Search

As a country, the United States spends significantly more on healthcare than other advanced industrialized countries, and Americans have comparably worse health outcomes. Both are developments of the last four decades. In this paper, we look at how change in antitrust and patent law and thus change in market power in the largest four subsectors of healthcare, hospitals, physician groups, prescription drugs, and net medical insurance, have contributed to the increasing cost of medical care in the United States. We show that the annual rent – the degree to which health care is overpriced as a result of market power – was between 2.47 and 4.30 percent of GDP in 2016 – truly a big cost for big medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) – including a BEA satellite account that imputes monetary values for unwaged household production – this paper provides a feminist, class-based framework for estimating the annual cost of social reproduction in the United States from 1959 to 2012. The key finding is that for US working-class households, the cost of socially reproducing labor-power has risen relative to the cost of employing labor-power, implying that employers are paying for a decreasing proportion of the total societal cost of socially reproducing labor-power. These results are discussed in relationship to growing income inequality and the contradictory role of the state in the US neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of religious heterogeneity on various important metro-area variables such as total expenditure, taxes, property taxes, debt, and employment as well as spending on the specific services of education, roads, police, health, and welfare. Two indices are used to measure religious heterogeneity, a fractionalization index and a polarization index. Polarization, designed to be a measure of social conflict, generally led to less spending and taxes, while fractionalization, the probability that two randomly chosen individuals belong to different religious groups, generally led to more spending and taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses General Social Survey data linked to Census data to investigate the effect of local area income and income inequality on worker well-being. Others have found a robust negative correlation between reference group income and self-reported well-being. However, in many cases the reference group is defined as a large geographic area. This paper adds to the literature in two ways. First, it considers multiple nested geographic reference groups with US data. Second, it explicitly considers income inequality in addition to the level of income. It is found that both income and income inequality are positively associated with well-being at the census tract level, but negatively associated at the county level. Further, the effect of inequality on well-being decreases as income increases at the census tract and county level, while it increases at the state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper reviews five major theoretical approaches that describe the fundamental causes of poverty, with particular attention to what these theories imply about government policy towards markets and the need for immediate poverty alleviation. Different causal theories have very different policy implications; it is difficult to recommend specific anti-poverty policies with making assumptions about the nature of economic markets and of individual behavior. The paper ends with comments about how to make these choices, arguing that the greater moral onus one associates with poverty, the more willing one should be to adopt less efficient strategies that do more to raise incomes among the poor. The interconnections between markets and social and political systems--which often disadvantage poor populations--suggests that some market regulations and targeted programs may be necessary to reduce poverty, especially if these can be implemented with minimal corruption and monitored for effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the logic of membership of sectoral business associations in Britain using evidence from a proportionate stratified random sample of associations. The British system gives no statuatory status to business associations. As a result the size and fragmentation of associations is similar to the US, membership of associations is interpreted in terms of the logic of specific business service demand and the logic of collective activities. Expectations from models of collective action, associability and involvement are used to interpret association membership. The paper argues that the normal distinction between associations as trade, professional or "peak" bodies is too simplistic in not properly differentiating the types of member. The paper employs instead a set of six categories dependent on the type of members: companies, owner-managers, the self-employed, and individuals, as well as bodies with mixed membership, and federations (which are associations of associations). Survey evidence demonstrates that member motives for joining, lapsing and constraining service development differ significantly between association types and tend most strongly to emphasise the logic of individual services as complements to the logic collective activity. Analysis of the rates of joining and lapsing membership show evidence of reluctance to join and high rates of lapsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering whether asset-price bubbles should be offset through policy, an important issue is who pays the price when the bubble bursts. A bust that reduces the wealth of well-off households only may have small welfare costs, but costs may be sizable if broad swaths of households are affected. This paper uses micro data on millions of households from the US American Community Survey to examine how the bursting of the 1998–2006 housing bubble affected households’ employment, homeownership, home