW): the likelihoods of LBW and VLBW could increase approximately by 6.50 and 17.12 percent, respectively. In light of the continual efforts of The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in reducing cross‐state air pollution caused by transboundary power plant emissions, our study is aimed at broadening the scope of cross‐border pollution impact analysis by taking into account adverse infant health effects of upwind polluters, which can impose disproportionate burdens of health risks on downwind states due to air pollutants transported by wind.
    April 04, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21989   open full text
  • Comparing Inference Approaches for RD Designs: A Reexamination of the Effect of Head Start on Child Mortality.
    Matias D. Cattaneo, Rocío Titiunik, Gonzalo Vazquez‐Bare.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 15, 2017
    The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a popular quasi‐experimental design for causal inference and policy evaluation. The most common inference approaches in RD designs employ “flexible” parametric and nonparametric local polynomial methods, which rely on extrapolation and large‐sample approximations of conditional expectations using observations somewhat near the cutoff that determines treatment assignment. An alternative inference approach employs the idea of local randomization, where the very few units closest to the cutoff are regarded as randomly assigned to treatment and finite‐sample exact inference methods are used. In this paper, we contrast these approaches empirically by re‐analyzing the influential findings of Ludwig and Miller (), who studied the effect of Head Start assistance on child mortality employing parametric RD methods. We first review methods based on approximations of conditional expectations, which are relatively well developed in the literature, and then present new methods based on randomization inference. In particular, we extend the local randomization framework to allow for parametric adjustments of the potential outcomes; our extended framework substantially relaxes strong assumptions in prior literature and better resembles other RD inference methods. We compare all these methods formally, focusing on both estimands and inference properties. In addition, we develop new approaches for randomization‐based sensitivity analysis specifically tailored to RD designs. Applying all these methods to the Head Start data, we find that the original RD treatment effect reported in the literature is quite stable and robust, an empirical finding that enhances the credibility of the original result. All the empirical methods we discuss are readily available in general purpose software in R and Stata; we also provide the dataset and software code needed to replicate all our results.
    March 15, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21985   open full text
  • On Measuring and Reducing Selection Bias With a Quasi‐Doubly Randomized Preference Trial.
    Ted Joyce, Dahlia K. Remler, David A. Jaeger, Onur Altindag, Stephen D. O'Connell, Sean Crockett.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. February 07, 2017
    Randomized experiments provide unbiased estimates of treatment effects, but are costly and time consuming. We demonstrate how a randomized experiment can be leveraged to measure selection bias by conducting a subsequent observational study that is identical in every way except that subjects choose their treatment—a quasi‐doubly randomized preference trial (quasi‐DRPT). Researchers first strive to think of and measure all possible confounders and then determine how well these confounders as controls can reduce or eliminate selection bias. We use a quasi‐DRPT to study the effect of class time on student performance in an undergraduate introductory microeconomics course at a large public university, illustrating its required design elements: experimental and choice arms conducted in the same setting with identical interventions and measurements, and all confounders measured prospectively to treatment assignment or choice. Quasi‐DRPTs augment randomized experiments in real‐world settings where participants choose their treatments.
    February 07, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21976   open full text
  • The Impact of Health Insurance on Preventive Care and Health Behaviors: Evidence from the First Two Years of the ACA Medicaid Expansions.
    Kosali Simon, Aparna Soni, John Cawley.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. January 16, 2017
    The U.S. population receives suboptimal levels of preventive care and has a high prevalence of risky health behaviors. One goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase preventive care and improve health behaviors by expanding access to health insurance. This paper estimates how the ACA‐facilitated state‐level expansions of Medicaid in 2014 affected these outcomes. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and a difference‐in‐differences model that compares states that did and did not expand Medicaid, we examine the impact of the expansions on preventive care (e.g., dental visits, immunizations, mammograms, cancer screenings), risky health behaviors (e.g., smoking, heavy drinking, lack of exercise, obesity), and self‐assessed health. We find that the expansions increased insurance coverage and access to care among the targeted population of low‐income childless adults. The expansions also increased use of certain forms of preventive care, but there is no evidence that they increased ex ante moral hazard (i.e., there is no evidence that risky health behaviors increased in response to health insurance coverage). The Medicaid expansions also modestly improved self‐assessed health.
    January 16, 2017   doi: 10.1002/pam.21972   open full text
  • The Effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Migration.
    Lucas Goodman.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. November 26, 2016
    The expansion of Medicaid to low‐income nondisabled adults is a key component of the Affordable Care Act's strategy to increase health insurance coverage, but many states have chosen not to take up the expansion. As a result, for many low‐income adults, there has been stark variation across states in access to Medicaid since the expansions took effect in 2014. This study investigates whether individuals migrate in order to gain access to these benefits. Using an empirical model in the spirit of a difference‐in‐differences, this study finds that migration from non‐expansion states to expansion states did not increase in 2014 relative to migration in the reverse direction. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out a migration effect that would meaningfully affect the number of enrollees in expansion states, which suggests that Medicaid expansion decisions do not impose a meaningful fiscal externality on other states.
    November 26, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21952   open full text
  • Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence From Age‐of‐Youngest‐Child Exemptions.
    Chris M. Herbst.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. November 12, 2016
    This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low‐income children's cognitive and social‐emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age‐of‐youngest‐child exemptions—as a source of quasi‐experimental variation in first‐year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work‐requirement‐induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.
    November 12, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21971   open full text
  • The Effect of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act of 1998 on Rewarded and Unrewarded Performance Goals.
    Ed Gerrish.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. November 09, 2016
    This paper examines the impact of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act (CSPIA) of 1998 on child support performance measures that are rewarded financially as well as outcomes that are not rewarded. Three of the five performance measures explicitly rewarded by CSPIA are reconstructed in this analysis, as are two child support outcomes that were considered for financial rewards but were ultimately rejected. Using a panel interrupted time series model with state fixed effects and state‐specific trends, this analysis finds that CSPIA had a statistically positive impact on just one rewarded performance goal, cost‐effectiveness, and negatively impacted an unrewarded child support outcome—collections sent to other states. Effect sizes suggest that CSPIA had little impact on child support performance, on balance. These results provide more evidence to the ongoing debate about the ability of performance incentives to improve public sector performance. It also suggests that reforming performance systems in response to perceived problems may create new gaming responses.
    November 09, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21957   open full text
  • Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non‐Expansion States.
    Charles Courtemanche, James Marton, Benjamin Ukert, Aaron Yelowitz, Daniela Zapata.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. November 07, 2016
    The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community Survey. We utilize difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences models that exploit cross‐sectional variation in the intensity of treatment arising from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and local area pre‐ACA uninsured rates. This strategy allows us to identify the effects of the ACA in both Medicaid expansion and non‐expansion states. Our preferred specification suggests that, at the average pre‐treatment uninsured rate, the full ACA increased the proportion of residents with insurance by 5.9 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points in states that did not expand Medicaid. Private insurance expansions from the ACA were due to increases in both employer‐provided and non‐group coverage. The coverage gains from the full ACA were largest for those without a college degree, non‐whites, young adults, unmarried individuals, and those without children in the home. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansion crowded out private coverage.
    November 07, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21961   open full text
  • What Can We Learn From A Doubly Randomized Preference Trial?—An Instrumental Variables Perspective.
