POLITICAL ECONOMY
"The Mythical Tradeoff between Black Representatives and Black Policy Interests" Coming Soon
For the 1990 redistricting congress mandated the creation of majority minority-resident districts in order to elect more minorities to congress. Civil rights groups and the Republican Party cheered. The Party views Democratic districts stripped of Black voters as opportunities to repaint blue districts red. In fact both the Party and many researchers believe minority districts contributed to Republican’s winning back the US House in 1994. By comparing congressional delegations of states under greater pressure to create majority minority districts with those under less pressure in a difference-in-difference framework, I find this belief is false. I find no evidence that minority districts benefit the Republican Party. In fact point estimates indicate that southern states that increased their share majority Black districts saw their delegations grow increasingly Black and increasingly liberal. I find similar results for Latino districts in the southwest. Thus I find no evidence of the alleged tradeoff between minority representatives and minorities’ preferred policies.
"Economics and Policy Preferences: Causal Evidence of the Impact of Economic Conditions on Support for Redistribution and Other Ballot Proposals", NBER Working Paper Number 14091, November 2009, (with Eric Brunner and Stephen L. Ross).
Using California ballot proposition returns and exogenous shifts to labor demand, we provide the first large-scale causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on policy preferences. In accord with economic theory, we find that positive economic shocks lead to large decreases in neighborhood residents' support for redistributive policies. More notably, we find evidence of the need for cognitive consistency in voting behavior as economic shocks have a smaller but still significant impact on voting on non-economic ballot issues.
"Party Affiliation, Partisanship, and Political Beliefs: A Field Experiment", NBER Working Paper Number 15365, September 2009, (with Alan Gerber and Greg Huber).
Partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but
it is unclear from this pattern whether partisanship has a causal effect on political
behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment designed to
investigate the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008
"Segregation and Black Political Efficacy", Journal of Public Economics, 2009, 5-6, 807-822 (with Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat).
The impact of segregation on Black political efficacy is
theoretically ambiguous. On one hand, increased contact among Blacks in more segregated
areas may mean that Blacks are better able to coordinate political behavior. On the other
hand, lesser contact with non-Blacks may mean that Blacks have less political influence
over voters of other races. As for non-Blacks, inter-group conflict theory suggests that greater contact
yields greater conflict between the groups while inter-group contact theory suggests exactly the reverse. We investigate this question empirically. We find that exogenous increases in segregation
lead to decreases in Black civic efficacy, as measured by an ability to elect
Representatives who vote liberally and more specifically in favor of legislation that is
favored by Blacks. This tendency for Representatives from more segregated MSAs to
vote more conservatively arises in spite of the fact that Blacks in more segregated areas
hold more liberal political views than do Blacks in less segregated locales. We find
evidence that this decrease in efficacy is driven by more conservative attitudes amongst
non-Blacks in more segregated areas.
"Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2009, 1, 1, 86-111 (with Sendhil Mullainathan).
Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting for a candidate leads to a more favorable opinion of the candidate in the future. We find support for the empirical relevance of cognitive dissonance to political attitudes. We examine the presidential opinion ratings of voting age eligibles and ineligibles two years after the president's election. We find that eligibles show 2-3 times greater polarization of opinions than comparable ineligibles. We find smaller effects when we compare polarization in opinions of senators elected during high turnout presidential campaign years with senators elected during non-presidential campaign years.
"Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues," American Economic Review, 2008, 98, 1, 311-332.
Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown,
increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or
peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of
children, each daughter increases a congress person’s propensity to vote liberally,
particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and
previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision
making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child to parent behavioral
influence.
"How Black Candidates Affect Voter Turnout," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2006, 121, 3, 973-998.
Both Black and White voter turnout increases 2-3 percentage points with each Black Democrat on the ballot. Given the groups’ representations in the population, the White response is numerically greater. Whites of both parties are less likely to vote for their parties’ candidate when s/he is Black. The turnout findings are not explained away by voter, election, or politician characteristics. However the fact that there is no turnout response to Black Republicans suggests that a perception of Blacks’ ideology may be a factor.
FINANCIAL BEHAVIOR OF LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS
"First of the Month Effect: Consumer Behavior and Store Responses" forthcoming, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, (with Justine Hastings).
Previous research has used survey and diary data to carefully document that Food Stamp recipients decrease their expenditures and consumption of food throughout the benefit month, the beginning of which is defined by the date on which benefits are distributed. The reliance on survey and diary data has meant that researchers could not test two rational hypotheses for why food consumption cycles. Using detailed grocery store scanner data we ask 1) whether cycling is due to a desire for variation in foods consumed that leads to substitution across product quality within the month and 2) whether cycling is driven by countercyclical pricing by grocery retailers. We find support for neither of these hypotheses. We find that the decrease in food expenditures is largely driven by reductions in food quantity, not quality, and that prices for foods purchased by benefit households vary pro-cyclically with demand implying that benefit households could save money by delaying their food purchases until later in the month. The price effects are small relative to demand changes and relative to impacts found for other subsidy programs such as EITC, suggesting that most of the benefits accrue to the intended recipients particularly in product categories and stores where benefit recipients represent a small fraction of overall demand. We conclude by concurring with previous literature that food cycling behavior is most likely due to short-run impatience.
"The Impact of Banking and Fringe Banking Regulation on the Number of Unbanked Americans," Journal of Human Resources, 2006, 41, 1.
Thirty-five to forty-five percent of low-income American households do not possess a bank account. This statistic coupled with claims of price gouging by check cashers has prompted government intervention. I find that state legislation requiring banks to offer low-cost accounts slightly decreases the number of low-income minority unbanked households, but only with a substantial lag. Caps on check cashing fees also lead to a small, but more immediate, reduction in the number of unbanked amongst this population. Because price caps may lead to a reduction in supply, welfare effects are indeterminate.
HEALTH
"Subsidies to Employee Health Insurance Premiums and the Health Insurance Market," Journal of Health Economics, Volume 24, Issue 2, March 2005, 24, 2, 253-276 (with Jonathan Gruber).
One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy-makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only appealing if there is a very high takeup elasticity among those who are offered and uninsured. Moreover, if plan choice decisions are price elastic, then such subsidies can at the same time increase health care costs by inducing selection of more expensive plans. We study an excellent example of such subsidies: the introduction of pre-tax premiums for postal employees in 1994, and then for the remaining federal employees in 2000. We do so using a census of personnel records for all federal employees from 1991 through 2002. We find that there is a very small elasticity of insurance takeup with respect to its after-tax price, and a modest elasticity of plan choice. Our results suggest that the federal government did little to improve insurance coverage, but much to increase health care expenditures, through this policy change.