values, and housing costs. To separate dynamics of the housing bust from those of the aggregate downturn, we differentiate between metropolitan areas that did and did not experience bubbles. We find that, for most measures, deteriorations in well-being were more severe in bubble metros than elsewhere, and for several measures, differential effects on less-educated households were also more severe. This underscores the importance of leaning against broad-based housing bubbles via appropriate policies, as burdens of adjustment fall differentially on people not well prepared to bear them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Census Bureau has estimated the nation's annual poverty rate since 1963 using data from the Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted in March of each year. Census deems a household "poor" if annual income falls below specified income thresholds. There are two problems with this methodology. First, the Current Population Survey dramatically undercounts household economic resources. Second, the fact that household income falls below a specific level reveals little about the nature of material deprivation within the household. This paper will take an alternative approach to assessing poverty: examining the material living conditions of low-income Americans. Using data from various government surveys this paper examines ownership of property and consumer durables; housing space, and housing conditions; food and nutriment consumption; and the height, thinness and obesity of low-income persons. Finally, we attempt an overall assessment of material deprivation based on material living conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between religious market product variety and church membership. We find that denominational variety is negatively associated with the total level of church membership in U.S. counties. This result appears to contradict the standard religious product variety model. Our data are consistent with a more general view of markets that incorporates the cost to consumers of product variety. Where product variety has significant costs, an increase in variety may reduce total market penetration. The paper suggests market characteristics that might give rise to this situation, characteristics present in the religion market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a quarter century of environmental regulation in this country, significant environmental threats remain. Why has the regulatory system failed to fully address our environmental problems? The goal of this paper is to suggest that the roots of environmental problems, and the failure of environmental regulation, are deeply embedded in the processes that generate economic growth. The logic of the argument to be presented will take the following form: long-run economic growth relies on the creation of new industries and new forms of economic activity; these new forms of economic activity create new kinds of environmental problems; these new forms of economic activity constitute vested political interests that oppose environmental regulation. Each of the three main sections of the paper will provide theoretical and empirical justification for each component part of the basic argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that interest on consumer debt must be taken into account when measuring poverty and inequality. These interest payments cannot be used to support household living standards. This makes middle- and low-income households worse off. Recent increases in consumer debt means that this deterioration in living standards is not captured by conventional government statistics. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we make estimates of poverty and inequality that take into account rising interest payments on consumer debt and discuss some of the implications of these estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander's challenge to racial oppression within the US. In 1921, Alexander became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in economics. The author links Alexander's arguments for black political rights to the provision of economic justice for working class Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how family friendly policies affect mothers' wages. Standard economic theory predicts that workers who desire family friendly policies would accept lower wages, all else equal. However, in the US labor market, the workers who have access to these policies tend to be in the higher-prestige and higher-earning occupations. This study examines the effects on wages of having had access to maternity leave and the ability to control one's schedule, using the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The present-day wages of mothers who were working prior to the birth of their first child and received pay during their maternity leave are 9 percent higher compared to other mothers, controlling for other personal and job-related characteristics. Mothers who report working their current schedule because it helps them address their caring responsibilities - child care, elder care, or care for a sick family member - do not suffer a wage penalty as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines citizenship-based arguments for work-conditioned welfare and basic income. I argue that the most common citizenship-based justifications for work requirements—the paternalistic and civic republican arguments—are flawed because of their selectivity, and that the only defensible citizenship-based justification for work requirements is the socialist model, which enforces work requirements universally on all. I offer as a liberal alternative a radically pluralist notion of citizenship, with a kind of universal economic suffrage at its core, to justify an unconditional basic income in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown growing shares of employment in the social economy (or non-profit