The Effects of Minimum Wages on Food Stamp Enrollment and Expenditures

We provide the first causal analysis of how minimum wages affects enrollments and expenditures in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Exploiting state‐ and federal‐level variation in minimum‐wage policy between 1990 and 2012, and incorporating local controls in our specifications, we find that a 10 percent minimum wage increase reduces SNAP enrollment between 2.4 and 3.2 percent, and reduces program expenditures an estimated 1.9 percent. If the federal minimum wage were increased from $7.25 to $10.10, enrollment would fall between 7.5 and 8.7 percent (3.1 to 3.6 million persons) relative to 2012 levels, and annual expenditures would decrease 6 percent ($4.6 billion).     

A rotten deal for schools? An assessment of states’ success with the National School Lunch Program’s in-kind food benefit

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is one of the United States’ largest domestic food aid programs. The NSLP provides states with both cash and commodity foods for school meals. This research assessed the success of the school commodity program by comparing states’ available annual funding to the value of foods that states actually received from 2001 to 2009. Results indicate that an in-kind food funding system is not desirable for schools; states failed to receive entitled commodity food value in most years, resulting in annual funding losses for schools of $35–87 million. Inconsistent funding inhibits schools’ ability to improve meals and, ultimately, child nutrition outcomes. In light of these results, it is recommended that a cash benefit should replace the National School Lunch Program’s commodity food program.     

Real Estate Investment Acquisition Rules for Life Insurance Companies and Pension Funds: A Survey

Real estate comprises the major wealth of the United States as well as the world. Life insurance companies and pension funds are rapidly becoming major investors in real estate due to their large portfolios and annual cash inflows. Aggregate inflows of life insurance companies and pension funds are estimated to be about 150 billion dollars per year. Increasing amounts of these funds are believed to be going into real estate investments. This study surveys life insurance companies and pension managers on all facets of their real estate investments. The survey covers real estate portfolio size and type, portfolio composition, investment by property type, international investments, before-tax analysis, after-tax analysis, diversification strategies, computer usage, holding period assumptions and criteria for obtaining mortgages, equity positions and construction loans. The results of this study are then compared and contrasted with previous studies.     

Pharmaceutical followers

We estimate a model of drug demand and supply that incorporates insurance, advertising, and competition between branded and generic drugs within and across therapeutic classes. We use data on antiulcer drugs from 1991 to 2010. Our simulations show that generics and “me-too” drugs each increased consumer welfare more than $100 million in 2010, holding insurance premiums constant. However, insurance payments in 2010 fell by nearly $1 billion due to generics and rose by over $7 billion due to me-too antiulcer drugs.     

A retrospective on PIK

In what now appears as an overreaction to an excessive build-up of grain and cotton stocks, the Reagan administration in 1983 undertook the most massive and most costly acreage reduction programme in the history of US farm policy. Farmers reduced their acreage by 25% in return for $ 6 billion in cash payments and $ 9 billion in payments-in-kind in the form of government-controlled commodities. With yields sharply reduced by a major drought, the USA is now faced with the prospect of critically low stocks of feedgrains and soybeans and higher meat prices later this year.     

Universal service and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The fact after the act

Three goals of the 1996 Telecommunications Act are competition, efficiency, and explicit mechanisms to further universal service. The new universal service policies violate these goals. I review the policies (support for highcost and rural areas, low-income subscribers, and educational and medical institutions, and the funding mechanism) and detect the influence of various interest groups and the regulators' desire to protect their policies from public scrutiny. The new policies will require $4–12 billion per year to fund and create inefficiency of $1.2–4.0 billion per year from revenue taxation. A more efficient tax scheme would increase total surplus.     

An estimate of the average cumulative royalty yield in the world mobile phone industry: Theory,measurement and results

An influential literature argues that dispersed patent ownership may lead to royalty stacking and excessive running royalties, thus increasing the long-run marginal cost of manufacturing phones and their prices. One set of estimates claims that the royalty stack is on the order of 20–40 percent of the value of the average phone. In order to assess this claim, we estimate the average cumulative royalty yield—the sum total of patent royalty payments earned by licensors, divided by the total value of mobile phones shipped— in the world mobile phone industry between 2007 and 2016.We “follow the money” and identify, with varying accuracy, 39 potential licensors in the smartphone value chain. We find that, of these, only 29 charged royalties in 2016, running from a low of $1.6 million to a high of $7.7 billion, summing to $14.2 billion in total, which compares with $425.1 billion in mobile phone sales. The average cumulative royalty yield in 2016 was 3.3 percent or $7.20 per phone. If we restrict this only to smartphones, the result would be $9.60 per phone, roughly 3.4 percent of the average selling price. A sensitivity analysis shows that even under a very restrictive set of assumptions, the average cumulative royalty yield on a smartphone would not exceed 5.6 percent.     

