Handedness and earnings (2009)
Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, Robert Moffitt
We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labour market and, in particular, to earnings. We find a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education. This...
Gordon Dahl, Lance Lochner, Dan Black, David Blau, Julie Cullen, ...
Lochner also acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. IRP Publications (discussion papers, special reports, and the newsletter Focus) are available on...
Estimating Marginal Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Populations (2008)
generous help in obtaining and using the data. Comments from Joshua Angrist, James
Audra J. Bowlus, Jean-marc Robin, Richard Blundell, Martin Browning, Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt, ...
In this paper, we compare and contrast earnings inequality and mobility across the
Job Instability and Insecurity for Males and Females in the 1980's and 1990's (2007)
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
This paper has two objectives. The first is to measure changes in job instability over the 1980’s and 1990’s. We provide evidence on changes in short term job turnover using a previously
Laurence Ball, Robert Moffitt, Yelena Takhtamanova, Robert Tchaidze, Gergana Trainor, Huiyan Zhang, ...
This paper is part of the Sustainable Employment Initiative of The Century and Russell Sage Foundations. We are grateful for research assistance from Cristian de Ritis, Daniel Leigh, Kevin Moore,...
Economic Effects of Means-Tested Transfers in the U.S. (2007)
The system of means-tested transfers in the U.S. has evolved in important ways over the last decade, with significant expansions of Medicaid , the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental...
Estimating Average and Marginal Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Populations (2007)
generous help in obtaining and using the data. Comments from Joshua Angrist, James Heckman, Guido Imbens, Tiemen Woutersen, and participants at a workshop at Johns Hopkins University are appreciated,...
Estimating Marginal Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Populations (2007)
generous help in obtaining and using the data. Comments from Joshua Angrist, James
Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences (2006)
National Bureau of Economic Research, and William and Mary are also appreciated. Additional comments from Stephen Coate and Emmanuel Saez, and the correction of an error by Michael Keane, are also...
Remarks on the Analysis of Causal Relationships in Population Research (2005)
Demography - Volume 42, Number 1, February 2005
Chapter for the Handbook of Econometrics ∗ (2005)
Geert Ridder, Robert Moffitt, J. Currie, J. J. Heckman, C. F. Manski
comments on an earlier draft.
Causal analysis in population research: an economist’s perspective (2003)
More than many other social science disciplines, population has a long history of non-causal descriptive analysis. The estimation of aggregate vital rates, the construction and estimation of life...
The Role of Non-Financial Factors in Exit and Entry in the TANF Program (2003)
Robert Moffitt, James Quane, Karl Scholz, James Walker
James Ziliak, two anonymous referees of this journal, and the participants at several universities and research organizations for comments. Wei Tan and Katie Winder provided excellent research...
Pedro Carneiro, Edward Vytlacil, Sebastian Gay, Michael Greenstone, Larry Katz, Steve Levitt, ...
This research was supported by NSF 97-09-873, NSF-SES-0099195 and NICHD-40-4043-000-85-261. Carneiro benefited from support from Fundaçao Ciência e Tecnologia and Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian. We...
I. Policy and Institutional Background (2002)
hpe_v4.wpd The labor supply and other work incentive effects of welfare programs have long been a central concern in economic research. Work has also been an increasing focus of policy reforms in the...
Job Instability and Insecurity for Males and Females in the 1980s and 1990s (1999)
Gottschalk, Peter, Moffitt, Robert
This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide evidence on changes in short term job turnover using a previously underutilized data source, the Survey of Income and Program Participation...
Estimating Dynamic Models of Quit Behavior: The Case of Military Reenlistment. (1998)
Dayka, Thomas, Moffitt, Robert
We estimate the effect of financial incentives for reenlistment on military retention rates using a stochastic dynamic programming model. We show that the computational burden of the model is...
Current Population Surveys: March Individual-Level Extracts, 1968-1992 (1998)
The data files in this collection are individual-level extracts derived from the Current Population Survey's March Annual Demographic files for the years 1968 to 1992. Each record contains...
An Analysis of Sample Attrition in Panel Data: The Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1997)
Fitzgerald, John, Gottschalk, Peter, Moffitt, Robert
By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this...
Handedness and Earnings * (1997)
Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, Robert Moffitt
We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labor market and, in particular, earnings. We find a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education. This...
Explaining Welfare Reform: Public Choice and the Labor Market
This paper seeks to identify factors which could plausibly have led to the contractionary welfare reform initiatives begun at the state and federal levels in the U.S. in the 1990s, initiatives...
