Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'policy'
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Authors
Alice Zawacki - 3
G. Edward Miller - 3
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 26
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Working PaperThe Icing on the Cake: The Effects of Monetary Incentives on Income Data Quality in the SIPP
January 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-03
Accurate measurement of key income variables plays a crucial role in economic research and policy decision-making. However, the presence of item nonresponse and measurement error in survey data can cause biased estimates. These biases can subsequently lead to sub-optimal policy decisions and inefficient allocation of resources. While there have been various studies documenting item nonresponse and measurement error in economic data, there have not been many studies investigating interventions that could reduce item nonresponse and measurement error. In our research, we investigate the impact of monetary incentives on reducing item nonresponse and measurement error for labor and investment income in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Our study utilizes a randomized incentive experiment in Waves 1 and 2 of the 2014 SIPP, which allows us to assess the effectiveness of incentives in reducing item nonresponse and measurement error. We find that households receiving incentives had item nonresponse rates that are 1.3 percentage points lower for earnings and 1.5 percentage points lower for Social Security income. Measurement error was 6.31 percentage points lower at the intensive margin for interest income, and 16.48 percentage points lower for dividend income compared to non-incentive recipient households. These findings provide valuable insights for data producers and users and highlight the importance of implementing strategies to improve data quality in economic research.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Impact of Industrial Opt-Out from Utility Sponsored Energy Efficiency Programs
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-52
Industry accounts for one-third of energy consumption in the US. Studies suggest that energy efficiency opportunities represent a potential energy resource for regulated utilities and have resulted in rate of return regulated demand-side management (DSM) and energy efficiency (EE) programs. However, many large customers are allowed to self-direct or opt-out. In the Carolinas (NC and SC), over half of industrial and large commercial customers have selected to opt out. Although these customers claim they invest in EE improvements when it is economic and cost-effective to do so, there is no mechanism to validate whether they actually achieved energy savings. This project examines the industrial energy efficiency between the program participants and non participants in the Carolinas by utilizing the non-public Census of Manufacturing data and the public list of firms that have chosen to opt out. We compare the relative energy efficiency between the stay-in and opt-out plants. The t-test results suggest opt-out plants are less efficient. However, the opt-out decisions are not random; large plants or plants belonging to large firms are more likely to opt out, possibly because they have more information and resources. We conduct a propensity score matching method to account for factors that could affect the opt-out decisions. We find that the opt-out plants perform at least as well or slightly better than the stay-in plants. The relative performance of the opt-out firms suggest that they may not need utility program resources to obtain similar levels of efficiency from the stay-in group.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperIs Affirmative Action in Employment Still Effective in the 21st Century?
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-54
We study Executive Order 11246, an employment-based affirmative action policy tar geted at firms holding contracts with the federal government. We find this policy to be in effective in the 21st century, contrary to the positive effects found in the late 1900s (Miller, 2017). Our novel dataset combines data on federal contract acquisition and enforcement with US linked employer-employee Census data 2000'2014. We employ an event study around firms' acquiring a contract, based on Miller (2017), and find the policy had no ef fect on employment shares or on hiring, for any minority group. Next, we isolate the impact of the affirmative action plan, which is EO 11246's preeminent requirement that applies to firms with contracts over $50,000. Leveraging variation from this threshold in an event study and regression discontinuity design, we find similarly null effects. Last, we show that even randomized audits are not effective, suggesting weak enforcement. Our results highlight the importance of the recent budget increase for the enforcement agency, as well as recent policies enacted to improve complianceView Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe U.S. Manufacturing Sector's Response to Higher Electricity Prices: Evidence from State-Level Renewable Portfolio Standards
October 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-47
While several papers examine the effects of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on electricity prices, they mainly rely on state-level data and there has been little research on how RPS policies affect manufacturing activity via their effect on electricity prices. Using plant-level data for the entire U.S. manufacturing sector and all electric utilities from 1992 ' 2015, we jointly estimate the effect of RPS adoption and stringency on plant-level electricity prices and production decisions. To ensure that our results are not sensitive to possible pre-existing differences across manufacturing plants in RPS and non-RPS states, we implement coarsened exact covariate matching. Our results suggest that electricity prices for plants in RPS states averaged about 2% higher than in non-RPS states, notably lower than prior estimates based on state-level data. In response to these higher electricity prices, we estimate that plant electricity usage declined by 1.2% for all plants and 1.8% for energy-intensive plants, broadly consistent with published estimates of the elasticity of electricity demand for industrial users. We find smaller declines in output, employment, and hours worked (relative to the decline in electricity use). Finally, several key RPS policy design features that vary substantially from state-to-state produce heterogeneous effects on plant-level electricity prices.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Underserved Have Less Access to Employer-Sponsored Telemedicine Coverage
