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Working Paper
The effect of Medicaid eligibility expansions on births
In an effort to increase the use of prenatal care by pregnant women and the utilization of medical care by children, eligibility for Medicaid was expanded dramatically for pregnant women and children during the 1980s and early 1990s. By lowering the costs of prenatal care, delivery, and child health care for some individuals, Medicaid expansions may prompt some women to give birth who otherwise would not have children or lead some women to have more children than they otherwise would have. This study uses natality data from 1983 to 1996 to examine the relationship between a state's ...
Journal Article
Unions and the wage-productivity gap
Although both real wages and productivity have been growing at relatively slow rates during the last two decades, some measures indicate that earnings have failed to keep up with productivity growth. The slowdown in real wage growth is important to workers and their families because their purchasing power is not rising if earnings are not increasing faster than prices. The failure of growth in real wages to match productiv-ity gains also has critical implications for workers. ; A substantial decline in the unionization rate since the 1960s has been cited as underlying the wage-productivity ...
Working Paper
Do remittances boost economic development? Evidence from Mexican states
Remittances have been promoted as a development tool because they can raise incomes and reduce poverty rates in developing countries. Remittances may also promote development by providing funds that recipients can spend on education or health care or invest in entrepreneurial activities. From a macroeconomic perspective, remittances can boost aggregate demand and thereby GDP as well as spur economic growth. However, remittances may also have adverse macroeconomic impacts by increasing income inequality and reducing labor supply among recipients. We use state-level data from Mexico during ...
Working Paper
The impact of welfare reform on marriage and divorce
The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage; the pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided benefits to single mothers. However, welfare reform may have actually decreased the incentives to be married by giving women greater financial independence via the program's new emphasis on work. This paper uses Vital Statistics data on marriages and divorces during 1989-2000 to examine the role of ...
Working Paper
Unauthorized Mexican Workers in the United States: Recent Inflows and Possible Future Scenarios
The U.S. economy has long relied on immigrant workers, many of them unauthorized, yet estimates of the inflow of unauthorized workers and the determinants of that inflow are hard to come by. This paper provides estimates of the number of newly arriving unauthorized workers from Mexico, the principal source of unauthorized immigrants to the United States, and examines how the inflow is related to U.S. and Mexico economic conditions. Our estimates suggest that annual inflows of unauthorized workers averaged about 170,000 during 1996-2014 but were much higher before the economic downturn that ...
Working Paper
Does immigration affect wages? A look at occupation-level evidence
Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about whether higher levels of immigration reduce the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill level. Using occupation as a proxy for skill, the authors find that an increase in the fraction of workers in an occupation group who are foreign born tends to lower the wages of low-skilled natives-particularly after controlling for endogeneity-but does not have a negative effect among skilled natives.
Journal Article
Higher minimum wage looms large in Texas
The rising minimum wage has important implications for Texas, which unlike other big states sets its minimum wage equal to the federal one.
Journal Article
Welfare and the locational choices of new immigrants
The 1996 welfare law ends most noncitizens' eligibility for federally funded public assistance programs and allows states to cut off payments under other welfare programs to noncitizens. If some states choose to continue extending benefits while others terminate payments to immigrants, interstate differentials in welfare generosity will widen. Potential policy differences create concern that states that continue to offer benefits to immigrants will become welfare magnets. ; In this article, Madeline Zavodny examines whether welfare generosity is correlated with the number of new immigrants ...