    Coady Wing, M. H. Clark.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 27, 2016
    The doubly randomized preference trial (DRPT) is a randomized experimental design with three arms: a treatment arm, a control arm, and a preference arm. The design has useful properties that have gone unnoticed in the applied and methodological literatures. This paper shows how to interpret the DRPT design using an instrumental variables (IV) framework. The IV framework reveals that the DRPT separately identifies three different treatment effect parameters: the Average Treatment Effect (ATE), the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT), and the Average Treatment Effect on the Untreated (ATU). The ATE, ATT, and ATU parameters are important for program evaluation research because in realistic settings many social programs are optional rather than mandatory and some people who are eligible for a program choose not to participate. Most of the paper is concerned with the interpretation of the research design. To make the ideas concrete, the final section provides an empirical example using data from an existing DRPT study.
    October 27, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21965   open full text
  • Child Poverty, the Great Recession, and the Social Safety Net in the United States.
    Marianne Bitler, Hilary Hoynes, Elira Kuka.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 26, 2016
    In this paper, we comprehensively examine the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty, with particular attention to the role of the social safety net in mitigating the adverse effects of shocks to earnings and income. Using a state panel data model and data for 2000 to 2014, we estimate the relationship between the business cycle and child poverty, and we examine how and to what extent the safety net is providing protection to at‐risk children. We find compelling evidence that the safety net provides protection; that is, the cyclicality of after‐tax‐and‐transfer child poverty is significantly attenuated relative to the cyclicality of private income poverty. We also find that the protective effect of the safety net is not similar across demographic groups, and that children from more disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those living with Hispanic or single heads, or particularly those living with immigrant household heads—or immigrant spouses—experience larger poverty cyclicality than those living with non‐Hispanic white or married heads, or those living with native household heads with native spouses. Our findings hold across a host of choices for how to define poverty. These include measures based on absolute thresholds or more relative thresholds. They also hold for measures of resources that include not only cash and near‐cash transfers net of taxes but also several measures of the value of public medical benefits.
    October 26, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21963   open full text
  • College Enrollment and Completion Among Nationally Recognized High‐Achieving Hispanic Students.
    Oded Gurantz, Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 26, 2016
    Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program (NHRP), which recognizes the highest‐scoring 11th‐grade Hispanic students on the PSAT/NMSQT, as a mechanism of improving college choice and completion. The program not only informs students about their relative ability, but it also enables colleges to identify, recruit, and offer enrollment incentives. Overall, we find that the program has strong effects on college attendance patterns, shifting students from two‐year to four‐year institutions, as well as to colleges that are out‐of‐state and public flagships, all areas where Hispanic attendance has lagged. NHRP shifts the geographic distribution of where students earn their degree, and increases overall bachelor's completion among Hispanic students who traditionally have had lower rates of success. These results demonstrate that college outreach can have significant impacts on the enrollment choices of Hispanic students and can serve as a policy lever for colleges looking to draw academically talented students.
    October 26, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21962   open full text
  • The Pass‐Through of Taxes on Sugar‐Sweetened Beverages to Retail Prices: The Case of Berkeley, California.
    John Cawley, David E. Frisvold.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 24, 2016
    Obesity and diet‐related chronic disease are increasing problems worldwide. In response, many governments have enacted or are considering taxes on energy‐dense foods. Perhaps the most commonly recommended policy is a tax on sugar‐sweetened beverages (SSBs). This paper estimates the extent to which a tax on SSBs is passed through to consumers in the form of higher prices. We examine the first city‐level tax on SSBs in the United States, which was enacted by the voters of Berkeley, California, in November 2014. We collected the prices of various brands and sizes of SSBs and other beverages before and after the implementation of the tax from a near‐census of convenience stores and supermarkets in Berkeley, California. We also collected prices from stores in a control city: San Francisco, where a similar voter referendum failed despite majority support. Estimates from difference‐in‐differences models indicate that, across all brands and sizes of products examined, 43.1 percent (95 percent confidence interval: 27.7 to 58.4 percent) of the Berkeley tax was passed on to consumers. The estimates also are consistent with cross‐border shopping. For each mile of distance between the store and the closest store selling untaxed SSBs, pass‐through rose 33.3 percent for 2 L bottles and 25.8 percent for 12‐packs of 12 ounce cans.
    October 24, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21960   open full text
  • Policy Reform and the Problem of Private Investment: Evidence from the Power Sector.
    Johannes Urpelainen, Joonseok Yang.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 19, 2016
    Development economists frequently emphasize the importance of good infrastructure for economic growth. Can governments attract private capital in infrastructural investments through policy reform? We address this question by showing that, in the case of electricity generation, a simple legislation enabling independent power production increases private investment in electricity generation by more than an order of magnitude. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on the importance of constraints on executive power for credible commitment, we find that such constraints neither draw private capital nor condition the effectiveness of policy reform. We also find that both domestic and foreign investment increase with IPP reform. Evidence for these claims comes from an instrumental variable analysis of power sector reforms and private electricity generation in all developing countries for the years 1982 to 2008. Simple and politically uncontroversial policies can generate positive results in developing countries.
    October 19, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21959   open full text
  • Supplying Disadvantaged Schools with Effective Teachers: Experimental Evidence on Secondary Math Teachers from Teach For America.
    Hanley S. Chiang, Melissa A. Clark, Sheena McConnell.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 13, 2016
    Teach For America (TFA) is an important but controversial source of teachers for hard‐to‐staff subjects in high‐poverty U.S. schools. We present findings from the first large‐scale experimental study of secondary math teachers from TFA. We find that TFA teachers are more effective than other math teachers in the same schools, increasing student math achievement by 0.07 standard deviations over one school year. Addressing concerns about the fact that TFA requires only a two‐year commitment, we find that TFA teachers in their first two years of teaching are more effective than more experienced non‐TFA teachers in the same schools.
    October 13, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21958   open full text
  • Testing the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline.
    Emily G. Owens.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. September 28, 2016
    The School‐to‐Prison Pipeline is a social phenomenon where students become formally involved with the criminal justice system as a result of school policies that use law enforcement, rather than discipline, to address behavioral problems. A potentially important part of the School‐to‐Prison Pipeline is the use of sworn School Resource Officers (SROs), but there is little research on the causal effect of hiring these officers on school crime or arrests. Using credibly exogenous variation in the use of SROs generated by federal hiring grants specifically to place law enforcement in schools, I find evidence that law enforcement agencies learn about more crimes in schools upon receipt of a grant, and are more likely to make arrests for those crimes. This primarily affects children under the age of 15. However, I also find evidence that SROs increase school safety, and help law enforcement agencies make arrests for drug crimes occurring on and off school grounds.
    September 28, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21954   open full text
  • Editors' Overview of Special Section on Big Data and Public Policy.
    Julia Lane, Paul T. Decker.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 20, 2016
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    July 20, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21936   open full text
  • Empowering Consumers Through Data and Smart Technology: Experimental Evidence on the Consequences of Time‐of‐Use Electricity Pricing Policies.
    Matthew Harding, Carlos Lamarche.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 08, 2016
    This paper investigates the extent to which technology used to automate household responses to time‐of‐use pricing for electricity leads to higher energy savings than simply providing households with information on current prices and quantities. Using a large randomized field trial, we find that informed households with “smart” thermostats achieve impressive reductions in consumption during on‐peak periods of up to 48 percent, but also engage in substantial load shifting to off‐peak hours. We also document the extent to which household responses to time‐of‐use pricing are heterogeneous and vary significantly by demographics, weather, and across the usage distribution.
    July 08, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21928   open full text
  • Explaining the Consequences of Imprisonment for Union Formation and Dissolution in Denmark.
