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Contact Avani Raval or Sallie Barker with any questions or comments. |
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Session Overviews
Session One of the Child Policy Conference brings together Bruce Meyer, the McCormick Tribune scholar of the University of Chicago, with Sara Hamersma, Assistant Professor of Economics of the University of Florida. Led by Discussant Robert Haveman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, each will present papers relevant to Federal Welfare Reforms, Employment, Income and Consumption.
Meyer's paper, “Consumption, Income and Material Well-Being After Welfare Reform,” examines how material well-being has changed since the early 1990s, particularly for those at the bottom of measured distributions of income and for families headed by a single mother. Meyer's research shows startling drops in income in the lowest decile while the top deciles report significant gains. At the same time, consumption by the bottom sector showed no sharp decrease, largely due to increases in spending on housing. Meyer makes the case that it is no longer likely that reported incomes provide a consistent way to measure income of single mothers, who make up a large majority of households living in poverty. His research looked at changes in disaggregated consumption and time use and draws conclusions with regard to changes in the material well-being of these families.
Hamersma’s research examines employer participation in federally subsidized programs such as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) and the Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit (WtW). In addition to looking at the rate of participation by eligible companies, Hamersma studied the effects of the programs on welfare recipients’ labor market outcomes and the interaction of these subsidies with opportunities for temporary employment. Her primary finding is that these two programs have low participation rates and limited effects on the labor market outcomes of welfare recipients.
Bruce Meyer is the McCormick Tribune Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Dr. Meyer studies tax policy, welfare policy, unemployment insurance, minority entrepreneurship, the healthcare safety net and numerous labor issues. He has been a visiting professor at the University College London and Princeton University, a member of the Institute for Research on Poverty and has held several distinguished faculty fellowships. Dr. Meyer has served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Sarah Hamersma, Assistant Professor of Economics of the University of Florida, received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. Her research addresses issues at the nexus of anti-poverty policy, labor economics and public economics. She focuses on empirical studies, emphasizing the analysis of labor incentives created by programs designed to combat poverty.
Robert Haveman is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Research Affiliate at their Institute for Research on Poverty. Widely published in public finance, the economics of poverty, social policy and other related areas of expertise, Dr. Haveman serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals including The Economist, and has been appointed to numerous advisory boards and committees within such organizations as the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Urban Institute and Resources for the Future.
Janet Johnson, Adjunct Professor of Economics and Senior Research Fellow, Nonprofit Studies Program, of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, is Session Chair. Johnson's interests and expertise are in two areas: labor economics and nonprofit studies. In both cases she brings to the table highly honed statistical skills. She led a recent study surveying the homeless population in Atlanta.
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Session Two explores three research studies impacting Public Programs and Children’s Health under the guidance of Discussant Bobbie Wolfe.
Mary Ann Phillips of the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center will discuss a grant program designed to promote collaboration among community-based organizations, health care providers, and Georgia’s Medicaid agency. Since public participation in the development of community health programs is a means to generate relevant and innovative solutions to community health promotion, this program seeks to encourage such participation in improving the utilization of children’s health services provided by Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program. The program made six awards to community-based organizations and evaluated these programs retrospectively to identify the methods used to increase health services utilization, the barriers encountered, and the innovative solutions created.
Angela Fertig of the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia sought to explore the relationship between public housing and health outcomes among low-income housing residents and whether the availability of easier access to public health clinics and social support networks may have provided a positive benefit to public housing residents. Fertig analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study and found that public housing residences do not appear to have a robust health effect on children or their mothers.
Patricia Ketsche, Kathleen Adams and Karen Minyard wished to determine the extent to which access and satisfaction with health care is influenced more by enrollee characteristics than the characteristics of the particular public program in which a child is enrolled. Georgia is one of 18 states with distinct Medicaid and S-CHIP (Peachcare) programs and this study helped measure access and perceived satisfaction of each, which is helpful to state officials considering whether to combine the programs.
Mary Ann Phillips has been with the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center since its inception in 1995. She has worked on a number of projects, including conducting research for the implementation of health insurance market reforms and health plan purchasing cooperatives in Georgia; managing a statewide effort to obtain provider and consumer input for reforming the state Medicaid system; and assisting with the development of Georgia's children's health insurance program, PeachCare for Kids. Before joining the center, she worked for the Governor's Commission on Health Care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Health Planning Branch of the U.S. Public Health Service.
Angela Fertig is an assistant professor in the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia in Athens, with a joint appointment in the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Prior to her current appointment, she was an assistant professor of economics at Indiana University in Bloomington and a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University. Her research focuses on issues related to young families, poverty, and health. Current projects include studying prenatal smoking and alcohol exposure, childhood obesity, child support enforcement policies, domestic violence, Medicaid take-up, public housing, and homelessness.