One of the areas of policy research where randomized field trials have been utilized most intensively is welfare reform. Starting in the late 1960s with experimental tests of a negative income tax...
One of the areas of policy research where randomized field trials have been utilized most intensively is welfare reform. Starting in the late 1960s with experimental tests of a negative income tax...
One of the areas of policy research where randomized field trials have been utilized most intensively is welfare reform. Starting in the late 1960s with experimental tests of a negative income tax...
Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences
Work requirements in means-tested transfer programs have grown in importance in the U.S. and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally...
Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, Jr, Robert Moffitt
We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labor market and, in particular, earnings. Though handedness is not found to be significantly related to earnings for the population as...
The Effect of the Medicaid Program on Welfare Participation and Labor Supply
Although there is a large literature on the effect of AFDC and Food Stamps on labor supply and welfare participation, there has been little work on the effects of Medicaid, despite its importance in...
The Role of Non-Financial Factors in Exit and Entry in the TANF Program
The dramatic decline in the AFDC-TANF caseload in the 1990s has refocused attention on the process of exit from and entry into welfare, a long-standing topic of interest in the research literature on...
Milton Friedman, the Negative Income Tax, and the Evolution of US Welfare Policy
The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one...
Economic Effects of Means-Tested Transfers in the US
The system of means-tested transfers in the US has evolved in important ways over the last decade with significant expansions of Medicaid the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Security...
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was created in 1996 from what was previously named the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program The TANF program is intended...
The Growth of Earnings Instability in the U.S. Labor Market
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
macroeconomics, growth of earnings, labor market
One of the areas of policy research where randomized field trials have been utilized most intensively is welfare reform. Starting in the late 1960s with experimental tests of a negative income tax...
An Analysis of Sample Attrition in Panel Data: The Michigan Panel Study of income Dynamics
John Fitzgerald, Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experimented approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership We study the effect of this...
The Decline of Welfare Benefits in the US: The Role of Wage Inequality
Robert Moffitt, David Ribar, Mark Wilhelm
Welfare benefits in the US have experiences a much-studies secular decline since the mid-1970s We explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor...
A New Index to Value In-Kind Benefits.
Wolfe, Barbara L, Moffitt, Robert
In this paper, the authors present a new approach to valuing in-kind benefits and a new index for that valuation. This approach is both individual (or family) specific and assigns a value to benefits...
The Growth of Earnings Instability in the U.S. Labor Market
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
macroeconomics, growth of earnings, labor market
The Econometrics of Data Combination
Ridder, Geert, Moffitt, Robert, J.J. Heckman, E.E. Leamer
Economists who use survey or administrative data for inferences regarding a population may want to combine information obtained from two or more samples drawn from the population. This is the case if...
Estimating the Value of an In-Kind Transfer: The Case of Food Stamps.
The value of one in-kind transfer, food stamps, is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in Puerto Rico in 1982. The evidence indicates that the cashout...
A Structural Model of Multiple Welfare Program Participation and Labor Supply.
Keane, Michael, Moffitt, Robert
Work on estimating the labor supply effects of high marginal tax rates in welfare programs has been hindered by the difficulty of estimating the effects of participation in multiple welfare programs...
Welfare work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences
Work requirements in means-tested transfer programmes have grown in importance in the US and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally...
A structural model of multiple welfare program participation and labor supply
Michael P. Keane, Robert Moffitt
One of the long-standing issues in the literature on transfer programs for the U.S. low-income population concerns the high cumulative marginal tax rate on earnings induced by participation in the...
The Dynamics of Job Separation: The Case of Federal Employees.
Black, Matthew, Moffitt, Robert, Warner, John T
In this paper we develop a model of workers' quit decisions. Using panel data on a sample of U.S. Federal government employees we use maximum-likelihood techniques to determine how much of the...
Job Instability and Insecurity for Males and Females in the 1980s and 1990s
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide evidence on changes in short term job turnover using a previously underutilized data source, the Survey of Income and Program Participation...
An Analysis of Sample Attrition in Panel Data: The Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics
John Fitzgerald, Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this...
The Effect of the Medicaid Program on Welfare Participation and Labor Supply.
Moffitt, Robert, Wolfe, Barbara L
The authors examine the effect of the Medicaid program on the labor supply and welfare participation decisions of female heads of family. A key contribution is the development of a family-specific...
The Estimation of Wage Gains and Welfare Gains in Self-selection.
