Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Empirical Essays on Disability Insurance, Employment and Health(2012) Moore, Timothy John; Kearney, Melissa S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The optimal design of tax and transfer policies involves understanding how income payments affect the behavior of recipients. This dissertation contributes to the public economics literature by examining how various income payments affect employment and health. The first chapter is focused on the relationship between disability payments and employment. The other two chapters explore short-term patterns in mortality and the role of income payments, which advances our understanding of the broader relationship between income and health. Chapter 1: The Employment Effects of Terminating Disability Benefits: Insights from Removing Drug and Alcohol Addictions as Disabling Conditions A challenge in designing return-to-work policies for Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income disability beneficiaries is identifying who is able to work. Using administrative data, I estimate the employment effects resulting from the 1996 removal of drug and alcohol addictions as disabling conditions, which eliminated the benefits of approximately 100,000 individuals. Terminated beneficiaries' employment increased by 20-30 percentage points, which is large relative to their work histories. The heterogeneity in employment is consistent with program participation initially increasing employment potential, before being outweighed by the negative consequences of being out of the labor force. Chapter 2: Liquidity, Economic Activity, and Mortality (with William N. Evans) We document a within-month mortality cycle where deaths decline before the first day of the month and spike after the first. This cycle is present across a wide variety of causes and demographic groups. A similar cycle exists for a range of economic activities, suggesting the mortality cycle may be due to short-term variation in levels of economic activity. Our results suggest a causal pathway whereby liquidity problems reduce activity, which in turn reduces mortality. These relationships may help explain the pro-cyclical nature of mortality. Chapter 3: The Short-term Mortality Consequences of Income Receipt (with William N. Evans) Researchers and retailers have documented that consumption declines before the receipt of income, and then rises afterwards. We identify a related phenomenon, where mortality rises immediately after income receipt. We find that mortality increases following the arrival of monthly Social Security payments, regular wage payments for military personnel, the 2001 tax rebates, and Alaska Permanent Fund dividend payments. The increase in short-run mortality is large, and occurs for a large number of causes of death.Item Essays in Public Finance(2006-05-16) Pang, Gaobo; Rust, John P; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1 analyzes effects of tax-favored savings plans on savings and retirement decisions in a realistically specified life-cycle model. Individuals face mortality risk and stochastic earnings, allocate assets between conventional savings accounts (CSAs) and tax-deferred accounts (TDAs), make endogenous choice of labor supply and retirement, and make a separate decision on claiming Social Security. The simulations reveal that there is a functional division to some degree between CSAs and TDAs, with the former serving mainly for liquidity and the latter for retirement and bequests. There is tremendous heterogeneity. The tax incentives are generally effective in stimulating new savings for the middle and upper income groups. The higher rate of return on TDAs facilitates wealth accumulation, which consequently and perhaps unintentionally encourages early retirement. Impatient and low-income individuals tend to retire and claim Social Security early. They derive less benefit from TDAs since they face lower marginal tax rates and they have limited resources to take advantage of TDAs. For them, the income effect dominates and TDAs fail to induce new savings. Chapter 2 attempts quantitatively to measure the efficiency of public spending in developing countries. The efficiency is defined as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier. Both input- and outputefficiencies are estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. This chapter further seeks to verify empirical regularities associated with cross-country efficiency variation. The panel Tobit regressions reveal that countries are more likely to register lower efficiency if they are faced with higher government expenditure levels, larger wage shares in government budget composition, higher ratios of public to private financing in service provision (health), more prevalence of HIV/AIDS epidemic (health), stronger external aid dependency, and/or higher income inequality (education). Though no causality may be inferred from these exercises, they help point at different factors to understand why some countries spend more resources than others to achieve similar educational and health outcomes.