Use of Public Transfer Programs and Privat Aid by Farm Workers

Legal status affects the use of public welfare and insurance and private assistance programs by families of farm workers. Families of unauthorized immigrants are more likely to use public medical assistance and less likely to use other public transfer programs than authorized immigrants and citizens. Unauthorized immigrants with young children in the United States are slightly more likely to use welfare, and welfare recipients are slightly more likely to have young children here.     

Assessing holistic economic value for multifunctional agriculture in the US

This study used contingent valuation method to shed light on public preferences on the multifunctional roles of the US agriculture and to present a holistic estimate of the economic value of the nonmarket goods and services of US agriculture. Contingent valuation survey instrument was administered to a sample composed from the Ipsos web-based panel. Fishbein’s model of reasoned behavior and mediation hypothesis were combined to model the relationship between WTP (behavioral intentions) and sets of explanatory variables including attitudes, perceived attributes (about family farms, farmland preservation programs, government involvement in agricultural markets, and ecological state of our world), and socio-demographic profiles. Results show that, while exerting a highly significant impact on WTP, attitudes mediate the effects of the attribute variables on WTP: i.e., the attributes influence WTP directly as well as indirectly through attitudes. The estimated mean WTP was $515 per taxpayer annually. Aggregating individual WTPs across the US taxpayers above 20 years old produces $105 billion, representing a crude estimate of the economic value that the US consumers place on the multifunctional roles of US agriculture.     

新生儿未参保之谜:基本事实、成因及其影响

中国已基本实现全民医疗保险覆盖,基本医疗保险参保率多年维持在95%以上,剩下的未参保人群成为真正实现全民医疗保险的“最后一公里”。精准识别未参保人群对于完善当前医疗保障制度具有重要意义。本文基于中国家庭追踪调查数据(CFPS),描述了大量新生儿未参加基本医疗保险的事实,并实证分析了参保率较低的原因及其对医疗服务利用的影响。描述性统计结果显示,新生儿参保率不足1/2,大大低于其他年龄阶段人群的参保率。进一步实证分析发现,父母不了解新生儿参保政策信息、基层组织缺乏向新生儿家庭宣传参保政策的激励是新生儿参保率低的主要原因。最后,考察未参保对新生儿医疗服务利用产生的影响,发现未参保状态显著降低了新生儿的医疗服务利用率。为了提高新生儿基本医疗保险参保率,政府一方面应针对性地加强新生儿医疗保险政策宣传,降低新生儿参保的信息障碍;另一方面应积极推动新生儿自动纳入基本医疗保障范围,甚至应考虑制定专门针对新生儿的医疗保健计划。     

Nominal and Real Required Returns in Present Value Analysis

Present value analysis is complicated by uncertainty about future inflation. If it so happened that real cash flows did not depend on inflation and real required returns were close to zero, then inflation and required returns could be omitted from present value analysis. Unfortunately, they cannot. This paper shows that real cash flows are typically sensitive to inflation and that, outside of the 1950s and 1960s, real interest rates, have not been very stable or close to zero. There have consequently been many years when a neglect of inflation and interest rates would have caused substantial present-value errors. It is also argued that interest rates on Treasury and Corporate AAA bonds are only appropriate for virtually risk-free projects. An engineering project normally commands a substantial risk premium and the neglect of such premia can cause a large overestimate of a project's present value.     

Unions and Unemployment Insurance Benefits Receipt: Evidence from the Current Population Survey

Using data from the January 1996 Current Population Survey's Displaced Worker Supplement, this article analyzes the effect of union representation on the likelihood that individuals eligible for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits receive UI benefits. For white-collar workers, unions do not have a significant effect on the probability of UI benefit receipt. Eligible blue-collar workers laid off from union jobs are approximately 23 percent more likely than comparable nonunion workers to receive UI benefits.     

