Research Activities: FACULTY RESEARCH

Child and Family Policy

Affiliated Professor and economist James Heckman was awarded the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research in microeconometrics. A founding faculty member of the Harris School, Heckman currently directs the Center for Social Program Evaluation. His conception of empirical social science was influential in crafting the School's training and research programs. Dean Robert T. Michael spoke at a University press conference heralding Heckman's research, which includes the development of theories and methods now widely used in the statistical analysis of individual and household behavior.

The research of developmental psychologist Ariel Kalil was featured at a November Harris School Research Briefing, "Transitions to Adulthood for Adolescent Mothers." Sponsored by the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy, Kalil's talk centered on the unique transition to adulthood that adolescent mothers face and the relationship of this research to welfare reform policy directed at young teenage mothers. Kalil's primary research interests are adolescent development and family functioning in disadvantaged social and economic circumstances, and she is currently working on projects involving welfare reform, family structure and early childbearing.

Economist Robert T. Michael and Department of Sociology Professor Susan Levine were included on a panel discussion at the October National Black Child Development Institute Conference in Washington, D.C. Representing the Harris School's Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and the University's Center for Early Childhood Research, respectively, their joint presentation explored questions central to understanding the importance of early childhood experiences in fostering the highest potential of academic and professional development. Michael utilized the session to introduce prospective students to public policy studies at the Harris School and to note the School's strengths in the study of child and family policy.

At an October Harris School Research Briefing, economist Don Coursey presented his findings from an examination of public health and environmental data on 130 countries observed between 1960 and 1992. Coursey and co-author Christopher A. Hartwell present their research in the Harris School working paper, "Environmental and Public Health Outcomes: An Interna-tional and Historical Comparison," which explores the link between economic freedom and environmental quality. The authors find that on average countries with repressive governments tend to have poorer environmental conditions and worse public health. A research summary based on their research is included in this report.

Education Policy

Economist Thomas DeLeire and co-author Margo Coleman (AM, '98) completed "An Economic Model of Locus of Control and the Human Capital Investment Decision," published by the Harris School Working Papers Series. Their paper presents an economic model of how teenagers' outlooks affect human capital investments. The empirical results indicate that locus of control, or teenagers' perceived employment opportunities when they enter the labor force, strongly influences the decision to invest in education. The results also show that locus of control operates through teenagers' expectations of the returns to human capital investments.

Sociologist Susan Mayer completed the Harris School working paper, "Income Inequality, Economic Segregation and Children's Educational Attainment," in which she uses 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census data to determine that an increase in income inequality at the state level is associated with an increase in economic segregation between census tracts in the state, while economic inequality between households in the same census tract hardly changed. Her paper shows that given a constant level of economic inequality in a state, an increase in economic segregation increases affluent children's educational attainment but reduces that of poor children. Mayer concludes that segregation between census tracts increases inequality in educational attainment and may therefore increase inequality in the next genera-tion, while economic inequality with census tracts has little effect on high or low-income children's educational attainment.

Finance and Public Finance

Jeffrey Milyo's study "Corporate PAC Campaign Contributions in Perspective" received significant attention in the winter months. The paper was published in the journal Business and Politics and a companion op-ed piece was published in the January 26 edition of the Chicago Sun Times. Milyo was also featured in University of Chicago Chronicle and Chicago Reader articles covering his research on the effects of campaign finance laws and his opinions about this highly charged topic. Milyo's research posits that campaign finance reformers are misguided and argues not only that the case for campaign reform is overstated, but also that additional regulations may do more harm than good. Research indicates that soft money spending by state parties increases electoral competition for state legislative seats and that campaign spending is strongly associated with higher voter turnout. In addition to his writing on campaign finance, Milyo also participated in several panel discussions on electoral politics. Milyo appeared twice on WTTW-Chicago's program Chicago Tonight to discuss the 2000 Presidential election, and in January he took part in a panel discussion of campaign finance reform for senior legislative assistants on Capitol Hill. Milyo's campaign finance research was the subject of a Harris School Research Briefing in November.

