This paper uses the rollout of the first Community Health Centers (CHCs) to study the longer-term health effects of increasing access to primary care. Within ten years, CHCs are associated with a reduction in age-adjusted mortality rates of 2 percent among those 50 and older. The implied 7 to 13 percent decrease in one-year mortality risk among beneficiaries amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the 1...

Head Start is a comprehensive, early childhood development program designed to augment the human capital and health capital levels of disadvantaged children. Grossman’s (1972) health capital model suggests that early investments of this type should have lasting effects on health outcomes. This research evaluates the impact of Head Start on long-term health by comparing health outcome and behavi...

Economists explain welfare dependency of the unemployed and in-work poverty by the low labour market quality of the poor. Work can be made to pay by working family tax credits. But these might lower wages and price nonrecipients out of the market, widening the eligibility for the wage supplementation and raising social welfare bills. This was precisely the effect of the Speenhamland system of w...

Social Insurance Networks Based on administrative panel data from Norway, we examine how social insurance dependency spreads within neighborhoods, families, ethnic minorities, and among former schoolmates. We use a fixed effects methodology that accounts for endogenous group formation, contextual interactions, and time-constant as well as time-varying confounders. We report evidence that social...

This paper asks whether targeting welfare benefits to women can be effective at changing household spending. We provide empirical evidence on this question by using a reform to the UK tax-credit system in 2003 as a quasi-experiment. We find that the reform caused low-income households to reallocate spending towards children’s goods. The results further demonstrate that the effects of directing ...

Child Care Subsidy Receipt, Employment, and Child Care Choices of Single Mothers This paper examines the impact of actual subsidy receipt of single mothers on their joint employment and child care mode decisions in the post-welfare reform environment, which places a high priority on parental choice with the quality and type of care chosen. Results indicate that single mothers are highly respons...

Participants in means-tested programs must periodically document eligibility through a recertification process. If all cases that fail are ineligible, the exact timing of this process should be irrelevant. We find later interview assignments for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which leave less time to reschedule missed interviews, decrease success by 22 percent. The consequenc...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax effect on subjective well-being is significant and positive when controlling for income net of taxes. T...

This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time employment, earnings, and income, and reduced pove...

Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to be low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia, unemployment, income, marriage, sex, health and age. Communist Party membership and political participation raise l...