Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is an essential lifeline for millions of Americans. Without it, many families would be in deep financial distress. SSDI is insurance that workers pay for through premiums deducted from their pay. In return, workers gain the right to monthly benefits if a disabling condition ends their capacity to earn a…

Obesity is epidemic in the United States, and there is an imperative need to identify policy tools that may help fight this epidemic. A recent paper in the economics literature finds an inverse relationship between gasoline prices and obesity risk--suggesting that increased gasoline prices via higher gasoline taxes may have the effect of reducing…

Slow economic growth since the end of the U.S. recession in June of 2009 has not yet translated into increases in employment large enough to meaningfully reduce the rate of unemployment. Because expansionary macroeconomic policy has been pursued on both the fiscal and monetary fronts, it appears at first glance that the hands of government at this…

All of the authors seem to share the perception that one can no longer expect much from macroeconomic policies. The authors of this paper share this opinion, but this should not be interpreted as the skeptical view that macroeconomic policies are ineffective on employment. They saw from the Korea's two crises how contrasting outcomes could result…

The economic gains from immigration are much like those from international trade: The economy benefits overall from immigration, but there are distributional effects that create both winners and losers. Immigration is different from trade, however, in that the physical presence of the people who provide the goods and services that drive the…

Social scientists offer competing theories on what explains the policymaking process. These typically include economic rationalism, political competition or power struggles, and policy imitation of the kind that diffuses across spatially proximate neighbors. In this paper, we examine the factors that have influenced a recent local policy trend in…

The Stages-of-Progress methodology helps identify context-specific reasons associated with households' movements into or out of poverty. Developed in 2002, it was used over the next seven years for examining the experiences of 35,567 households in 398 diverse communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina. This essay looks at the…

Debt limits, interest coverage ratios, one-off balanced budget requirements, pay-as-you-go rules, and tax and expenditure limits are among the most important fiscal rules for constraining intertemporal transfers. There is considerable evidence that the least costly and most effective of such rules are those that focus directly on the rate of…

Although it is well known that vaccines against many infectious diseases confer positive economic externalities via indirect protection, analysts have typically ignored possible herd protection effects in policy analyses of vaccination programs. Despite a growing literature on the economic theory of vaccine externalities and several innovative…

This paper estimates the elasticity of taxable income to the net-of-tax share using a panel of tax returns that follows a random sample of taxpayers from 1999 to 2005, spanning the EGTRRA 2001 and JGTRRA 2003 tax changes. Results suggest that the elasticity of taxable income to the current year's net-of-tax share lies between 0.3 and 0.4 overall,…

This paper discusses the reasons why the current official U.S. poverty measure is outdated and nonresponsive to many anti-poverty initiatives. A variety of efforts to update and improve the statistic have failed, for political, technical, and institutional reasons. Meanwhile, the European Union is taking a very different approach to poverty…

Cigarette smoking is concentrated among low-income groups. Consequently, cigarette taxes are considered regressive. However, if poorer individuals are much more price sensitive than richer individuals, then tax increases would reduce smoking much more among the poor and their cigarette tax expenditures as a share of income would rise by much less…

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis conjectures a nonlinear relationship between pollution and economic growth, such that pollution per capita initially increases as countries economically develop, but then reaches a maximum point before ultimately declining. Much of the EKC literature has focused on testing this basic hypothesis and,…

The promotion of marriage and two-parent families became an explicit public policy goal with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Marriage has the putative effect of reducing welfare dependency among single mothers, but only if they marry men with earnings sufficient to lift them and their children out of poverty. Newly released data from…

This paper offers unique rankings of the extent to which fiscal structures of U.S. states contribute to economic growth. The rankings are novel in two key respects: They are well grounded in established growth theory, in which the effect of taxes depends both on the level of taxes and on the composition of expenditures; and they are derived from…