sector) both in the European Union and in the United States. In the EU, there seems to be growing hopes that the social economy will be capable of contributing to local progress on the unemployment issue in crisis regions. This paper analyses employment in certain entrepreneurial forms, usually considered belonging to the social economy, in Sweden during the 1990s. The results show considerable regional differences of employment in the social economy, but also that its share of the labor market is very limited. The effect of social-economic organizations on employment, therefore, is probably mainly indirect in as much as they function as platforms for cooperation between firms or else as embryos for enterprises by strengthening local entrepreneurship and helping to nurture a deposit of social capital which has visible effects on private business and jobs. However, these effects need more detailed examinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The almshouse dominated the thinking about poverty and the poor during America's period of industrialization and its greatest economic downturns. Yet economists had surprisingly little to say about the facts of almshouse demography, and what they have written has been a rather bad fiction when seen in contrast with American novels. The main object of the paper is to delineate typical characters and characteristics of almshouses in America, and to examine the plausibility of various literary characterizations in light of the facts. The data certainly suggest new stories about paupers in American history: economists, and even the new social historians, have gotten it wrong. Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the typical pauper living in an almshouse was not Oliver Twist (as many believe). He was not the Shiftless Man of the classical imagination (as Malthusians and Benthamites believe). The typical pauper of an American almshouse was plural. Instructive examples in American literature include Lennie, of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; Denver, of Toni Morrison's Beloved; Mrs. Thomson, of Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Master; and Forrest Gump, of Winston Groom's Forrest Gump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how an approach resembling Sen's capabilities framework is being applied by low-income neighborhoods in efforts to strengthen community and improve quality of life for residents. It will begin with a brief review of Sen's capabilities framework, followed by a detailed description of neighborhood resource surveys. A final section will bring the two ideas together and will explain how the work being done in neighborhoods can be viewed as an extension of Sen's approach, deepening our understanding of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Important social benefits of the market system are predicated on the assumption that consumers can effectively pursue their interest in the marketplace. Cause for concern exists to the extent that high consumption expenditures lead to relatively low levels of personal savings in the U.S. To the extent that they do, in fact, over spend, consumers appear to deviate from economic assumptions of rationality. This paper examines four conceptions of rationality (two variants of rational choice theory, institutionalism, and one derived from economic sociology), with a view to evaluating implications for consumer sovereignty under each. By explicitly accounting for differences among individuals, economic sociology appears to offer more realistic policy solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of mainstream economists believe that globalization and trade liberalization have had a minor role in increasing U.S. wage inequality. A minority argues that capital mobility and outsourcing indicate a larger effect. This paper first surveys these views, and then argues that how we understand the policy consequences of trade liberalization helps determine the character our analysis of the issue itself. Thus, a shift in policy perspective, to consider the "equity costs" of trade liberalization in terms of eroded U.S. labor market institutions, produces a larger framework for analyzing the consequences of globalization and trade liberalization than is available in traditional comparative advantage efficiency reasoning. From this wider perspective, trade liberalization has likely had a greater impact on U.S. wage inequality than even the minority mainstream position allows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on the work of Rector et al. (1999a, 1999b). The poverty lines implicit in their restrictive material deprivation approach are disputed and the claim that America has triumphed over poverty is rejected. Evidence is presented showing that poverty among the poorest Americans has significantly increased and is now near an all time high. The long economic expansion since the recession of 1990-1991 has left hardcore poverty essentially unchanged and relative deprivation among the poorest of the poor has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops and applies new measures of poverty that overcome a number of specific methodological flaws in the official US poverty statistics. Sen's distribution sensitive index of poverty and each of its components are estimated at several distinct poverty thresholds for the period 1961-1996. Distribution sensitive measures of urban poverty are corrected for interarea differences in the cost of living and for comprehensive incomes. Recently developed statistical inference procedures are applied. Official poverty statistics are shown to be seriously misleading in some time periods and the choice of a poverty line affects conclusions concerning changes in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes implications for worker well-being if legislation in the U.S. Congress is passed permitting employers and non-supervisory employees who agree to substitute