    Peter Fallesen, Lars H. Andersen.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 05, 2016
    Crime and subsequent imprisonment reduces men's chances on the marriage market and increases their divorce risk, but existing research, with a few notable exceptions, is silent about the underlying mechanisms driving these effects. This article studies the effect of home confinement under electronic monitoring as a noncustodial alternative to imprisonment on the risk of relationship dissolution and being single, thereby distinguishing between effects of incarceration and of committing crime. We study a policy that expanded the use of electronic monitoring to address nonrandom selection into electronic monitoring instead of in prison. Results from a sample of 4,522 men show that home confinement under electronic monitoring significantly and persistently lowers the risk both of being single and of becoming single during the first five years following conviction. The results show that one of the tools that could promote decarceration trends also secures better relationship outcomes of convicted men.
    July 05, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21933   open full text
  • The Productivity Costs of Inefficient Hiring Practices: Evidence From Late Teacher Hiring.
    John P. Papay, Matthew A. Kraft.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. June 29, 2016
    We use matched employee–employer records from the teacher labor market to explore the effects of late teacher hiring on student achievement. Hiring teachers after the school year starts reduces student achievement by 0.042 SD in mathematics and 0.026 SD in reading. This reflects, in part, a temporary disruption effect in the first year. In mathematics, but not in reading, late‐hired teachers remain persistently less effective, evidence of negative selection in the teacher labor market. Late hiring concentrates in schools that disproportionately serve disadvantaged student populations, contributing to challenges in ensuring an equitable distribution of educational resources for all students.
    June 29, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21930   open full text
  • Connections Matter: How Interactive Peers Affect Students in Online College Courses.
    Eric Bettinger, Jing Liu, Susanna Loeb.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. June 27, 2016
    Peers affect individual's productivity in the workforce, in education, and in other team‐based tasks. Using large‐scale language data from an online college course, we measure the impacts of peer interactions on student learning outcomes and persistence. In our setting, students are quasi‐randomly assigned to peers, and as such, we are able to overcome selection biases stemming from endogenous peer grouping. We also mitigate reflection bias by utilizing rich student interaction data. We find that females and older students are more likely to engage in student interactions. Students are also more likely to interact with peers of the same gender and with peers from roughly the same geographic region. For students who are relatively less likely to be engaged in online discussion, exposure to more interactive peers increases their probabilities of passing the course, improves their grade in the course, and increases their likelihood of enrolling in the following academic term. This study demonstrates how the use of large‐scale, text‐based data can provide insights into students’ learning processes.
    June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21932   open full text
  • Why Don't Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Live Near Better Schools? Insights from Big Data.
    Ingrid Gould Ellen, Keren Mertens Horn, Amy Ellen Schwartz.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. June 27, 2016
    Housing choice vouchers provide low‐income households with additional income to spend on rental housing in the private market. The assistance vouchers provide is substantial, offering the potential to dramatically expand the neighborhoods—and associated public schools—that low‐income households can reach. However, existing research on the program suggests that housing choice voucher holders live in neighborhoods with schools that are no better than those accessible to other households with similar incomes. Households, in other words, do not seem to spend the additional income provided by the voucher to access better schools. In this analysis we rely on a large‐scale administrative data set to explore why voucher households typically do not live near to better schools, as measured by school‐level proficiency rates. We combine confidential administrative data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on 1.4 million housing choice voucher holders in 15 states, with school‐level data from 5,841 different school districts, to examine why the average housing voucher holder does not live near to higher‐performing schools than otherwise similar households without vouchers. Specifically, we use the large‐scale administrative data set to test whether voucher holders living in areas with good schools nearby and slack housing markets move toward better schools when schools become salient for them—that is, when their oldest child becomes school eligible. We take advantage of the thick sample of households with young children provided through our administrative data to implement both a household fixed effects and a regression discontinuity design. Together these analyses shed light on whether voucher households are more likely to move toward better schools when schools are most relevant, and how market conditions shape that response. We find that families with vouchers are more likely to move toward a better school in the year before their oldest child meets the eligibility cutoff for kindergarten, suggesting salience matters. Further, the magnitude of the effect is larger in metropolitan areas with a relatively high share of affordable rental units located near high‐performing schools and in neighborhoods in close proximity to higher‐performing schools. Results suggest that, if given the appropriate information and opportunities, more voucher families would move to better schools when their children reach school age.
    June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21929   open full text
  • How Do Nonprofits Respond to Regulatory Thresholds: Evidence From New York's Audit Requirements.
    Travis St. Clair.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. June 22, 2016
    Nonprofits in the United States must comply with various state and federal regulations to maintain their tax‐exempt status. Despite persistent calls to increase accountability in the nonprofit sector, there is little research examining the burden imposed by existing regulatory requirements, especially at the state level. This paper uses a bunching design to estimate the avoidance behavior exhibited by tax‐exempt charities in response to New York State's audit requirements. There is clear evidence of bunching in response to the requirement that nonprofits above certain revenue thresholds file financial statements reviewed by or audited by an independent certified public accountant. Measuring the extent of bunching around the revenue notches yields estimates of the average revenue that nonprofits either forego or fail to report in avoidance of the requirements. Results from dynamic estimation show that charities near the threshold for a review engagement report approximately $1,300 less revenue than otherwise predicted by a counterfactual; charities near the threshold for a full audit report approximately $1,400 less. The results have implications for the optimal design of state‐level financial regulations.
    June 22, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21931   open full text
  • Can Social–Emotional Learning Reduce School Dropout in Developing Countries?
    Huan Wang, James Chu, Prashant Loyalka, Tao Xin, Yaojiang Shi, Qinghe Qu, Chu Yang.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 16, 2016
    An alarming number of students drop out of junior high school in developing countries. In this study, we examine the impacts of providing a social–emotional learning (SEL) program on the dropout behavior and learning anxiety of students in the first two years of junior high. We do so by analyzing data from a randomized controlled trial involving 70 junior high schools and 7,495 students in rural China. After eight months, the SEL program reduces dropout by 1.6 percentage points and decreases learning anxiety by 2.3 percentage points. Effects are no longer statistically different from zero after 15 months, perhaps due to decreasing student interest in the program. However, we do find that the program reduces dropout among students at high risk of dropping out (older students and students with friends who have already dropped out), both after eight and 15 months of exposure to the SEL program.
    May 16, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21915   open full text
  • Reading for Life and Adolescent Re‐Arrest: Evaluating a Unique Juvenile Diversion Program.
    A. D. Seroczynski, William N. Evans, Amy D. Jobst, Luke Horvath, Giuliana Carozza.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 06, 2016
    We present results of an evaluation of Reading for Life (RFL), a diversion program for nonviolent juvenile offenders in a medium‐sized Midwestern county. The unique program uses philosophical virtue theory, works of literature, and small mentoring groups to foster moral development in juvenile offenders. Participants were randomly assigned to RFL treatment or a comparison program of community service. The RFL program generated large and statistically significant drops in future arrests. The program was particularly successful at reducing the recidivism of more serious offenses and for those groups with the highest propensity for future offenses.
    May 06, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21916   open full text
  • Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers within School Districts?
    Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, Roddy Theobald.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 22, 2016
    We utilize detailed teacher‐level longitudinal data from Washington State to investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. Specifically, we estimate the log odds that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other schools in the district in Washington kindergarten through 12th grade (K‐12) public schools. We find little consistent evidence relating voluntary transfer provisions in CBAs to patterns in teacher mobility, but do find evidence that patterns in within‐district mobility by teacher experience and effectiveness vary between districts that do not use seniority in involuntary transfer decisions and those that use seniority as a tiebreaker or the only factor in these moves. In models that consider teacher experience, the interaction between teacher experience and school disadvantage in teacher transfer decisions is more extreme in districts with strong involuntary seniority transfer protections; novice teachers are even more likely to stay in disadvantaged schools, and veteran teachers are even more likely to leave disadvantaged schools. On the other hand, models that consider value‐added measures of teacher effectiveness suggest that more effective teachers are less likely to leave disadvantaged schools in districts that do use seniority in involuntary transfer decisions, that is, seniority transfer provisions could actually make the distribution of output‐based measures of quality more equitable. Taken together, these results suggest that seniority transfer provisions may have differential impacts on the distributions of teacher experience and effectiveness.
    April 22, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21914   open full text
  • Do School Report Cards Produce Accountability Through the Ballot Box?
    Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu, Zachary Peskowitz.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 14, 2016
    Public education has been transformed by the widespread adoption of accountability systems that involve the dissemination of school district performance information. Using data from Ohio, we examine if elections serve as one channel through which these accountability systems might lead to improvements in educational quality. We find little evidence that poor performance on widely disseminated state and federal indicators has an impact on school board turnover, the vote share of sitting school board members, or superintendent tenure, suggesting that the dissemination of district performance information puts little (if any) electoral pressure on elected officials to improve student achievement.
    April 14, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21912   open full text
  • Broadening Benefits from Natural Resource Extraction: Housing Values and Taxation of Natural Gas Wells as Property.
    Jeremy G. Weber, J. Wesley Burnett, Irene M. Xiarchos.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 06, 2016
    We study the effects of the property tax base shock caused by natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale in Texas—a state that taxes oil and gas wells as property. Over the boom and bust in drilling, housing appreciation closely followed the oil and gas property tax base, which expanded the total tax base by 23 percent at its height. The expansion led to a decline in property tax rates while maintaining or increasing revenues to schools. Overall, each $1 per student increase in the oil and gas property tax base increased the value of the typical home by $0.15. Some evidence suggests that the cumulative density of wells nearby may lower housing values, indicating that drilling could reduce local welfare without policies to increase local public revenues.
    April 06, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21911   open full text
  • Charter High Schools’ Effects on Long‐Term Attainment and Earnings.
    Tim R. Sass, Ron W. Zimmer, Brian P. Gill, T. Kevin Booker.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 04, 2016
    Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer‐term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on earnings in adulthood, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Florida, we first confirm previous research (Booker et al., ) that students attending charter high schools are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. We then examine two longer‐term outcomes not previously studied in research on charter schools—college persistence and earnings. We find that students attending charter high schools are more likely to persist in college, and that in their mid‐20s they experience higher earnings.
    April 04, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21913   open full text
  • The Effect of English Language Learner Reclassification on Student ACT Scores, High School Graduation, and Postsecondary Enrollment: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Wisconsin.
    Deven Carlson, Jared E. Knowles.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 30, 2016
    The recent increase in the number of students classified as English language learners (ELLs) has focused significant attention on reclassification policy, which governs the process by which ELLs move toward, and are deemed to reach, full English proficiency. In this paper, we draw on a data set containing annual individual‐level records for every Wisconsin student ever classified as an ELL between the 2006–07 and 2012–13 school years to estimate the effects of being reclassified at the end of 10th grade—a crucial period on the pathway to postsecondary education—on several measures related to students’ postsecondary attainments. We estimate these effects in a regression discontinuity framework, exploiting Wisconsin's policy rule that automatically reclassifies ELLs who score above a specified cutoff on the state's English language proficiency exam. Our analysis indicates that being reclassified as fully English proficient in 10th grade has a positive effect on students’ ACT scores. It also provides some evidence of a positive effect on high school graduation and the probability of enrolling in a postsecondary institution the fall after graduation. Together, our analyses provide evidence on the effects of a policy directly relevant to the country's fastest growing student population, and we close the paper with a discussion of the implications for research and policy.
    March 30, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21908   open full text
  • The Effect of Breakfast in the Classroom on Obesity and Academic Performance: Evidence from New York City.
    Sean P. Corcoran, Brian Elbel, Amy Ellen Schwartz.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 30, 2016
    Participation in the federally subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take‐up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight. We use the implementation of BIC in New York City (NYC) to estimate its impact on meals program participation, body mass index (BMI), achievement, and attendance. While we find large effects on participation, our findings provide no evidence of hoped‐for gains in academic performance, or of feared increases in obesity. The policy case for BIC will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer‐term effects.
    March 30, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21909   open full text
  • Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence From Teacher Absences.
    Seth Gershenson.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 22, 2016
    The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title‐1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference‐in‐difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the subsequent year suggest that on average, teacher absences in North Carolina fell by about 10 percent. The probability of being frequently absent similarly decreased. These reductions in teacher absences were driven by within‐teacher increases in effort and by teachers in the bottom half of the effectiveness distribution. On average, only a modest amount of the achievement gains attributable to the increased accountability pressure are explained by the corresponding decline in teacher absences.
    March 22, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21910   open full text
  • Public and Private Production in a Mixed Delivery System: Regulation, Competition and Costs.
    Germà Bel, Jordi Rosell.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 14, 2016
    Academics and policymakers are increasingly shifting the debate concerning the best form of public service provision beyond the traditional dilemma between pure public and pure private delivery modes, because, among other reasons, there is a growing body of evidence that casts doubt on the existence of systematic cost savings from privatization, while any competition seems to be eroded over time. In this paper, we compare the relative merits of public and private delivery within a mixed delivery system. We study the role played by ownership, transaction costs, and competition on local public service delivery within the same jurisdiction. Using a stochastic cost frontier, we analyze the public‐private urban bus system in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area. We find that private firms have higher delivery costs than those incurred by the public firm, especially when transaction costs are taken into account. Furthermore, tenders tend to decrease delivery costs.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21906   open full text
  • The Effects of Paid Family Leave in California on Labor Market Outcomes.
    Charles L. Baum, Christopher J. Ruhm.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. February 02, 2016
    Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY‐97), we examine the effects of California's paid family leave program (CA‐PFL) on mothers’ and fathers’ use of leave during the period surrounding child birth, and on the timing of mothers’ return to work, the probability of eventually returning to prechildbirth jobs, and subsequent labor market outcomes. We estimate multivariate difference‐in‐differences regression models that compare changes in the outcomes for new California parents before and after the enactment of CA‐PFL to those for corresponding parents in control states. Our results suggest that CA‐PFL raised leave use by almost five weeks for the average covered mother and two to three days for the corresponding father. Maternal leave‐taking appears to increase in the quarter before the birth and to extend through the two quarters after it. Paternal leave‐taking rises fairly quickly after the birth and is short‐lasting. Rights to paid leave are also associated with higher work and employment probabilities for mothers nine to 12 months after birth, probably because they increase job continuity among those with relatively weak labor force attachments. We also find positive effects of California's program on hours and weeks of work during their child's second year of life.
    February 02, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21894   open full text
  • Do Nighttime Driving Restrictions Reduce Criminal Participation Among Teenagers? Evidence From Graduated Driver Licensing.
