|
Faculty Research
Child and Family Policy Developmental psychologist Ariel Kalil and economist Thomas DeLeire completed a Harris School Working Paper "Living Arrangements of Single-Mother Families: Variations, Transitions, and Child Development Outcomes," with Rukmalie Jayakody and Meejung Chin. Their findings suggested that children living with a single mother or living in a cohabiting arrangement have poorer child development outcomes than children living with their married mothers. DeLeire and Kalil also collaborated on the working paper "Good Things Come in 3's: Single-Parent Multigenerational Family Structure and Adolescent Adjustment." In this paper they found that teenagers living in non-intact families are on average less likely to graduate from high school and less likely to attend college. These teens also are more likely to use alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana and are more likely to initiate sexual activity at a younger age. However, not all non-intact families are alike. In particular, teenagers living with their single mother and with at least one of their grandparents in a multigenerational household have developmental outcomes that are at least as good as teenagers in intact families. Dean Robert Michael edited Social Awakening: Adolescent Behavior as Adulthood Approaches, published in August by the Russell Sage Foundation. Using new data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a survey of more than 9,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 16, the book explored the choices adolescents make about their lives and their futures. The book focused on the key role the family plays as teenagers navigate the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. Dean Robert Michael recently completed a Harris School Working Paper "Children's Cognitive Skill Development in Britain and the United States," in which he found 5 to 7 year old children in Great Britain had superior cognitive test scores than their counterparts in the United States but that this academic gap virtually disappeared when the students were between 10 and 14 years of age. The early success by British youth may be explained by an earlier entry into school while the vanishing gap may be explained by social and economic conditions in the two countries. Economist Robert LaLonde was awarded the Levin Faculty Fellowship for the 2001-20002 academic year. The annual Fellowship was established earlier this year, by a $1 million gift from Daniel Levin, Chairman of the Habitat Company and managing general partner of the East Bank Club. Mr. Levin's gift to the Harris School will support research related to domestic social policy, train students to become more effective at addressing domestic problems, and contribute to the body of knowledge that aims to improve the urban condition. LaLonde has begun a new study on the individual and social consequences of incarcerating women with minor children. The project will assess the potential for alternative sentencing and comprehensive rehabilitation programs to reduce costs associated with women's criminal activity. Harris School professor Ariel Kalil, Rachel Dunifon, and Sandra Danziger coauthored the paper "Does Maternal Employment Mandated by Welfare-Reform Affect Children's Behavior?" They found few significant differences in child developmental outcomes between welfare families and those that are poor but not welfare dependent. However, children in welfare families suffered from greater physical disabilities and more serious health outcomes. Maternal employment is associated with better maternal mental health and can benefit children in low-income families through additional income and the social stimulation it provides the mother. In a related topic, Ariel Kalil coauthored a paper with Heidi Schweingruber, and Kristin Seefeldt titled "Correlates of Employment Among Welfare Recipients: Do Psychological Characteristics and Attitudes Matter?" The authors discussed the implications for welfare-to-work programs and policy and found a moderate correlation between employment and positive psychological characteristics and attitudes. Environmental Policy Economist George Tolley completed the Harris School Working Paper "Environmental Issues in Newly Industrializing Economies: A View from North America" that explored why countries differ in how they cope with their internal environmental problems and how more developed countries can transfer strategies that will make environmental issues less costly in under-developed countries. His paper also discussed how countries deal with environmental issues that affect competitiveness in international trade and the environmental externalities that extend across national boarders, particularly externalities with global consequences. The basic problem of what to do about such phenomena is discussed and a seven-point framework is presented for dealing with these phenomena. Education Policy Sociologist Susan Mayer's research "How Did the Increase in Economic Inequality between 1970 and 1990 Affect Children's Educational Attainment?" was published in the American Journal of Sociology; volume 107 (July 2001). Mayer found that a child's family income does not account for the effect of inequality on their schooling. The effect of inequality, rather, is due to the effect of other people's income. When the rich got richer, they benefited from positive interpersonal comparisons. However, as the poor got poorer, they suffered from more negative interpersonal comparisons. The growth in inequality, in sum, probably reduced high school graduation among low-income children, and increased college graduation among high-income children. Because economic inequality seemed to have some benefits, at least for affluent children, it is a challenge to policymakers to try to reduce the potentially harmful effects of inequality on low-income children without eliminating the potentially