Cash Balance Plans and the Distribution of Pension Wealth

Recent pension plan conversions by numerous large employers have sparked debate about the merits of cash balance plans. This article compares pension wealth in traditional defined benefit (DB) plans and cash balance plans for a national sample of covered Americans aged 51 to 61. The simulations indicate that replacing DB plans with cash balance plans would redistribute pension wealth from those with long-term jobs to those with multiple short-term jobs and from those with substantial pension benefits to those with more limited benefits. Perhaps unexpectedly, women at midlife in 1992 with DB coverage would lose wealth in cash balance plans, but future cohorts of women are likely to fare better.     

Toward universal telephone access: Market progress and progress beyond the market

The last 10 years have seen an explosion in access to telephone services worldwide based on rapid technology advance in increasingly competitive markets. The mobile phone has driven expansion in subscribers and access, especially in the developing world. This paper estimates global mobile footprint coverage based on 2002 data and calculates that as much as 77 percent of the world's population may live in an area covered by a mobile signal. Nonetheless, many people remain without access to telephony. The paper estimates the maximum likely cost in terms of cross subsidy within the industry and outside financing for achieving universal access using competitively awarded subsidies to private providers in a reformed market. This upper-end cost is estimated at $5.7 billion, with costs that could not be supplied by a reasonable tax on existing providers (and so required from outside the sector) estimated at $1.8 billion.     

Changes in REIT Liquidity 1990–1994: Evidence from Intra-day Transactions

This study uses data on intra-day transactions to analyze whether real estate investment (REIT) liquidity as measured by the bid-ask spread changed from 1990 to 1994, a period during which the industry's market capitalization increased from $8.7 billion to $45 billion. REIT percentage spreads (spread as percentage of share price) narrowed significantly, primarily attributable to higher share prices rather than narrower dollar-value spreads. An empirical model is used to analyze the determinants of percentage spreads. Return variance and share price, not market capitalization are found to be the primary determinants of percentage spreads in both periods. This suggests that the liquidity of REIT securities is similar to that of non-REIT securities with similar prices and return variance. In addition, percentage spreads are wider for REITs trading on the NASDAQ.     

The Role of Real Estate in the Portfolio Allocation Process

This study explores the role of direct real estate investment in a portfolio context incorporating the real estate imperfections of indivisible assets and no short sales. Mean-variance efficient portfolios are calculated using Treasury-bills, bond and equity indices together with cash flows and appraised values from a set of twenty-two properties having an aggregate appraised value of $336 million. Real estate diversification benefits are shown to be the greatest with smaller properties and are most advantageous at higher target levels of return. The study suggests that a 9% allocation to real estate is optimal, rather than the 20% figure suggested in other studies.     

The broadband bonus: Estimating broadband Internet's economic value

How much economic value did broadband Internet create? Despite the importance of this question for national policy, no research has estimated broadband's incremental contribution to U.S. GDP by calibrating against historical adoption and incorporating counterfactuals. This study provides benchmark estimates for 1999 through 2006 and finds that broadband accounts for $28 billion of the $39 billion observed in 2006. Depending on the estimate, households generated $20-$22 billion of broadband revenue and approximately $8.3-$10.6 billion was additional revenue created between 1999 and 2006. Consumer surplus accounted for $4.8-$6.7 billion of this amount, which is not measured in GDP. An Internet-access Consumer Price Index would have to decline by 1.6-2.2% per year for it to reflect this unmeasured value. These estimates differ from existing benchmarks by an order of magnitude and relate to several policy debates.     

Exposing organizational buyers to consumer magazine advertisements

The feasibility of using consumer magazines in support of more traditional industrial media in marketing programs designed to create awareness and goodwill among industrial buyers and purchasing influentials is examined. Specifically, magazines delivering at least 10 percent of those individuals influencing organizational purchases of $1000 or more are compared with trade publications. Exposure patterns are examined in total and by segments based on company size. Consumer magazines are found more cost efficient than industry-trade publications and should be considered for exposing purchasing influentials to institutional advertisement containing general appeals designed to build firm awareness among industrial buyers and influentials in different industries.     

Unionism in State and Local Governments: Ohio and Illinois, 1982-87

Census of Governments (COG) data for 1982 and 1987 were analyzed to assess growth in state and local government unionism in Ohio and Illinois, two states that enacted comprehensive public employee bargaining legislation in 1983. Against a backdrop of stable state and local government unionism across the United States, Ohio and Illinois recorded substantial gains in certain sectors. The greatest gains were observed in sectors that had been only lightly unionized prior to enactment of law. Laws had much less impact on more heavily unionized sectors. In spite of the gains, Ohio and Illinois remain substantially less unionized, on average, than do states that enacted comprehensive bargaining legislation earlier.