future compensatory time off in lieu of premium pay for overtime work, calculated over an 80-hour two-week standard. The impact on worker welfare is predicted applying augmented worker utility and employer demand for hours functions. Plausible inter-temporal scenarios suggest that unless workers gain more control over the timing of their overtime and comp time hours, they are likely to experience a net loss in welfare. This will occur to the extent employers use the new overtime regulation to vary work hours and schedules more closely with fluctuations in output demand as opposed to better customizing work hours to fit workers' needs to balance work with competing demands on their time, that is, adopting a short rather than longer-run time horizon regarding the restraint of labor costs, Alternative policies are more likely to raise welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes three trends in working time in the United States over the last thirty years. First, we document an increasing bifurcation of working time, with growth evident among those working both long and short hours. An international comparison also shows that the United States stands out as having among the highest percentage of workers putting in 50 hours per week or more. Second, we argue that there is a mismatch between working time and the preferences of American workers. On average, those working very long hours express a desire to work less, while those working short hours prefer to work more. Third, we maintain that the sense of being overworked stems primarily from demographic shifts in the labor force rather than from changes in average working time per se. Even in the absence of a dramatic rise in time spent on the job. the growth in the proportion of American households consisting of dual-earner couples and single parents has created a growing percentage of workers who face heightened time pressures and increased conflicts between work and their private lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we demonstrate that because of stagnating wages and rising job insecurity, there has been a change in the labor supply regime in the U.S. macroeconomy since the 1970s. There is now greater labor supply at any given officially measured unemployment rate. This induced growth in the quantity of labor effort is coming from experienced, incumbent workers and therefore does not show up in the official unemployment rate. While this may diminish family and community life, the increased aggregate labor supply means rising aggregate demand is being absorbed even at unemployment rates of less than 5 percent without sparking inflationary pressures. Because of this upward structural trend in weekly hours, monetary policy authorities must now recognize that standard jobless measures have become a misleading gauge of available labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income tax reform has become a hot topic in both the United States and Canada. Over the past few years, a variety of proposals have been advanced for the replacement of the current income tax system and most proposals involve a compression of the multi-rate structure into a single rate and a shift to some form of consumption tax base. Flat taxes are advocated on the belief that they will provide a strong stimulus to investment, employment and output. Their supporters are convinced that the economic benefits are sufficiently large to make everyone better off, therefore there is no need to be concerned about the distributional effects of flat taxes. However, the claims about potentially large efficiency gains from flat taxes are not supported by research. Evaluating the effects of a consumption-base flat tax of the type proposed by Hall and Rabushka is one of the main purposes of the paper. Using a microdata set for Canada, which allows identifying taxpayers by both income level and family type, we show that flat taxes not only increase income inequality but also have important horizontal equity implications. We argue that a full debate on income tax reform requires a detailed evaluation of both polar alternatives to the current hybrid income tax: a move to a consumption base and a move to a comprehensive income tax. Toward that end, we have performed a simulation which estimates the distributional effects of a comprehensive income base with across the board rate reductions in order to maintain revenue-neutrality. We show that this option has advantages over the consumption-base flat tax in terms of both vertical and horizontal equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes new forms of flexibility in the US apparel industry and the consequences of this flexibility for labor market segmentation. Post-Fordist flexible work organization takes place only in those enterprises that occupy privileged positions in newly established hierarchical networks of firms. Subcontracting work to smaller firms results in labor segmentation between rather than within firms. Dominant firms in hierarchical networks gain production efficiencies similar to that attained by a fixed hierarchy within Fordist type enterprises. For most apparel workers, the new production system could best be described as neo-Fordist, since it appears to be predicated on routinization and work intensification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En a series of papers, Taylor (1971, 1977, 1979) has proposed a theoretical model of Credit Union behavior emphasizing their non-profit and cooperative nature. Taylor (1979) represents the model in its most developed form. In this note his work is surveyed and a modification is proposed, namely the incorporation of current period endogenous reserve accumulation, which is very important in practice and which, it is suggested, fills a significant gap and makes his model more satisfactory as a representation of credit union behaviour in periods of asset growth or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]