beneficial effects for higher income families. Susan Mayer and Harris School Ph.D. Leonard Lopoo coauthored the working paper "Has the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status Changed?" in which they investigate the effect of parental income on a son's economic status. They suggest that the decline in the effect of parental income on son's income may be due to the increase in government investment in children, especially in their educational attainment. Louis Jacobson, Harris School professor Robert LaLonde, and Daniel Sullivan collaborated on the Harris School Working Paper "The Returns to Community College Schooling for Displaced Workers." They explored the retraining programs in community colleges and the impact this retraining had on displaced workers' wages. They show that, on average, a year of community college schooling received by prime-aged workers was associated with less than a 2 percent increase in hourly wages. However, these average returns mask substantial variation in the returns associated with different types of courses. Skills acquired from more technically oriented vocational and academic math and science courses have very large returns, whereas most other types of courses are associated with zero or sometimes negative returns. Statistician Larry Hedges, Barbara Nye, and Spyros Konstantopoulos recently published an article, "The Effects of Small Classes on Achievement: The results of the Tennessee Class Size Experiment," in the American Educational Research Journal. In it, they examined the weaknesses in the experiment to see if they were responsible for the positive effects of class size reductions, and concluded they were not. Larry Hedges also had an article, "Using Converging Evidence in Policy Formation," printed in the British education journal Evaluation and Research in Education. The article compared evidence on class size effects from large scale randomized experiments; small scale randomized experiments, and econometric studies, and concluded that the class size effects are remarkably similar. Economist John Durkin investigated the impact of human capital on individual wages as a function of a person's social capital in the Harris School Working Paper "Measuring Social Capital and its Economic Impact." He found the impact on wages of the share of the population within a city or county that has a bachelor's degree is indeed an increasing function of the frequency of contact measure, but it is unrelated to the measures of trust and group membership. Finance and Public Finance Boris Blumberg and Harris School visiting professor Gerard Pfann wrote the Harris School Working Paper "Social Capital and the Uncertainty Reduction of Self-Employment" in which they studied the self-employed decision and its relation to human and social capital. They found that about 15 percent of their sample of Dutch men chose self-employment and that the choice is highest for men in their mid-twenties. Duration analysis shows that social capital is the most important resource for self-employment. Pfann also studied how optimal layoff rules are derived in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs in his paper "Downsizing." His empirical analysis showed that workers with high uncertainty associated with higher than average expected productivity growth are most likely to be retained by these firms. Orazio Attanasio and Harris School professor Thomas DeLeire produced the Harris School Policy Brief "Do IRAs Increase National Saving?" Their brief is summarized earlier in the issue. Economist Casey Mulligan finds that middle class consumers are worse off with any negative income tax scheme than they would be with no redistribution at all in his Harris School Working Paper "Economic Limits on "Rational" Democratic Redistribution." This finding has important implications for political-economic theories of redistribution, because it implies that the fully informed median voter cannot be expected to support programs of cash redistribution from rich to poor - such as the negative income tax - merely on the basis of personal benefits from the program. Mulligan also coauthored "Average Marginal Tax Rates Revisited: A Comment" with Justin Marionto showing that different methods for calculating several marginal income tax rates, found in the literature, are sensitive to assumptions about tax evasion and avoidance. Rutgers University Press published Unsettling Sensation: Arts-Policy Lesson from the Brooklyn Museum Art Controversy, a volume edited by Lawrence Rothfield, associate professor of English and comparative literature and faculty director of the Harris School/Division of Humanities Cultural Policy Center. Contributors to the book, including both Rothfield and the Cultural Policy Center's Executive Director, Carroll Joynes, used the controversial 1999 Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum as a springboard to analyze larger issues at the center of arts policy. Spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art, the articles in Rothfield's book proposed various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts. Additional information about the book is available at: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Unsettling__Sensation__713.html Health Policy Economists Thomas DeLeire and Helen Levy coauthored a Harris School Working Paper "Gender, Occupation Choice and the Risk of Death at Work" in which they study the paths men and women take in choosing occupations that are largely segregated by gender. They find that women tend to select safer jobs, and that parenthood has a bigger effect on the choices made by women. Overall, men and women's different preferences for risk can explain about one-quarter of the fact that men and women choose different occupations. Helen Levy and fellow health economist David Meltzer's study "What Do We Really Know about whether Health Insurance Affects