Economist Gerard Pfann completed "Tax Policy and Market Structure" with co-author Hans L. van Kranenburg and "Two-Sided Learning, Labor Turnover and Worker Displacement" with Daniel S. Hamermesh. Pfann's study of tax policy yield valuable results on the effects of taxation and entry limitation on market structures and the development of new industries such as wireless telecom-munication and e-businesses. In Pfann's second project on worker displacement, he seeks to remedy deficiencies in recent literature on job loss by constructing a structural model of two-sided learning between a firm and its workers, a model that allows researchers to infer the extent of biases in measuring the losses arising from displacement when the data sample is restricted to displaced workers.

Health Policy

Economist Thomas DeLeire received a $60,000 grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation for a study of the impact that recent legislation has had on the employment of disabled Americans. This project, "The Employment of People with Disabilities: Measuring the Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act," will use pre- and post-ADA enactment employment data in order to evaluate the Act's effect. An earlier study by DeLeire found that the Americans with Disabilities Act did little to boost employment for the intended beneficiaries and that the Act may have had the unintended consequence of lowering the employment of disabled workers. Results of that study show that the enactment of the ADA led to a 7.2% decrease in employment of people with disabilities, and that these declines began as early as 1990 and continued through 1995. This research was featured in the August 24 Investors Business Daily article, "How Successful Is The Disabilities Act? Unintended Results are Showing Up," and his study "The Wage and Employment Effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act" was included in the Fall 2000 Journal of Human Resources, 35(4).

In a related paper, "Changes in Wage Discrimination Against People with Disabilities: 1984-1993," DeLeire estimated the extent to which discrimination against people with disabilities has changed from 1984 to 1993. DeLeire found that while discrimination did not change over this period, the negative effects of poor health on the earnings of people with disabilities fell substantially; this suggests that without either improvements in technology or the accommodation provisions of the ADA, the earnings gaps faced by people with disabilities would have been even higher in 1993. This paper was recently published in the Winter 2001 Journal of Human Resources, 36(1).

Economist Helen Levy received a $10,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor for a project examining disability insurance coverage. The study, "Where are the Gaps in Disability Insurance Cover-age," will examine how insurance rates vary between groups of workers, such as across race or skill level. At a December Research Briefing, Levy discussed the impact that poor health has on household spending and saving and how this impact differs for households with and without health insurance. Levy's research found that health insurance protects household capital in the event of illness or injury and that uninsured households are likely to dip into savings to maintain consumption levels.

Results of a study led by Harris School Dean Robert Michael and University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann and published in the newly released book Sex, Love, and Health in America: Private Choices and Public Policies, have been the subject of numerous media reports. The Associated Press Newswires and the Reuters English News Service carried stories about the book, which is a second installment of the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey. A compilation of interviews of 1,921 women and 1,511 men, the survey is regarded as the most comprehensive scientific study of American sexual behavior and attitudes. January 25 editions of Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune newspapers both contained front-page stories about the book. Reports also ran on ABC Radio Net-work's Al Rantel Show, Associated Press Radio, CLTV, CNN, Fox News, the NBC Nightly News, WFLD-TV, Wisconsin Public Radio, WLS-AM, WMAQ-TV and WTTW-TV's Chicago Tonight.

Political economist Jeffrey Milyo and co-author Jennifer M. Mellor completed the working paper "Re-Examining the Evidence of an Ecological Association Between Income Inequality and Health," forthcoming in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. The paper examines the relationship between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across 30 countries over a four-decade span and across 48 U.S. states over five decades. The results of this study challenge beliefs that income inequality is an important determinant of population health. Milyo and Mellor also completed the working paper and forthcoming Critical Review article, "Is Inequality Bad for Your Health?" as well as a related paper "Income Inequality and Health," which was published in the winter issue of the Journal of Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Health Economist Tomas Philipson was presented with the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the Best Health Economics Paper of 1999 at the International Health Economics Association Meeting in New Orleans in January. The Association honored Philipson's study "Longevity Complementarities Under Competing Risks," co-authored with William H. Dow and Xavier Sala-I-Martin and published in December in the American Economic Review. Philipson has completed additional longevity related projects, including "Aging and the Growth of Long-Term Care," co-authored with Darius Lakdawalla. In that paper, the authors analyze how markets for old-age care respond to the aging of populations and argue that an increase in the supply of family-provided care for the aging may lower the demand for market care.

