B E Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy最新文献

We study the factors associated with food insecurity and participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Mexican immigrant families in the US. Estimates from analyses that control for a rich set of economic, demographic, and geographic variables show that children in Mexican immigrant families are more likely to be food insecure than children in native families, but are less likely to participate in SNAP. Further, more vulnerable groups such as the first-generation Mexican immigrant families, families in the US for less than 5 years, and families with non-citizen children - that are at a higher risk of food insecurity are the least likely to participate in SNAP. Our analysis suggests that the US Department of Agriculture outreach initiative and SNAP expansion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act increased SNAP participation of the mixed-status Mexican families. We do not find any evidence that the outreach and ARRA expansion increased SNAP receipt among Mexican immigrant families with only non-citizen members who are likely to be undocumented.

Informal care is the largest source of long-term care for elderly, surpassing home health care and nursing home care. By definition, informal care is unpaid. It remains a puzzle why so many adult children give freely of their time. Transfers of time to the older generation may be balanced by financial transfers going to the younger generation. This leads to the question of whether informal care and inter-vivos transfers are causally related. We analyze data from the 1999 and 2003 waves of National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women. We examine whether the elderly parents give more inter-vivos monetary transfers to adult children who provide informal care, by examining both the extensive and intensive margins of financial transfers and of informal care. We find statistically significant results that a child who provides informal care is more likely to receive inter-vivos transfers than a sibling who does not. If a child does provide care, there is no statistically significant effect on the amount of the transfer.

This paper explores how high school graduate men and women vary in their behavioral responses to beginning labor market entry during a recession. In contrast with previous related literature that found a substantial negative wage impact but minimal employment impact in samples of highly educated men, the empirical evidence presented here suggests a different outcome for the less well educated, and between the sexes. Women, but not men, who graduate high school in an adverse labor market are less likely to be in the workforce for the next four years, but longer-term effects are minimal. Further, while men increase their enrollment as a short-run response to weak labor demand, women do not; instead, they appear to temporarily substitute into home production. Women's wages are less affected then men's, and both groups' wages are less affected than the college graduates previously studied.

This paper presents new estimates of sibling correlations in health and socioeconomic outcomes over the life course in the U.S. Sibling correlations provide an omnibus measure of the importance of all family and community influences. I find that sibling correlations in a range of health and socioeconomic outcomes start quite high at birth and remain high over the life course. The sibling correlation in birth weight is estimated to be 0.5. Sibling correlations in test scores during childhood are as high as 0.6. Sibling correlations in adult men's wages are also around 0.5. Decompositions provide suggestive evidence on which pathways may account for the gradients in health and SES by family background. For example, sibling correlations in cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills during childhood are lower controlling for family income. Similarly, parent education levels can account for a sizable portion of the correlation in adult health status among brothers.

Using national data from the U.S., we find that poor health at birth and limited parental resources (including low income, lack of health insurance, and unwanted pregnancy) interfere with cognitive development and health capital in childhood, reduce educational attainment, and lead to worse labor market and health outcomes in adulthood. These effects are substantial and robust to the inclusion of sibling fixed effects and an extensive set of controls. The results reveal that low birth weight ages people in their 30s and 40s by 12 years, increases the probability of dropping out of high school by one-third, lowers labor force participation by 5 percentage points, and reduces labor market earnings by roughly 15 percent. While poor birth outcomes reduce human capital accumulation, they explain only 10 percent of the total effect of low birth weight on labor market earnings. Taken together, the evidence is consistent with a negative reinforcing intergenerational transmission of disadvantage within the family; parental economic status influences birth outcomes, birth outcomes have long reaching effects on health and economic status in adulthood, which in turn leads to poor birth outcomes for one's own children.