Health" was reviewed in the September-October 2001 edition of Poverty Research News. They evaluated the complexities inherent in studying the link between health and insurance. They suggested that insurance may improve mortality rates in some groups but caution that more work is needed to quantify health benefits in specific groups and to determine their cost-effectiveness. Carina Furnée, Marius Kemler, and Gerard Pfann measured the value of functional capacity improvement from electronic pain treatment in their working paper "The Value of Pain Relief." The value of basic improvement averages 109,000 Dutch 1995 guilders or 25 percent of the total earnings loss without treatment. The value of advanced improvement, when on-the-job learning capacity is recovered, amounts to 150,000 Dutch guilders or 32 percent for workers with university education. David Meltzer received a three-year, $3,250,000 grant from the National Institutes for Health for his study, "A Multi-Center Trial of Academic Hospitalists." Metzler's study will combine data from six academic medical centers around the country, including the University of Chicago. The study will measure and analyze the effects of hospitalists-physicians who dedicate at least one-quarter of their practice to inpatient care - on the quality of care, costs and medical education. David Meltzer, Robert Gibbons, Naihua Duan and other members of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Organ Procurement and Transplantation completed the study "Researchers Evaluate Nation's Organ Transplant System" The IOM committee studied 33,000 patients on waiting lists for liver transplants between 1995 and 1999. They found that under current policy, organs that could be used for the most severely ill are often used for less ill patients. The waiting times and mortality rates differ across organ procurement organizations (OPO), are associated with the size of the OPO service region, and whether the OPO participates in a sharing arrangement with other OPOs. According to the report no evidence suggests that distributing organs across broader geographic areas would cause smaller centers to close, reduce donation rates, or adversely affect access for minorities or the economically disadvantaged. The main obstacles to organ transplant for minorities and the poor are actually outside of the transplant system: lack of access to health insurance and to high quality health care services. Thomas DeLeire, David Katzelnick, et al, published their paper "Impact of Social Anxiety Disorder in Managed Care" in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The authors determined the direct and indirect costs of generalized social anxiety disorder (GSAD) in managed care. They found that in a community of health maintenance organization members, GSAD was rarely diagnosed or treated although it was highly prevalent and associated with significant direct and indirect costs. Poverty and Inequality Jennifer Mellor and Harris School professor Jeffrey Milyo will have their paper "Income Inequality and Health Status in the United States" published in the Journal of Human Resources. Their study found no consistent association between income inequality and individual health status; contradicting claims that the psychosocial effects of income inequality have dramatic effects on individual health outcomes. Thomas DeLeire had his study "The Wage and Employment Effects of the American with Disabilities Act" published in the Journal of Human Resources. He found that employment rates of men with disabilities have decreased dramatically since ADAs passage, and that wages for disabled men have not changed. Harris School Ph.D. Carolyn Hill and Dean Robert Michael published their study "Measuring Poverty in the NLSY97" in the Journal of Human Resources. The author's assessed the differences between a new poverty measure recommended by the National Research Council and the official measure by comparing poverty rates in a public-use data set using the two different measures. Harris School Ph.D. Brett Baden and Harris School professor Don Coursey completed their study "Impact Fees Linked to Rising Home Costs." The empirical results of this research show that fees increase the price of homes. Baden and Coursey find that municipal fees increase new housing costs by 70% to 210% of the actual fee imposed, which ranges from $2,224 to $8,942 for an average four-bedroom home examined in the study. Moreover, fees increased repeatedly, dramatically, and unpredictably, making it difficult for developers to simply incorporate impact fees into the fixed-cost components of their projects. Impact fees have significant influences on the racial and class composition of neighborhoods. Specifically, impact fees may place a disproportionate burden on poor and middle-income homebuyers because fees represent a higher percentage of the sale cost of a lower-priced home than a higher-priced home. Therefore, impact fees are more likely to push moderate-income homebuyers out of the market than more affluent buyers. Further, to the extent that income is correlated with race, impact fees may create barriers to the migration of minorities into the suburbs. Ariel Kalil, Catherine Born, James Kunz, and Pamela Caudill coauthored the paper "Life Stressors, Social Support, and Depressive Symptoms Among First-Time Welfare Recipients." They examined the associations among stressful life events, social support, and depressive symptoms in a sample of first-time welfare recipients. They found that women with transportation barriers to employment, those experiencing greater numbers of stressful events, and those who were less satisfied with their housing situation reported a larger number of depressive symptoms. Public Management Tim Groseclose and Jeffery Milyo examined a model in which some voters' position-taking preferences differ from their outcome preferences in the Harris School Working