E. Kathleen Adams, Ph.D., is an economist with more than 20 years experience in health services research and a Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) at Emory University. She also serves as a Health Economist in the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health (DRH). Throughout her career the focus of her research has been on low-income and vulnerable populations and this has translated into extensive experience with Medicaid populations, issues and policies. Adams has also recently completed work on the effectiveness of Medicaid family planning waivers and was co-PI on a large grant that examined the implementation of primary care case management and S-CHIP on Medicaid children's access and utilization in Georgia and Alabama.
Patricia Ketsche, Ph.D., MBA, MHA, is on the faculty of the Institute of Health Administration at Georgia State. Her primary research interests focus on determinants of public and private insurance, coverage in the population and the effect of coverage on access to and satisfaction with care. She has studied the relationship between compensation and coverage and the effect of the tax subsidization of employment-based health insurance on risk pooling in that market. Dr. Ketsche worked for several years in the employee benefits field and worked as a physical therapist in a variety of health care settings for over 10 years.
Karen Minyard is director of the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center and is charged with leading the policy, research, and technical assistance programs of the center. The center's program areas are concentrated in care at the end of life, child well-being, health philanthropy, rural health, and access to care for the uninsured. Minyard is an advocate for basic restructuring of local health care systems to focus on access to care and health status improvements. She serves as an officer on the founding board of the Community Health Leadership Network, a national partnership dedicated to helping communities achieve healthcare access, and has provided numerous consultations and presentations for groups and organizations that seek to build stronger health care systems.
Barbara (Bobbie) Wolfe, Professor in the departments of Economics, Population Health Sciences, and Lafollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wolfe is an affiliate and past director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. She has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1977. Her current research projects focus on health economics including in particular, child health, persons with disabilities, the tie between Children’s Health Insurance Program characteristics and coverage and the tie between health, race, income and wealth. She has published extensively in economics journals and serves on the board of a number of professional organizations. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
Andrea Young, Vice President of SPARK DC and Project Director for the National Black Child Development Institute, is Session Chair. She is an accomplished program executive, human rights activist, writer and member of the State Bar of Georgia. Young leads SPARK DC, a collaborative initiative to improve school readiness for young children in the District of Columbia. Since its inception, SPARK DC has helped local funding for early childhood programs in the District of Columbia increase by more than $31.5 million, helped the District to adopt early learning standards and to launch a new pre-Kindergarten initiative. Young is the author of Life Lessons My Mother Taught Me and assisted her father, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, in writing his memoir of the civil rights movement An Easy Burden, Civil Rights and the Transformation of America.
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Session Three of the Conference, Education, with Discussant David Figlio of the University of Florida, examines trends in early childhood education that have an impact on multiple skill sets critical to the development of young children.
Gary Henry and Dana Rickman of the Andrew Young School, who have been studying various aspects of Pre-K/early intervention programs for more than five years, present their paper on value-added peer effects, an area that has been previously studied in older age school children but not those as young as age four. This groundbreaking research shows direct and positive peer effects on the children’s cognitive skills, pre-reading skills and expressive language skills.
Guanglei Hong of the University of Ontario studied the controversial topic of grade retention, particularly kindergarten retention. By analyzing data from the U.S. Early Childhood Longitudinal Kindergarten Study, she found evidence suggesting that children who are retained in kindergarten learn less in the repeated year than they would have had they instead been promoted. Dr. Hong’s work further evaluated the effects of kindergarten retention on cognitive development in reading and mathematics, as well as on the children’s socio-emotional development.
Gary Henry is a professor of policy studies in the Andrew Young School. He previously served as the Director of Evaluation and Learning Services for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Henry has evaluated a variety of policies and programs, including Pre-K and the HOPE Scholarship in Georgia as well as school reforms and accountability systems. Henry has been appointed to serve on the Institute of Education Sciences Education Systems and Broad Reform Scientific Review Panel.
Dana Rickman is a research associate at the Andrew Young School and Principal Investigator for The Georgia Pre-Kindergarten Resource Coordinator (RC) Program Evaluation, which is a descriptive evaluation that examines the services provided by the RC Program, how these services are delivered to the students enrolled in Georgia’s Pre-K program and the role of the RC Program in transitioning children into kindergarten. Rickman is also the project manager for the North Carolina Disadvantaged Student Supplement Fund (DSSF) Pilot Program Evaluation.