    Monica Deza, Daniel Litwok.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. January 14, 2016
    To date, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have a three‐stage Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) system that phases in driving privileges for teenagers. GDL laws effectively impose a statutory driving curfew and a limitation on the number of passengers in motor vehicles. Both the timing of motor vehicle access and a limitation on the peer influences available in a motor vehicle could significantly affect the production of criminal behavior. Using the Uniform Crime Reports 1995 to 2011 and a triple‐differences approach, we find that the implementation of GDL decreased criminal participation by 6 percent among teenagers ages 16 and 17, as measured by arrests. These effects are larger in magnitude in states where the nighttime driving curfew is required for a longer period of time. We also show that GDL plays an important role in reducing crime in periods of low gasoline prices, a time when teen driver prevalence would otherwise have been high. These results suggest that there is another benefit to states for adopting GDL laws and provide insight into the production of teenage crime.
    January 14, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21893   open full text
  • Marginal Pricing and Student Investment in Higher Education.
    Steven W. Hemelt, Kevin M. Stange.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. January 07, 2016
    This paper examines the effect of marginal price on students’ educational investments using rich administrative data on students at Michigan public universities. Marginal price refers to the amount colleges charge for each additional credit taken in a semester. Institutions differ in how they price credits above the full‐time minimum (of 12 credits), with many institutions reducing the marginal price of such credits to zero. We find that a zero marginal price induces a modest share of students (i.e., 7 percent) to attempt up to one additional class (i.e., three credits) but also increases withdrawals and lowers course performance. The analysis generally suggests minimal impacts on credits earned and the likelihood of meeting “on‐time” benchmarks toward college completion, though estimates for these outcomes are less precise and more variable across specifications. Consistent with theory, the effect on attempted credits is largest among students who would otherwise locate at the full‐time minimum, which includes lower‐achieving and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
    January 07, 2016   doi: 10.1002/pam.21891   open full text
  • The Social and Productive Impacts of Zambia's Child Grant.
    Sudhanshu Handa, David Seidenfeld, Benjamin Davis, Gelson Tembo,.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. December 31, 2015
    Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer (CT) programs across the world suggests that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost‐effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. However, individual published impact assessments typically focus on only one program and one outcome. This article presents two‐year impacts of the Zambian Government's Child Grant, an unconditional CT to families with children under age 5, across a wide range of domains including consumption, productive activity, and women and children's outcomes, making this one of the first studies to assess both protective and productive impacts of a national unconditional CT program. We show strong impacts on consumption, food security, savings, and productive activity. However, impacts in areas such as child nutritional status and schooling depend on initial conditions of the household, suggesting that cash alone is not enough to solve all constraints faced by these poor, rural households. Nevertheless, the apparent transformative effects of this program suggest that unconditional transfers in very poor settings can contribute to both protection and development outcomes.
    December 31, 2015   doi: 10.1002/pam.21892   open full text
  • Do Industrial Tax Abatements Spur Property Value Growth?
    Sung Hoon Kang, Laura Reese, Mark Skidmore.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 30, 2015
    Despite ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of tax abatements, Michigan's Industrial Facilities Tax (IFT) abatement program has been widely and extensively used to boost local economic development. In this article, we estimate the effects of industrial property tax abatements on industrial, residential, and commercial property value growth in the context of regional competition for a panel of 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit from 1983 through 2002. We find that: (1) offering tax abatements yields statistically significant positive impacts on industrial property value growth; (2) the impacts are larger in high tax than in low tax communities; (3) there are positive spillover effects of industrial tax abatements on residential and commercial property value growth; (4) tax abatements offered in competitor communities do not appear to influence own industrial property value growth; and (5) changes in the own as well as competitor property tax rates are important determinants of industrial property value growth. However, the fiscal benefits of tax abatements are quite small as compared with the costs of offering abatements even when spillover benefits to residential and commercial properties are considered.
    October 30, 2015   doi: 10.1002/pam.21862   open full text
  • The Effects of Changing Test‐Based Policies for Reclassifying English Learners.
    Joseph P. Robinson‐Cimpian, Karen D. Thompson.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. October 30, 2015
    When students labeled English Learners (ELs) are reclassified as Fluent English Proficient, changes often occur in services and settings (e.g., changes in teachers, peers, and ancillary services). Policymakers play an important role in the reclassification process because they establish test‐based criteria that an EL must attain in order to become reclassified. If the criteria established by policymakers are incongruent with the instructional changes that result from reclassification, then services and settings may be denied to students who would otherwise benefit from them. In response to teachers’ and administrators’ concerns that some ELs who were reclassified were not succeeding without additional supports, California policymakers in 2006 to 2007 changed the reclassification criteria. In this paper, we examine the effects of changing these criteria using data on Latino/a students from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the U.S. district serving the largest number of ELs. Using “difference‐in‐regression‐discontinuities” approaches, we find consistent evidence that this policy change, which increased the difficulty of attaining the test‐based criteria for EL reclassification eligibility, had significant effects on high‐school students’ subsequent English language arts achievement (0.18 SDs) and graduation outcomes (11 percentage points). Specifically, when the criteria for reclassification were lower, students experienced negative effects of reclassification; but when the criteria were raised, students no longer experienced these negative effects. Highlighting the complex interplay between assessments, instruction, and policy, these findings demonstrate the important role policymakers play in the academic success of ELs and speak to policymaker considerations when implementing assessment and accountability systems.
    October 30, 2015   doi: 10.1002/pam.21882   open full text
  • Easy Money: Tax Exporting and State Support for Higher Education.
    John M. Foster, Jacob Fowles.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. December 30, 2014
    There is a substantial literature that assesses the effects of tax‐exporting capacities on the tax structures and aggregate spending levels that state governments choose to implement, but no work exists that isolates the effects of state tax exporting on higher education spending. Using state‐level data for 1989, 1995, 2002, and 2007, we estimate for the median voter in each state the change in the marginal cost of higher education subsidization generated by tax exportation, and calculate the increased higher education spending that results. We consider three types of spending: state appropriations to public universities as well as need‐ and non‐need‐based aid awarded to in‐state students. We find that neither type of aid is responsive to the marginal cost, or tax price, faced by the median voter. However, the median voter's price elasticity of demand for state appropriations is statistically significant and negative. We find that the median voter's tax price is substantially reduced by the presence of prominent mining and tourism industries and by the federal deductibility offset available to firms. Thus, these tax‐exporting capacities exert upward pressure on voter demand for state appropriations to public universities.
    December 30, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21813   open full text
  • Recent Trends in U.S. Income and Expenditure Poverty.
    Richard Bavier.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 23, 2014
    After many years of following similar trends, U.S. poverty rates measured by household spending in data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) fell between 2000 and 2008, while poverty measured by income rose. Comparisons of spending and income poverty in the CE with income poverty in other surveys, spending data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and a time series of employment levels, find the CE to be the outlier. The findings do not bear directly on the primary use of CE data in providing category weights for calculation of the Consumer Price Index, but do require explanation not available in CE public‐use files.
    May 23, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21775   open full text
  • Property Rights and Forest Commons.
    Eric A. Coleman, Scott S. Liebertz.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 06, 2014
    Although property rights have been linked to a variety of positive social outcomes at the macro‐level, less research focuses on how property rights affect the benefits that actors receive at the micro‐level. This article examines property rights to a common‐pool resource (CPR) that are asymmetrically allocated among users, and presents a theoretical argument that property rights affect the allocation of resource benefits in two important ways. First, users with extensive property rights receive more benefits than users with limited property rights. Second, users with the power to influence how community rules are enforced—for example, landholders and ethnic majorities—more effectively define and defend their property and thus receive disproportionate CPR benefits compared to users with similar levels of property rights, but with less power. Using household‐level survey data in Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico, and Uganda, collected after a period of property rights decentralization, the empirical analysis finds support for these propositions. We conclude that power critically moderates the effects of property rights on the commons.