International Policy

Political scientist Delia Boylan finished revisions on a book manuscript, Defusing Democracy: Central Bank Autonomy and the Transition from Authoritarian Rule, which will be published by the University of Michigan Press in August 2001. Boylan also finished a paper on electoral politics and "second stage" institutional reforms in Chile for an edited volume on economic reforms in Latin America.

Economist Robert LaLonde completed the Harris School working paper "Emigration of Immigrants and Measures of Immigrant Assimilation: Evidence from Sweden" with co-authors Per-Anders Edin and Olof ?slund. In that study, the authors used longitudinal data on immigration to Sweden from 1970-1990 to examine the extent and pattern of immigrant emigration and its consequences for measures of assimilation. Their analysis shows that a large fraction of economic immigrants leave the host country within five years of arrival. By contrast, immigrants who migrated for political reasons are much less likely to subsequently emigrate. Between both types, those who were the most likely to emigrate were those who were the least successful in the host country's labor market.

Political scientist Duncan Snidal co-authored an investigation of the various ways in which stand-ards, the central mechanisms of international governance, function in different governance arrangements and at different levels of governance. The study, "International Standards and International Governance," presented a comparative institutional framework to help address the associated question of how to set international standards.

Poverty and Inequality

Visiting Professor Annamaria Lusardi completed the study, "Precautionary Saving and the Accumula-tion of Wealth," before returning to Dartmouth College in September. In her work, Lusardi estimates the amount of wealth households accumulate to insure against income risk. She uses data from a new survey: the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, which sampled older households. Lusardi finds evidence in favor of precautionary accumulation. Even though the precautionary saving motive does not give rise to a lot of wealth, many households make provisions to insure against income risk. Thus, her findings suggest that a precautionary saving motive exists and continues to affect accumulation even in later periods of life.

Sociologist Susan Mayer's research on economic inequality was featured in the September 21, 2000 issue of the University of Chicago Chronicle. Mayer's findings suggest that a growth in inequality in the U.S. is apparent in data showing that although the overall education attainment of American children increased over the past 25 years, that increase came by improving only the outcomes of high-income children, while hurting the outcomes of low-income children.

Economist Robert T. Michael's article, "Recent Developments for Poverty Measurement in U.S. Official Statistics," was published in Volume 16 of the Journal of Official Statistics. In his paper Michael recommends a new poverty measure, arguing that the official measure is severely flawed and its concepts outmoded by changes in economic circumstances, tax policies, and demographic behavior. Michael's new measurement is based on a commonly accepted notion of economic deprivation and accounts for the impact of social welfare programs on the poor. Michael also co-authored the Harris School working paper "Measuring Poverty in the NLSY97" with Carolyn Hill. Using data from the NSL797, the authors construct two measures of poverty using the official definition and the National Research Council definition. They estimate the poverty rates for 1996 youths aged 12-16 as 17.9% (official) and 23.4% (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths considered in poverty under the two measures.

Public Management

In November, political scientist Charles L. Glaser, sociologist Susan Mayer, economist Helen Levy, political economist Jeffrey Milyo and Don Fouts, president of the Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities, led more than 65 students, faculty and friends in an informal discussion of the key issues surrounding this year's presidential campaign. The five presenters provided insightful over-views of the candidates' positions on education, health care, campaign finance reform and foreign policy.

Economist Thomas DeLeire and co-authors Jay Bhattacharya and Thomas MaCurdy also completed the Harris School working paper, "The California Overtime Experiment: Labor Demand and the Impact of Overtime Regulation on Hours of Work," which analyzes the effect of the change in California's overtime rules from daily to weekly calculation. Their findings show that while the change yields negligible effects on average, larger effects are found when the data is studied by type of firm. DeLeire presents estimates suggesting that the hours effect of switching from a daily to a weekly overtime rule is equivalent to increasing the standard workweek by 0.6 hours. Daily overtime is thus regressive, relative to weekly, and raises the number of work hours of high-wage earners at the cost of reduced work hours for low-wage earners.

In November economist Robert LaLonde spoke to state-level policy makers at a workshop designed to explore the skills gap in the labor market as part of the Council of State Governments Annual Legisla-tive Conference. The workshop, moderated by Illinois Representative Judy Erwin (D-Chicago) and led by LaLonde and a representative from the National Association of Manufacturers, was designed to explore the changing demographics and skill demands of the workplace in the New Economy. LaLonde presented his research on America's changing workforce and disparities in workers' skill levels and discussed the ways that policy makers and employers can close this gap.