Bjorklund, Anders, Moffitt, Robert
The authors modify the basic self-sele ction model for the effects ofeducation, training, unions, and other activities on wages, by including "heterogeneity of rewards" to the activity-i.e., diffe...
AN ESTIMATE OF A SECTORAL MODEL OF LABOR MOBILITY
Jovanovic, Boyan, Moffitt, Robert
labour mobility ; economic models ; statistics
Causal Analysis in Population Research: An Economist's Perspective
The problem of determining cause and effect is one of the oldest questions in the social sciences. This note provides a perspective on the analysis of causal relationships in population research,...
Welfare reform: the US experience
The reform of the cash-based welfare program for single mothers in the US which occurred in the 1990s was the most important since its inception in 1935. The reforms imposed credible and enforceable...
Variable Earnings and Nonlinear Taxation
Michael Rothschild, Robert Moffitt
We explore the interaction between two facts. The first is that income is variable; the second is that the tax and transfer system transforms before tax income into after tax income in highly...
Has State Redistribution Policy Grown More Conservative?
It is well-known that real benefits in the major cash transfer program in the U.S. -- the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program -- have fallen drastically over the past twenty years....
Hilary Williamson Hoynes, Robert Moffitt
The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) Program has long been criticized by economists for its apparent work disincentives stemming from the imposition of 100-percent tax rates on earnings....
The Decline of Welfare Benefits in the U.S.: The Role of Wage Inequality
Robert Moffitt, David Ribar, Mark Wilhelm
Welfare benefits in the U.S. have experienced a much-studied secular decline since the mid-1970s. We explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor...
Productivity Growth and the Phillips Curve
We present a model in which workers' aspirations for wage increases adjust slowly to shifts in productivity growth. The model yields a Phillips curve with a new variable: the gap between productivity...
Economic Effects of Means-Tested Transfers in the U.S.
The system of means-tested transfers in the U.S. has evolved in important ways over the last decade, with significant expansions of Medicaid , the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental...
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was created in 1996 from what was previously named the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The TANF program is intended...
Welfare Programs and Labor Supply
The labor supply and other work incentive effects of welfare programs have long been a central concern in economic research. Work has also been an increasing focus of policy reforms in the U.S.,...
Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences
Work requirements in means-tested transfer programs have grown in importance in the U.S. and in some other countries. The theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally...
Christopher S. Ruebeck, Robert Moffitt
We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labor market and, in particular, earnings. We find a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education. This...
Estimating Marginal Returns to Higher Education in the UK
A long-standing issue in the literature on education is whether marginal returns to education fall as education rises. If the population differs in its rate of return, a closely related question is...
The Effect of Ignoring Heteroscedasticity on Estimates of the Tobit Model
We consider the sensitivity of the Tobit estimator to heteroscedasticity. Our single independent variable is a dummy variable whose coefficient is a difference between group means, and the error...
An Analysis of Sample Attrition in Panel Data: The Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics
John Fitzgerald, Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this...
Changes in Job Instability and Insecurity Using Monthly Survey Data.
Gottschalk, Peter, Moffitt, Robert
This article provides evidence on changes in short-term job instability and insecurity using the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Monthly measures from this data set are contrasted with...
Estimating Dynamic Models of Quit Behavior: The Case of Military Reenlistment.
Daula, Thomas, Moffitt, Robert
The authors estimate the effect of financial incentives for reenlistment on military retention rates using a stochastic dynamic programming model. They show that the computational burden of the model...
An Estimate of a Sectoral Model of Labor Mobility.
Jovanovic, Boyan, Moffitt, Robert
This paper develops a model of sectoral labor mobility and tests its main implications. The model nests two distinct hypotheses on the origin of mobility: (1) sectoral shocks and (2) worker-employer...
Real Wages over the Business Cycle: Estimating the Impact of Heterogeneity with Micro Data.
Keane, Michael, Moffitt, Robert, Runkle, David
New evidence on the correlation between the cycle and the real wage is provided by using panel data to adjust for the aggregation cum selectivity bias that arises when those who move in and out of...
Trends in the Transitory Variance of Male Earnings in the U.S., 1970-2004
Robert Moffitt, Peter Gottschalk
We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as...
Peter Gottschalk, Erika McEntarfer, Robert Moffitt
We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. from 1991 to 2005 using an administrative data set of Unemployment Insurance wage reports, the Longitudinal...
The Rising Instability of U.S. Earnings
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt
The inequality of earnings and of family incomes in the United States has increased since the late 1970s. The large rise in earnings inequality between the 1970s and the 1990s could reflect either a...