Guanglei Hong is Assistant Professor of Measurement and Evaluation in the Department of Human Development and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2005 American Educational Research Association Mary Catherine Ellwein Outstanding Dissertation Award in Quantitative Research Methodology. She focuses her research interests on concepts and methods for causal inferences in social scientific and educational research. Her applied interests are in assessing the effectiveness of educational policies and programs; disclosing the dependence of policy and program effects on mediating factors such as variation in local implementation; and studying the causal effects of sequences of instructional experiences on the cognitive growth of students over multiple years.
David Figlio is the Knight-Ridder Professor of Economics and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research at the University of Florida. His recent work includes evaluating the intended and unintended consequences of school accountability initiatives, measuring the efficacy of pre-kindergarten programs, and identifying the determinants and effects of teacher expectations on students. He is the inaugural editor of the new MIT Press Journal Education Finance and Policy and has had his work published in top economic journals. He has also assisted several foreign countries in the development and evaluation of their education policies.
David Sjoquist, Professor of Economics and holder of the Dan E. Sweat Chair in Educational and Community Policy in the Andrew Young School is Session Chair. Director of Domestic Programs and Director of the Fiscal Research Center, Sjoquist’s research focuses on state and local public finance, urban economics, local economic development and central city poverty, and educational policy. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota. He is a member of several professional associations and is on the Board of Editors of the National Tax Journal.
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Session Four, led by Discussant Erdal Tekin, examines two facets of a topic frequently making news in today’s American culture Childhood Obesity. Shin Yi Chou, Michael Grossman and Inas Rashad studied the influence of fast food restaurant advertising on childhood obesity and Rashad teamed with colleague Dhaval Dave to determine if overweight status is causal to the suicidal behaviors of adolescents. An escalating problem both in the United States and around the world, childhood obesity’s effects are especially detrimental as they carry on into adulthood. The first team utilized two longitudinal studies of youth to estimate the frequency of fast food advertising and its impact on children and teens; and made the recommendation that a ban on such advertising could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 12 percent.
The second team, Rashad and Dave, examined statistics that point to possible links between adolescent suicide and suicidal behaviors, and overweight status, which previous studies have shown are causal to depressive disorders and potentially to suicidal thoughts or attempts in adults. Their research makes the case that adolescents may not have been randomly selected into previous analyses of overweight status and suicidal behaviors and that, if overweight status is found causually to raise the propensity of engaging in suicidal ideation and attempts, risk of suicide should be added to the economic costs of obesity. Further, they make the case that isolating causal risk factors for suicidal behaviors among youths may guide targeted interventions for identifying and assisting those as risk.
Jim Alm, Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics in the Andrew Young School is Session Chair. Professor Alm teaches and conducts research in the area of public economics, has authored six books and published articles in leading economics journals. He has also worked extensively on fiscal and decentralization reforms overseas, including projects in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jamaica, Grenada, Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, China, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Uganda, Nigeria, India and Nepal.
Michael Grossman is Distinguished Professor of Economics in the Ph.D. Program in Economics at The City University of New York Graduate Center and Research Associate, and Health Economics Program Director at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the author of four books, 57 journal articles, and 33 book chapters. His extensive research has focused on economic models of the determinants of adult, child, and infant health in the U.S.; economic approaches to cigarette smoking and alcohol use by teenagers and young adults; the relationship between substance use and risky sexual behavior by teenagers; the economics of obesity and many other topics. Grossman edits or co-edits numerous scholarly publications and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and was listed in the 2003 edition of Who’s Who in Economics.
Shin-Yi Chou is Assistant Professor of Economics and Kane Faculty Fellow at Lehigh University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her B.A. from National Taiwan University in 1994 and her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1999. Her research focuses on quality and cost of health care; economic analysis of obesity; and health insurance, education and behavior/health outcomes. Her recent research on parental education and child well-being, and national health insurance and child health are funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development and the National Science Foundation, respectively.
Inas Rashad is a Research Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research health economics program and an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the Andrew Young School. In addition to her research pertaining to child health, advertising and obesity, she studies policy implications regarding corporate tax deductibility and how foods that have high glycemic indexes are affecting the prevalence of Type II diabetes, once termed adult-onset diabetes but now afflicting numerous adolescents and even children. Rashad’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and she has written articles for the Dallas Morning News, the Journal of Health Economics, Public Policy Research, the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and Gender Issues.
Dhaval Dave is currently an assistant professor at Bentley College and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the public policy aspects relating to the economic determinants of the demand for addictive substances including illicit drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Other research interests are in the area of applied microeconomics, including the economics of human resources, moral hazard due to health insurance, production of mental health, production of infant health, and obesity. He received his Ph.D. in economics from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 2003 and was a John M. Olin post-doctoral research fellow in Health Care Systems at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Session Five, led by Discussant Eric Twombly, explores papers measuring Environmental Factors Affecting Children, including health care utilization and quality; neighborhood/school crime and school performance; and child abuse and neglect.