    May 06, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21766   open full text
  • Did Age Discrimination Protections Help Older Workers Weather the Great Recession?
    David Neumark, Patrick Button.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 13, 2014
    We examine whether stronger age discrimination laws at the state level moderated the impact of the Great Recession on older workers. We use a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences strategy to compare older and younger workers, in states with stronger and weaker laws, before, during, and after the Great Recession. We find very little evidence that stronger age discrimination protections helped older workers weather the Great Recession, relative to younger workers. The evidence sometimes points in the opposite direction, with stronger state age discrimination protections associated with more adverse effects of the Great Recession on older workers. We suggest that during an experience such as the Great Recession, severe labor market disruptions make it difficult to discern discrimination, weakening the effects of stronger state age discrimination protections. Alternatively, higher termination costs associated with stronger age discrimination protections may do more to deter hiring when future product and labor demand is highly uncertain.
    April 13, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21762   open full text
  • The Impact of Rehabilitation and Counseling Services on the Labor Market Activity of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) Beneficiaries.
    Robert R. Weathers, Michelle Stegman Bailey.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 10, 2014
    We use data from a social experiment to estimate the impact of a rehabilitation and counseling program on the labor market activity of newly entitled Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries. Our results indicate that the program led to a 4.6 percentage point increase in the receipt of employment services within the first year following random assignment and a 5.1 percentage point increase in participation in the Social Security Administration's Ticket to Work program within the first three years following random assignment. The program led to a 5.3 percentage point increase, or almost 50 percent increase, in employment, and an $831 increase in annual earnings in the second calendar year after the calendar year of random assignment. The employment and earnings impacts are smaller and not statistically significant in the third calendar year following random assignment, and we describe SSDI rules that are consistent with this finding. Our findings indicate that disability reform proposals focusing on restoring the work capacity of people with disabilities can increase the disability employment rate.
    April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21763   open full text
  • The Effects of Contraception on Female Poverty.
    Stephanie P. Browne, Sara LaLumia.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 09, 2014
    Poverty rates are particularly high among households headed by single women, and childbirth is often the event preceding these households’ poverty spells. This paper examines the relationship between legal access to the birth control pill and female poverty. We rely on exogenous cross‐state variation in the year in which oral contraception became legally available to young, single women. Using census data from 1960 to 1990, we find that having legal access to the birth control pill by age 20 significantly reduces the probability that a woman is subsequently in poverty. We estimate that early legal access to oral contraception reduces female poverty by 0.5 percentage points, even when controlling for completed education, employment status, and household composition.
    April 09, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21761   open full text
  • A Conceptual Framework for Studying the Sources of Variation in Program Effects.
    Michael J. Weiss, Howard S. Bloom, Thomas Brock.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 28, 2014
    Evaluations of public programs in many fields reveal that different types of programs—or different versions of the same program—vary in their effectiveness. Moreover, a program that is effective for one group of people might not be effective for other groups, and a program that is effective in one set of circumstances may not be effective in other circumstances. This paper presents a conceptual framework for research on such variation in program effects and the sources of this variation. The framework is intended to help researchers—both those who focus mainly on studying program implementation and those who focus mainly on estimating program effects—see how their respective pieces fit together in a way that helps to identify factors that explain variation in program effects, and thereby support more systematic data collection. The ultimate goal of the framework is to enable researchers to offer better guidance to policymakers and program operators on the conditions and practices that are associated with larger and more positive effects.
    March 28, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21760   open full text
  • The Effect of Providing Breakfast in Class on Student Performance.
    Scott A. Imberman, Adriana D. Kugler.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 19, 2014
    Many schools have recently experimented with moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom. We examine whether such a program increases achievement, grades, and attendance rates. We exploit quasi‐random timing of program implementation that allows for a difference‐in‐differences identification strategy. We find that providing breakfast in class relative to the cafeteria raises math and reading achievement by 0.09 and 0.06 standard deviations, respectively. These effects are most pronounced for low‐performing, free lunch‐eligible, Hispanic, and low body mass index students. A lack of differences by exposure time and effects on grades suggest that these impacts are on test‐taking performance rather than learning. At the same time, the results highlight the possibility that measured achievement may be biased downwards, and accountability penalties may be inappropriately applied, in schools where many students do not consume breakfast.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21759   open full text
  • Can Small High Schools of Choice Improve Educational Prospects for Disadvantaged Students?
    Howard S. Bloom, Rebecca Unterman.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 02, 2014
    This paper provides rigorous evidence (for 12,130 participants in a series of naturally occurring randomized lotteries) that a large‐scale high school reform initiative (New York City's creation of 100+ small high schools of choice between 2002 and 2008) can markedly and consistently increase high school graduation rates (by 9.5 percentage points overall and for many different student subgroups) for a large population of educationally and economically disadvantaged students of color without increasing annual school operating costs. These findings are directly relevant to current debates by policymakers and practitioners about how to improve the educational prospects of disadvantaged students in the United States.
    March 02, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21748   open full text
  • The Forgotten Summer: Does the Offer of College Counseling After High School Mitigate Summer Melt Among College‐Intending, Low‐Income High School Graduates?
    Benjamin L. Castleman, Lindsay C. Page, Korynn Schooley.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. January 14, 2014
    Despite decades of policy intervention to increase college entry and success among low‐income students, considerable gaps by socioeconomic status remain. To date, policymakers have overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students’ transition to college, yet recent research documents high rates of summer attrition from the college pipeline among college‐intending high school graduates, a phenomenon we refer to as “summer melt.” We report on two randomized trials investigating efforts to mitigate summer melt. Offering college‐intending graduates two to three hours of summer support increased enrollment by 3 percentage points overall, and by 8 to 12 percentage points among low‐income students, at a cost of $100 to $200 per student. Further, summer support has lasting impacts on persistence several semesters into college.
    January 14, 2014   doi: 10.1002/pam.21743   open full text
  • Revisiting the Income Tax Effects of Legalizing Same‐Sex Marriages.
    James Alm, J. Sebastian Leguizamon, Susane Leguizamon.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. December 19, 2013
    In this paper we estimate the impacts on income tax collections of legalizing same‐sex marriage. We utilize new individual‐level data sources to estimate the federal income tax consequences of legalizing same‐sex marriages. These data sources also allow us to estimate the impact of legalization on state income tax collections. We find that 23 states would realize a net fiscal benefit from legalization, while 21 states would experience a decline in revenue. The potential (annual) changes in state tax revenue range from negative $29 million in California to positive $16 million in New York. At the federal level, our estimates suggest an overall reduction in revenues, ranging from a potential loss of $187 million to $580 million. Overall, we find that the federal and state impacts are quite modest. We also find that our estimates are only marginally affected by alternative assumptions about how many same‐sex couples will choose to marry and which partner will claim any children for tax deduction purposes.
    December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21740   open full text
  • Choice in a World of New School Types.
    J. S. Butler, Douglas A. Carr, Eugenia F. Toma, Ron Zimmer.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. August 11, 2013
    As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as previous research generally has not been able to link individual households to school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examined the role that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative, charter schools, attracts families with higher socioeconomic status than those that traditional public schools attract. The attraction of charter schools, however, unlike traditional public schools, appears to be racially and ethnically neutral. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining private school choice than to those factors explaining the choice of traditional public schools. The findings suggest that policies governing the design of charter schools should focus on broader socioeconomic diversity rather than race only.
