This paper investigates the effects of economic incentives on divorce and remarriage behavior. Before December 1977, the Social Security law entitled divorcees to claim auxiliary benefits on their ex-spouse’s record only if the marriage lasted at least 20 years. One of the 1977 amendments of...

Background: Increasing the productivity and efficiency of physician practices could help relieve the rapid growth of U.S. healthcare costs and the expected physician shortage. Radiology practices are an attractive specific focus for research on practices’ productivity and efficiency because...

Purpose: To test the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a multilevel intervention for population-level African American (AA) severe maternal morbidity and mortality.Background: Severe maternal morbidity and mortality in the U.S. disproportionately affect AA women. Inequities occur at many...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could either penalize or subsidize marriage. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and controlling for individual fixed effects and the endogeneity of the EITC, we find that, among a sample of married women with children, those who...

The Social Security program, like the federal income tax system, is not marriage neutral. Provisions in each public program, in effect, subsidize or penalize marriage. In this paper, we examine marriage penalties associated with Social Security's child–in–care benefits. This program provides...

The transfer system typically has large marriage disincentives, while the income tax system is likely to subsidize marriage for many low-income families. In other words, the tax system may mitigate the loss of transfer benefits associated with marriage. The relevance of the income tax system for...

Cohabitation is an alternative to marriage and to living independently for an increasing number of Americans. Despite this fact, research exploring links between living arrangements and economic behavior is limited by a lack of data that explicitly identify cohabiting couples. To aid researchers...

This paper examines 237 instances of policy changes related to alcohol sales and consumption enacted in Texas communities between 1975 and 1996 to determine their effect on the incidence of alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents. These policies are categorized by location where the alcohol is...

In the United States and Europe there has been renewed interest in subsidizing firms that employ disadvantaged workers as a means of addressing poverty and other social problems. In contrast, the prevailing practice is largely to provide social welfare benefits directly to individuals. Which...

This research seeks to understand the role of information, in the form of media campaigns, and changes in transaction costs, in the form of online applications and call centers, in the growth in county-level SNAP caseloads. We find that SNAP radio advertisements are associated with a small...