Paper "Why a Teaspoonful of Position-Taking Drowns a Mountain of Policy Preferences: A Theoretical Result." They showed that if (i) there at least two voters with such conflicting preferences and (ii) the voting process does not end until every voter does not want to change his or her vote, then in equilibrium all voter ignore their outcome preferences. Harris School professor Howard Margolis' article, "Pivotal Voting and the Emperor's New Clothes," is forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare. In the paper, he discusses a claim that poorly informed voters can make the identical choices as well-informed voters. Margolis also had an article published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics. "Game Theory and Juries: A Miraculous Result" that questions the startling result of q presently published claim that making convictions easier by relaxing the unanimity requirement of juries would reduce the number of false convictions. Further, Margolis spoke at a June 5, 2001, symposium marking the 30th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. Margolis, who worked on the Pentagon Papers, spoke on a panel discussing the confrontation between the press and government. Morten Bennedsen and Harris School professor Sven Feldman had their study "Lobbying Legislatures" accepted for publication by the Journal of Political Economy. By comparing a decentralized legislature to a parliament with strong party cohesion, they found that the former allows for the strategic formation of policy coalitions among high-demand districts and exclusions of low-demand districts. This increases the incentives to provide information about districts' demand compared to a legislature in which the governing power is fixed. Harris School professor Laurence Lynn prepared a discussion paper entitled "Public Management" for the forthcoming Handbook of Public Administration, to be published by Sage Publications, Inc. Lynn and Harris School Ph.D. Carolyn Heinrich authored Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research, published in April 2001, by the Georgetown University Press. Lynn also collaborated with Carolyn Hill to write the Harris School Working Paper "Producing Human Services: Why Do Agencies Collaborate?" The paper probed the myriad of difficulties that confront the actual practitioners of collaboration strategies. Harris School professor Sean Gailmard completed a Harris School Working Paper "Expertise, Subversion, and Bureaucratic Discretion" in which he examines a legislature's delegation of policy-making authority to an imperfectly controlled, expert bureaucrat. He found that because of the equilibrium effect of subversion on discretion, bureaucrats will want subversion of legislative dictates to be difficult, while legislators want it to be relatively easy. Jeffrey Milyo, David Primo and Timothy Groseclose completed the paper "PAC Campaign Contributions Have Little Influence." While Milyo and his colleagues find a positive relationship between roll call votes and the interest of their PAC contributors, they argue that there is no proven relationship between PAC contributions and the actions of the legislators who received the contributions. The authors suggested that the apparent simple correlation does not control for the preferences of the legislators or their constituents (i.e. it does not control for how the legislators would vote in absence of campaign contributions). Studies that do control for these preferences find no evidence of influence in the roll-call votes of members of Congress. Statistics Harris School professor and statistician Colm O'Muircheartaigh, Jon Krosnick, and Armin Helic studied an aspect of question construction in their Harris School Working Paper "Middle Alternatives, Acquiescence, and the Quality of Questionnaire Data." They found that offering respondents a middle alternative instead of just two options for expressing an opinion reduces the amount of random measurement error in the responses, thereby increasing reliability while not affecting the validity of attitude measurements. This suggested that middle alternatives should be included in rating scales in order to maximize data quality. Honors Individual faculty members awards and honors Spring - Autumn 2001 The British Academy is England's national
academy for the humanities and the social sciences, an independent
learned society that is the counterpart of the Royal Society which
serves the physical and biological sciences. The British Academy
uses the title of "Corresponding
Fellow" for non-citizen awardees. In 2001 the British Academy
elected 16 Corresponding Fellows one of whom was Dean Robert Michael. The National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council has created a new honorary title of "National Associate" of the National Academies and two of its first-year awardees are Harris School faculty members. The award is intended "to recognize extraordinary service to the National Academies," according to Bruce Alberts, the Chair of the NRC. To honor their past service to the NAS / NRC, Emeritus Professor Norman Bradburn and Dean Robert Michael have been selected as National Associates in 2001. Larry Hedges was appointed to a three-year term on the Secretary of Education's United States Advisory Committee on Educational Statistics. The committee provides policy advice on federal collection of statistical data relevant to education, including operations of the US National Center for Education Statistics and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Harris School's Public Policy Student Association named three teachers as Professors of the year for 2001. The Association chose Don Coursey, the Ameritech Professor in the Harris School and a three-time winner of the award, Helen Levy, Assistant Professor and in just her second year at the Harris School, and professor Raaj Sah, who has also previously won this award.
|