    August 11, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21711   open full text
  • Collection of Delinquent Fines: An Adaptive Randomized Trial to Assess the Effectiveness of Alternative Text Messages.
    Laura C. Haynes, Donald P. Green, Rory Gallagher, Peter John, David J. Torgerson.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. August 06, 2013
    The collection of delinquent fines is a vast and ongoing public administration challenge. In the United Kingdom, unpaid fines amount to more than 500 million pounds. Managing noncompliant accounts and dispatching bailiffs to collect fines in person is costly. This paper reports the results of a large randomized controlled trial, led by the UK Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights Team, which was designed to test the effectiveness of mobile phone text messaging as an alternative method of inducing people to pay their outstanding fines. An adaptive trial design was used, first to test the effectiveness of text messaging against no treatment and then to test the relative effectiveness of alternative messages. Text messages, which are relatively inexpensive, are found to significantly increase average payment of delinquent fines. We found text messages to be especially effective when they address the recipient by name.
    August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21717   open full text
  • The Effects of Green Cards on the Wages and Innovations of New PhDs.
    Xiaohuan Lan.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 27, 2013
    Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.‐trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United States. Many CSPA beneficiaries, Chinese students who became permanent residents, did not pursue postdoctoral training and instead entered the public or private sector directly. This supply shift increased the relative wage of native postdocs to non‐postdocs. Four to eight years after graduation, CSPA beneficiaries earned 9 percent more than the comparison group, were less likely to work in academia, published fewer research articles, and produced more patents.
    July 27, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21713   open full text
  • Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion.
    Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 26, 2013
    This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We used the random assignment in Project STAR (the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment) to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We found that assignment to a small class increases students’ probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among black students. Among students enrolled in the poorest third of schools, the effect is 7.3 percentage points. Smaller classes increased the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shifted students toward high‐earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), business, and economics. We found that test‐score effects at the time of the experiment were an excellent predictor of long‐term improvements in postsecondary outcomes.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21715   open full text
  • Do Alternative Base Periods Increase Unemployment Insurance Receipt Among Low‐Educated Unemployed Workers?
    Alix Gould‐Werth, H. Luke Shaefer.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 19, 2013
    Unemployment Insurance (UI) is the major social insurance program that protects against lost earnings resulting from involuntary unemployment. Existing literature finds that low‐earning unemployed workers experience difficulty accessing UI benefits. The most prominent policy reform designed to increase rates of monetary eligibility, and thus UI receipt, among these unemployed workers is the Alternative Base Period (ABP). In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sought to increase use of the ABP, making ABP adoption a necessary precondition for states to receive their share of the $7 billion targeted at UI programs. By January 2013, 40 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the ABP despite the absence of an evaluation of ABP efficacy using nationally representative data. This study analyzes Current Population Survey data from 1987 to 2011 to assess the efficacy of the ABP in increasing UI receipt among low‐educated unemployed workers. We used a natural‐experiment design to capture the combined behavioral and mechanical effects of the policy change. We found no association between state‐level ABP adoption and individual UI receipt for all unemployed workers. However, among part‐time unemployed workers with less than a high school degree, adoption of the ABP was associated with a 2.8 percentage point increase in the probability of UI receipt.
    July 19, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21708   open full text
  • Discouraging Disadvantaged Fathers’ Employment: An Unintended Consequence of Policies Designed to Support Families.
    Maria Cancian, Carolyn J. Heinrich, Yiyoon Chung.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. June 24, 2013
    Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers’ employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a consequence of unemployment and low child support order compliance. We used childbirth costs charged in unmarried mothers’ Medicaid‐covered childbirths, from Wisconsin administrative records, as an exogenous source of variation to identify the impact of debt. We found that greater debt has a substantial negative effect on fathers’ formal employment and child support payments, and that this effect is mediated by fathers’ prebirth earnings histories.
    June 24, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21707   open full text
  • State Unemployment Insurance Trust Solvency and Benefit Generosity.
    Daniel L. Smith, Jeffrey B. Wenger.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 14, 2013
    This paper employs panel estimators with data on the 50 American states for the years 1963 to 2006 to test the relationship between Unemployment Insurance (UI) trust fund solvency and UI benefit generosity. We find that both average and maximum weekly UI benefit amounts, as ratios to the average weekly wage, are higher in states and in years with more highly solvent trust funds. This result holds after controlling for state‐level unemployment rate, gross domestic product, population growth, legislative political ideology, partisan control of the executive and legislative branches, and gubernatorial election year across multiple specifications, including fixed‐effects and dynamic panel estimators. We propose a theory of moderate coupling as the causal mechanism, whereby UI program benefits and financing are directly related but are not as tightly linked as in other social insurance programs, such as Medicaid. The findings have important policy implications for the funding of states’ UI systems. As a consequence of moderate coupling, the countercyclicality of the UI program is dampened.
    May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21701   open full text
  • Would a Value‐Added System of Retention Improve the Distribution of Teacher Quality? A Simulation of Alternative Policies.
    Marcus A. Winters, Joshua M. Cowen.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 05, 2013
    In this paper, we consider several features of teacher‐retention policies based on value‐added measures of effectiveness under a variety of empirically grounded rules and parameters. We consider the effects of policy design by varying the standard above which satisfactory teachers are expected to perform. We simulate recently adopted policies that remove teachers based on consecutive unsatisfactory performance and compare these to policies that remove teachers based on poor performance on average over a multiyear period. We also consider the precision of the performance measure and the underlying variation in teacher quality on policy effects. Finally, the simulation makes a step forward by incorporating recent empirical findings of a relationship between teacher quality and natural attrition from the profession. Our results indicate that deselection policies based on value‐added measures have the potential to improve teacher quality, although understanding the role of policy design, self‐selected exits, and the underlying variation in teacher quality is essential for determining policy effects.
    May 05, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21705   open full text
  • Aviation Security, Risk Assessment, and Risk Aversion for Public Decisionmaking.
    Mark G. Stewart, John Mueller.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. May 05, 2013
    This paper estimates risk reductions for each layer of security designed to prevent commercial passenger airliners from being commandeered by terrorists, kept under control for some time, and then crashed into specific targets. Probabilistic methods are used to characterize the uncertainty of rates of deterrence, detection, and disruption, as well as losses. Since homeland security decisionmakers tend to be risk‐averse because of the catastrophic or dire nature of the hazard or event, utility theory and Monte Carlo simulation methods are used to propagate uncertainties in calculations of net present value, expected utility, and probabilities of net benefit. We employ a “break‐even” cost‐benefit analysis to determine the minimum probability of an otherwise successful attack that is required for the benefit of security measures to equal their cost. In this context, we examine specific policy options: including Improvised Physical Secondary Barriers (IPSBs) in the array of aircraft security measures, including the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), and including them both. Attack probabilities need to exceed 260 percent or 2.6 attacks per year to be 90 percent sure that FAMS is cost‐effective, whereas IPSBs have more than 90 percent chance of being cost‐effective even if attack probabilities are as low as 6 percent per year. A risk‐neutral analysis finds a policy option of adding IPSBs but not FAMS to the other measures to be preferred for all attack probabilities. However, a very risk‐averse decisionmaker is 48 percent likely to prefer to retain FAMS even if the attack probability is as low as 1 percent per year—a level of risk aversion exhibited by few, if any, government agencies. Overall, it seems that, even in an analysis that biases the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, far too much may currently be spent on security measures to address the problem of airline hijacking, and many spending reductions could likely be made with little or no consequent reduction of security.