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-40
Telemedicine has been proposed as one means of improving health care access for underserved communities, and information about insurance coverage for telemedicine (TMC) is important in understanding its utilization and provision. We use 2018-2019 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component data on employer-sponsored coverage to examine pre-pandemic TMC relative to employer, worker, and health plan characteristics. We find that the share of employees in private sector establishments offering TMC was lower in the most rural counties, in smaller firms, in establishments without unionized employees, and in establishments where most workers were low wage, part-time and older when compared to other establishments. These findings reflect differences across establishments in insurance offers, as well as differences in TMC conditional on an insurance offer, which suggests that TMC may function as a premium plan feature with limited availability and potential support for improving healthcare access for the underserved.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-42R
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show that the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAn Economic Analysis of Privacy Protection and Statistical Accuracy as Social Choices
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-35
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: operate where the marginal cost of increasing privacy equals the marginal benefit. Our model of production, from computer science, assumes data are published using an efficient differentially private algorithm. Optimal choice weighs the demand for accurate statistics against the demand for privacy. Examples from U.S. statistical programs show how our framework can guide decision-making. Further progress requires a better understanding of willingness-to-pay for privacy and statistical accuracy.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPlanning Parenthood: The Affordable Care Act Young Adult Provision and Pathways to Fertility
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-65
This paper investigates the effect of the Affordable Care Act young adult provision on fertility and related outcomes. The expected effect of the provision on fertility is not clear ex ante. By expanding insurance coverage to young adults, the provision may affect fertility directly through expanded options for obtaining contraceptives as well as through expanded options for obtaining pregnancy-, birth-, and infant-related care, and these may lead to decreased or increased fertility, respectively. In addition, the provision may also affect fertility indirectly through marriage or labor markets, and the direction and magnitude of these effects is difficult to determine. This paper considers the effect of the provision on fertility as well as the contributing channels by applying difference-in-differences-type methods using the 2008-2010 and 2012-2013 American Community Survey, 2006-2009 and 2012-2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abortion surveillance data, and 2006-2010 and 2011-2013 National Survey of Family Growth. Results suggest that the provision is associated with decreases in the likelihood of having given birth and abortion rates and an increase in the likelihood of using long-term hormonal contraceptives.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEstimating the Costs of Covering Dependents through Employer-Sponsored Plans
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-48
Several health reform microsimulation models use synthetic firms to estimate how changes in federal and state policies will affect employers' offers of health insurance, as well as the price of health insurance for workers and firms. These models typically rely on distinct measures of the average costs of single and dependent coverage, for employees and employers, which do not capture the joint distribution of these costs. Since some firms pay a large share of the premium for single polices but a lower share for dependent coverage, or the reverse, simulation models that do not account for the joint distribution of premium costs may not be sufficient to answer certain policy questions. To address this issue, we developed a method to extract estimates of the joint distribution of employer and employee costs of health insurance coverage from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey ' Insurance Component (MEPS-IC). This paper describes how these distributions were constructed and how they were incorporated into the Urban Institute's Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM). The estimates presented in this paper and those available in supplementary datasets may be useful for other simulation models that need to utilize information on the joint distribution of single and dependent employee premium contributions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSchool Accountability and Residential Location Patterns: Evaluating the Unintended Consequences of No Child Left Behind
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-28
The 2002 to 2015 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is often considered the most significant federal intervention into education in the United States since 1965 with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. There is growing evidence that holding schools accountable is leading to some improved educational outcomes for students. There is in contrast very little work examining whether these sweeping reforms have unintended consequences for the communities which these schools are serving. As school attendance, particularly at the elementary school level, is closely tied to one's residence, placing sanctions on a school could have negative repercussions for neighborhoods if it provides new information on school failure. In contrast, if these sanctions also bring new resources, including financial resources or school choice, they could spark additional demand within a neighborhood. Through the use of restricted access census data, which includes local housing values, rents and individual residential choices in combination with the use of a boundary discontinuity identification strategy, this paper seeks to examine how failure to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the key enforcement mechanism of NCLB, is shaping local housing markets and residential choices in five diverse urban school districts: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and Tucson.View Full Paper PDF