Glenn Landers and Mei Zhou of the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center compared health status and health care utilization of children in Georgia’s foster care system relevant to other Georgia Medicaid children and against national norms for children who are recipients of Medicaid. Georgia foster children fare well in their access to healthcare in comparison, particularly in the area of preventative care. In the utilization of some services, they defied national trends. Landers and Zhou analyzed demographics, health conditions, service utilization, cost and quality indicators using three years of Georgia Medicaid data.
William Smith and Mary Beth Walker of the Andrew Young School wanted to explore the link between violent crimes in and around urban schools and the poor performance of those schools. Their paper investigated this link using geographic data from a large urban school district; its relevance was validated by new funding requirements in the No Child Left Behind act, which diminishes or takes away entirely federal dollars from campuses deemed “unsafe.” Their preliminary findings show evidence that neighborhood crime has significant negative impact on school outcomes and that the magnitude of the effect is higher for reports of violent crimes committed outside of schools.
Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin focused their paper on measuring the effects of child maltreatment, both abuse and neglect, and on crime, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Because crime is one of the most socially costly potential outcomes of maltreatment, this research was largely focused on identifying casual impacts of abuse and using a large sample to investigate different types of abuse within a similar framework. Results found that maltreatment approximately doubles the probability of engaging in many types of crime and multiple types of maltreatment increase the probability.
Glenn Landers is a Senior Research Associate at the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center with primary expertise in long-term care. Since joining the center in 1999, Landers has directed or participated in many projects addressing the improvement of Georgia’s long-term care system and directs research projects addressing health care access for the uninsured. He has worked to develop options for care of the uninsured, evaluated the condition of the health care safety net, and recently completed a three-year research study evaluating the use of primary care dollars in the state's Indigent Care Trust Fund, Georgia's Disproportionate Share Hospital program.
Mei Zhou, M.S, M.A., is a research associate at the Andrew Young School's Georgia Health Policy Center. Ms. Zhou is experienced with large data sets, especially Medicaid claims data analysis. Ms. Zhou’s current projects include an evaluation of the health care safety net in seven metropolitan Atlanta counties, performing the data analysis for the State Coverage Initiative project granted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Georgia Department of Community Health, and an evaluation of Georgia’s Disease Management program.
William J. (Joey) Smith is a senior research associate with the Fiscal Research Center at the Andrew Young School. His current research includes forecasting TANF and Medicaid eligibility for the State of Georgia and investigating the effects of employment access on TANF labor force participation. His research interests include economic geography, poverty and welfare, state and local public finance and urban economics. He holds a Ph.D. from Georgia State University.
Janet Currie is the Charles E. Davidson Professor of Economics at UCLA. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate of the University of Michigan's Poverty Center and has served on several National Academy panels. She has held positions at MIT and Princeton. Her work evaluates the extent to which federal programs for poor children and families can be viewed as successful social investments.
Erdal Tekin is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Andrew Young School. His current research focuses on the effects of welfare reform on single mothers' child care, employment, and welfare decisions. His work has received funding from the Child Care Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Tekin is a research affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany.
Mary Beth Walker is an associate professor of economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Her research is primarily in the area of micro-econometrics, with a specialization in spatial econometrics. She has done applied work in several areas, including education, public finance, and health economics. She has published in a variety of journals, including the National Tax Journal, Public Finance Review and Journal of Econometrics.
Eric Twombly is a national expert on social service provision by community-based, nonprofit organizations and wage setting in the nonprofit sector. He has also written widely on the determinants of charitable giving in metropolitan areas, the fiscal capacity of nonprofits, and the ability of advocates to improve worker compensation in the child care industry. Focusing specifically on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, he recently completed a multiyear assessment of child services and a study of the economic activity of the region’s nonprofit sector. Prior to joining the faculty of the Andrew Young School, Twombly was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his doctorate in public policy from the George Washington University, where he also taught as an Assistant Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and Public Administration.
Julie Hotchkiss, a research economist and policy adviser in the regional group of the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, is Session Chair. She is also Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Andrew Young School. Her major fields of study are earnings and employment differentials across different groups of workers, variations in employment and earnings across time, and policy implications of changes in labor supply. Dr. Hotchkiss has published her research work in various journals and is a member of the American Economic Association, and a board member of the Southern Economic Association, and serves on the Committee of the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She earned her master’s degree and doctorate in economics at Cornell University.
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