    May 05, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21704   open full text
  • An Experimental Test of the Expectancy‐Disconfirmation Theory of Citizen Satisfaction.
    Gregg G. Van Ryzin.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 30, 2013
    A number of prior studies have found evidence for the expectancy‐disconfirmation theory of citizen satisfaction with public services, which holds that citizens judge public services not only on experienced service quality but also on an implicit comparison of service quality with prior expectations. But the evidence to date has been based on surveys (observational studies) and on subjective measures of expectations and performance, which are likely endogenous. Thus, the present study aimed to test the expectancy‐disconfirmation theory of citizen satisfaction with public services using an experimental method. Participants in an Internet panel (N = 964) were randomly assigned to receive either low‐ or high‐expectations statements from a hypothetical government official and to view either low‐ or high‐performance street cleanliness photographs, in an online survey experiment. The findings are in line with previous research and generally confirm the core relationships in the theory, although the effect of expectations varied by age and political ideology. Because this study is a true randomized experiment, it provides better evidence than previous studies regarding the true causal nature of these relationships.
    April 30, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21702   open full text
  • Teacher Pension Systems, the Composition of the Teaching Workforce, and Teacher Quality.
    Cory Koedel, Michael Podgursky, Shishan Shi.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 30, 2013
    Teacher pension systems concentrate retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine the link between teachers’ pension incentives and workforce quality and find no evidence to suggest that the incentives raise quality. Given the large and growing costs associated with maintaining teacher pension systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.
    April 30, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21699   open full text
  • Fiscal Rules and the Composition of Government Expenditures in OECD Countries.
    Momi Dahan, Michel Strawczynski.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. April 02, 2013
    Since the 1990s many OECD countries have adopted fiscal rules. After the adoption of these rules, the ratio of social transfers to government consumption substantially declined, and it recovered following the global economic crisis. Using a sample of 22 OECD countries, we found a negative effect of fiscal rules on the ratio of social transfers to government consumption. This finding implies that fiscal rules are effective, but not necessarily binding. Our examination reveals that the negative effect of fiscal rules on the social transfers to government consumption ratio is particularly evident in countries with relatively weak legal protection to social rights.
    April 02, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21694   open full text
  • Technical Management in an Age of Openness: The Political, Public, and Environmental Forest Ranger.
    Sarah E. Anderson, Heather E. Hodges, Terry L. Anderson.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 29, 2013
    Modern bureaucracy faces trade‐offs between public and congressional input and agency expertise. The U.S. Forest Service offers an opportunity to quantitatively analyze whether an agency that is required to be more open to the public and congressional input will be forced to ignore its technical expertise in managing resources. This study uses data on 83,000 hazardous fuels reduction activities conducted by the Forest Service from 2001 to 2011. Although the results show that managers are responsive to public and congressional considerations, this has not prevented them from utilizing their technical knowledge to restore lands most deviated from natural conditions. This suggests that managers can balance responsiveness to public and political principals with technically sound management.
    March 29, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21697   open full text
  • Has the Shift to Managed Care Reduced Medicaid Expenditures? Evidence from State and Local‐Level Mandates.
    Mark Duggan, Tamara Hayford.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 21, 2013
    From 1991 to 2009, the fraction of Medicaid recipients enrolled in HMOs and other forms of Medicaid managed care (MMC) increased from 11 percent to 71 percent. This increase was largely driven by state and local mandates that required most Medicaid recipients to enroll in an MMC plan. Theoretically, it is ambiguous whether the shift from fee‐for‐service into managed care would lead to an increase or a reduction in Medicaid spending. This paper investigates this effect using a data set on state‐ and local‐level MMC mandates and detailed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on state Medicaid expenditures. The findings suggest that shifting Medicaid recipients from fee‐for‐service into MMC did not on average reduce Medicaid spending. If anything, our results suggest that the shift to MMC increased Medicaid spending and that this effect was especially present for risk‐based HMOs. However, the effects of the shift to MMC on Medicaid spending varied significantly across states as a function of the generosity of the state's baseline Medicaid provider reimbursement rates.
    March 21, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21693   open full text
  • Cream‐Skimming, Parking and Other Intended and Unintended Effects of High‐Powered, Performance‐Based Contracts.
    Pierre Koning, Carolyn J. Heinrich.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. March 21, 2013
    As performance‐based contracting in social welfare services continues to expand, concerns about potential unintended effects are also growing. We analyze the incentive effects of high‐powered, performance‐based contracts and their implications for program outcomes using panel data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were assigned to private social welfare providers in 2002 to 2005. We employ a difference‐in‐differences design that takes advantage of the fact that contracts gradually moved from partial performance‐contingent pay to full (100 percent) performance‐contingent contracting schemes. We develop explicit measures of selection into the programs and find evidence of cream skimming and other gaming activities on the part of providers, but little impact of these activities on program outcomes. Moving to a system with contract payments fully contingent on performance appears to increase job placements, but not job duration, for more readily employable workers.
    March 21, 2013   doi: 10.1002/pam.21695   open full text
  • The Use and Efficacy of Capacity‐Building Assistance for Low‐Performing Districts: The Case of California's District Assistance and Intervention Teams.
    Katharine O. Strunk, Andrew McEachin, Theresa N. Westover.
    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. July 23, 2012
    The theory of action upon which high‐stakes accountability policies are based calls for systemic reforms in educational systems that will emerge by pairing incentives for improvement with extensive and targeted technical assistance (TA) to build the capacity of low‐performing schools and districts. To this end, a little discussed and often overlooked aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated that, in addition to sanctions, states were required to provide TA to build the capacity of struggling schools and Local Education Agencies (LEAs, or districts) to help them improve student achievement. Although every state in the country provides some form of TA to its lowest performing districts, we know little about the content of these programs or about their efficacy in improving student performance. In this paper, we use both quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the actions taken by TA providers in one state—California—and examine whether the TA and support tied to California's NCLB sanctions succeeds in improving student achievement. Like many other states, California requires that districts labeled as persistently failing under NCLB (in Program Improvement year 3, PI3) work with external experts to help them build the capacity to make reforms that will improve student achievement. California's lowest performing PI3 districts are given substantial amounts of funding and are required to contract with state‐approved District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs), whereas the remaining PI3 districts receive less funding and are asked to access less intensive TA from non‐DAIT providers. We use a five‐year panel difference‐in‐difference design to estimate the impacts of DAITs on student performance on the math and English language arts (ELA) standardized tests relative to non‐DAIT TA during the two years of the program intervention. We find that students in districts with DAITs perform significantly better on math California Standards Tests (CSTs) averaged over both treatment years and in each of the first and second years. We do not find evidence that students in districts with DAITs perform higher on ELA CSTs over the combined two years of treatment, although we find suggestive evidence that ELA performance increases in the second year of treatment relative to students in districts with non‐DAIT TA. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions that explore the association between specific activities fostered by DAITs and changes in districts’ gains in achievement over the two years of treatment show that DAIT districts that report increasing their focus on using data to guide instruction, shifting district culture to generate and maintain high expectations of students and staff, and increasing within‐district accountability for student performance, have higher math achievement gains over the course of the DAIT treatment. In addition, DAIT districts that increase their focus on ELA instruction and shift district culture to one of high expectations have higher ELA achievement gains than do DAIT districts that do not have a similar focus. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
    July 23, 2012   doi: 10.1002/pam.21658   open full text