In October Georgetown Press published Governance and Performance: New Perspectives, a new book co-edited by economist Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. In this book Lynn and co-author Carolyn J. Heinrich (Harris School Ph.D. 1996) draw on advances in the social sciences to illustrate how rigorous, theory-based empirical research can help improve the management of public policies and programs, and how better governance can lead to better performance. The collection of papers illuminates such issues as automatic grade advancement in public schools, welfare caseload reduction, and management of federally funded job-training programs.

Lynn also finished the Harris School working paper, "The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For" featured in a symposium in The Public Administration Review. In it, he argues that recent public administration scholarship has been unduly careless in characterizing the field's traditional literature as an example of a "bureaucratic paradigm," an ingrained and narrowly focused pattern of thought. According to Lynn, this characterization is at best a caricature and, at worst, a demonstrable distortion of traditional thought, which exhibited far more respect for laws, politics, citizens, and values than the new, customer-oriented administration managerialism and its variants. Lynn contends that the result of this mischaracterization is an intellectual rootlessness and an analytical negligence that allow vague, anti- or psuedo-democratic ideas to flourish and basic issues of responsible management not to go addressed.

Lynn and co-authors Carolyn J. Heinrich and Carolyn Hill (Harris School doctoral student) also completed the working paper, "Studying Governance and Public Management: Challenges and Prospects, in which they offer a first step in framing a theory-based research model that produces a richer and more rigorous understanding of governance. The authors propose a model that considers a broad, dynamic view of governance regimes, enabling researchers to capture possible associations between independent and dependent variables of interest and encourage researchers to locate particular theories and models within a more general framework.

In addition, Lynn and co-author Anthony Bertelli completed the working paper, "A Precept of Managerial Responsibility: Securing Collective Justice in Institutional Reform Litigation," in which they use the recent New York child welfare case of Marisol A. v. Giuliani as an illustration of the ways institutional reform litigation places constraints on the public manager's ability to balance indi-vidual and collective justice. The authors argue that where a state has established an administrative scheme in which public managers follow a precept of managerial responsibility, it must be given the opportunity to work; that claims should be brought in state court to build an instructive "common law," rather than in federal court to deduce process from individual rights, and that public administration theory urges the same.

Social theorist Howard Margolis' study "Pivotal Voting and the Emperor's New Clothes" was included in the January 2001 Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13 (01). In his paper, Margolis dissects the logic of pivotal voting, a leading innovation in game theory. He also discusses the relation of assumptions and implications to actual situations of social choice. This research was also published as a 1999 Harris School working paper.

Public Choice published two papers by political economist Jeffrey Milyo: "Logical Deficiencies of Spatial Models: A Constructive Critique" and "Gender Bias and Selection Bias in House Elections." In his study on gender bias, Milyo and co-author Samantha Schosberg find that female incumbents are of higher average candidate quality than male incumbents and that the many barriers to entry that potential female candidates face are responsible for this quality difference. Using data from House elections for 1984-1992, the co-authors estimate that the gender-based differential in candidate quality yields an extra six percentage points of vote share for female incumbents. In addition to the papers published in Public Choice, Milyo also completed the study "What Do Candidates Maximize (and Why Should Anyone Care)?" In this paper, Milyo finds fault with empirical studies of Congressional elections that implicitly assume that candidates are vote-maximizers and shows that this assumption is not an accurate description of incumbent behavior.

Economist Casey B. Mulligan completed the Harris School working paper "The Empirical Frequency of a Pivotal Vote" in October. Mulligan examines at the distributions of election margins and finds that one of every 100,000 votes cast in U.S. elections and one of every 15,000 votes cast in state elections "mattered," in the sense of being cast for a candidate that officially tied or won by one vote. The paper includes evidence that roughly one out of every 30,000 elections with at least 100,000 votes is decided by one vote, while for elections with at least 5000 or at least 20,000 votes, roughly one out of every 1500 or 6000 is decided by one vote, respectively. Based on this data, Mulligan concludes that there is an inverse relationship between election size and the frequency of one-vote margins, and that very close elections are more rare in fact than predicted by statistical models of voting.