The Impact of 2021 Advance Child Tax Credit Payments on Low-Income Households’ Labor Supply
by Zixin “Ellen” Zhang
Abstract
Studies have established that the Advance 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments substantially reduced poverty and food insecurity, but some claim that the CTC payments may create negative labor supply effects that could offset its hardship-reduction benefits. Researchers have used a variety of methods to measure how the monthly CTC payments affect the labor supply of households, but the results vary from significant decreases to no significant change to even increases in household labor supply. Using a method novel to this literature, I estimate the labor supply impacts of Advance 2021 CTC by analyzing labor supply changes in response to real amounts of CTC received, which varies by household depending on regional cost-of-livings. Through fixed effects linear regressions across many different combinations of household type and income level, I find that, on average, receiving Advance CTC caused a statistically significant decrease in household labor supply. However, for different household subgroups, I find both statistically significant and insignificant labor supply impacts as well as both increases, decreases, and no change in households’ labor supply due to monthly CTC payments. This suggests that the impacts of 2021 Advance CTC on household labor depend heavily on a household’s situation, specifically income level and household composition. These household-specific patterns align with prior research on the Advance 2021 CTC and how welfare payments are used by families.
Professor Thomas Nechyba, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C31, H24, I38, J22
Financial Inclusion and Women’s Economic Empowerment in India
by Nehal Jain
Abstract
On August 14th, 2014 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi implemented the largest ever financial inclusion scheme to date known as Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). The program aimed to bank all of India’s unbanked population. Prior to the program, India had one of the highest rates of unbanked citizens. The program also included measures that prioritized women’s access to these financial institutions given the gender gap in financial inclusivity. This paper aims both to understand the effectiveness of PMJDY on granting women equal access as men to financial institutions and whether financial inclusion results in increased economic empowerment, I find that PMJDY was successful in increasing access to bank accounts and separately, that access to bank accounts economically empowers women.
Professor Pengpeng Xiao, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: J1; G28; I31
Is Affordable Housing Moving Mobile? Analyzing the Impact of COVID-19 on Demand for Manufactured Housing
by Jair Coleridge Soman Alleyne
Abstract
As demand for affordable housing continues to increase in America, manufactured homes provide a private solution to this problem. Research has shown that manufactured home prices are largely dependent on the price of local housing substitutes as well as other geographic hedonic factors. This paper looks at the impact of Covid-19 on the manufactured housing market to determine the effects that economic shocks have on the demand for manufactured housing. Conditional on wanting to buy a house, we use a logistic model to examine the probability that an individual purchases a manufactured home and whether this probability increases at times of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. Due to the nature of our data, although the impact of Covid as a disease is difficult to measure, we do find decreased income and increased unemployment to be a factor increasing the likelihood of purchasing a manufactured home. We also find that in 2020, demand for manufactured housing increased significantly compared to the years prior.
Professor Charles Becker, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: R2, R21, I32
Do Evictions Cause Income Changes? An Instrumental Variables Approach
By Grace Mok
Evictions are an important aspect of the affordable housing crisis facing low-income American renters. However, there has been little research quantifying the causal impact of evictions, which poses challenges for academics interested in understanding inequality and policy-makers interested in reducing it. Merging two datasets both new to the literature, I address this gap in the causal literature by using an instrumental variables strategy to examine the impact of evictions on household income over time in Durham, North Carolina. Exploiting gentrification-related evictions as an instrument, I find a 2.5% decrease in household income after eviction. This is a small, but significant decrease in income given that median household income for households at time of eviction is about $15,000.
Advisors: Professor Christopher Timmins, Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I32, R29
The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?
By Hayley Jordan Barton
This research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very sensitive to specification, but Oportunidades participation is shown to be positively associated with educational attainment regardless of homicide increases. Homicides are associated with decreases in likelihood of school enrollment and compulsory education completion; however, they also correspond with increases in educational attainment, with a larger effect for Oportunidades non-recipients.
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Advisors: Professor Charles Becker, and Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C23; D15; I20; I38; J24
Assessing the Impacts of an Aging Population on Rising Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Expenditures within the United States
By Rahul Sharma
This paper studies the impact of aging on rising healthcare and pharmaceutical expenditures in the United States with the goal of contextualizing the future burden of public health insurance on the government. Precedent literature has focused on international panels of multiple countries and hasn’t identified significant correlation between age and healthcare expenditures. This paper presents a novel approach of identifying this correlation by using a US sample population to determine if age impacts an individual’s consumption of healthcare services and goods. Results suggest that age has a significant impact on healthcare and pharmaceutical expenditures across private and public insurance.
Advisors: Gilliam D. Saunders-Schmidler and Grace Kim | JEL Codes: H51, H53, I12, I13, I18, I38
Measuring the Long-term Effects of Orphanhood
By Nicholas Thomas Gardner
This paper works towards developing the narrative of orphans whose parent or parents died from natural disaster. By taking advantage of the unanticipated nature of death from the 2004
Indonesian tsunami, orphanhood can be treated as much closer to random than similar literature using data centered on HIV/AIDS related deaths. We use a community level fixed effects model to attempt to derive a causal relationship between orphanhood and both education and log wages. Our models suggest that orphaned males aged 14 and older at baseline complete 1-2 fewer years of education than their cohorts. The adverse effects persist in the long-term, as these orphans earn 26% less than non-orphan cohorts.
Advisors: Duncan Thomas and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I24, I25, I31, J24, J31
The Impact of Suburbanization on Poverty Concentration: Using Transportation Networks to Predict the Spatial Distribution of Poverty
By Winston Riddick
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of concentrated poverty, a phenomenon where socioeconomically deprived groups are heavily concentrated in particular neighborhoods in a metropolitan area. Drawing on Land Use Theory and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis, I develop a theory that identifies suburbanization as a principal cause of poverty concentration. Using interstate highway expansion as a source of exogenous variation in suburbanization rates, I evaluate this relationship in 240 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1960-1990, with concentrated poverty measured at the tract level. Panel regressions with MSA Fixed Effects find a positive and significant relationship between highway expansion and increased poverty concentration under a variety of specifications, including alternative measures of highways and an instrumented measure of urban population decline.
Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I30, J61, R13, R40 | Tagged: Highways, Poverty Concentration, Spatial Mismatch, Suburbanization, Transportation Networks
Foreign Aid Allocation and Impact: A Sub-National Analysis of Malawi
By Rajlakshmi De
Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries for development economics. To augment past cross-country studies and randomized evaluations, this project data from Malawi is used in combination with multiple rounds of living standards data to predict the allocation and impact of health aid, water aid, and education aid. Both instrumentation and propensity score matching methods are used.
Advisor: Charles Becker | JEL Codes: F35, I15, I25, I32, O12 | Tagged: Development, Education, Foreign Aid, Health, Malawi, Water
