Robert Moffitt
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 263367 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robert Moffitt |
| NOMBRES | Robert |
| APELLIDO | Moffitt |
| FIRMA | MOFFITT R |
| AFILIACIONES | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3627-3057 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 238 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1979 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic Recession on Less Educated Women’s Human Capital
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major declines in employment of women. We provide projections of impacts of this reduction on less educated women’s future human capital framed within the traditional Mincerian model. We find that wage losses one year out from 2020 are relatively modest on average, generally less than 1%, with the largest for married women without children in the home. But losses are greater for young married women, mothers with …
Legacies of the War on Poverty
We extend the work of Haveman et al., a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. social welfare system's evolution from the start of the War on Poverty through 2012. Their work chronicled changes in the welfare system and in poverty measurement and analyzed poverty levels and trends. We extend the analysis through 2022, finding that the poverty rate declined from 2012 to 2019 mostly because of improvements in the economy and not from changes in the tra…
Reconciling Trends in U.S. Male Earnings Volatility
There is a large literature on earnings and income volatility in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. One strand of that literature has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the United States over the last several decades. There are strong disagreements in the empirical literature on this important question, with some studies showing upward trends, some showing downward trends, and some showing n…
Reconciling Trends in Male Earnings Volatility
As part of a set of papers using the same methods and sample selection criteria to estimate trends in male earnings volatility across survey and administrative datasets, we conduct a new investigation of male earnings volatility using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) survey and SIPP-linked administrative earnings data (SIPP GSF). We find that the level of volatility is higher in the administrative earnings histories…
Estimating Trends in Male Earnings Volatility with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has been the workhorse dataset used to estimate trends in U.S. earnings volatility at the individual level. We provide updated estimates for male earnings volatility using additional years of data. The analysis confirms prior work showing upward trends in the 1970s and 1980s, with a near doubling of the level of volatility over that period. The results also confirm prior work showing a resumption of an up…
Entitlements
A combination of demographic aging and diversification, volatile business cycle conditions, stagnant real wages, declining employment, and policy choices have increased the need to examine the adequacy of the U.S. social safety net. Is it accomplishing what it is designed to do? Can it weather a fiscal storm? Current "entitlement" programs are in almost all cases providing important assistance to U.S. families and are improving families' well-bei…
The High Cost of Good Intentions
In this volume, Cogan, an economist, provides a history of U.S. federal entitlement programs from the colonial period to the present. His focus is on the Congressional debates surrounding the creation and legislative modifications of the major programs in U.S. history, providing in each chapter a summary of those debates and what the pro and con arguments were for each program in different eras. The main thesis of the volume is stated in the intr…
The PSID and Income Volatility
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other dataset in the United States. Its record of providing data for seminal research is unmatched. In this article, we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the topic. Then we review the major papers that have used the PSID to study income volatility, comparing their results to those …
Economics of Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, Volume II
In Defense of the NSF Economics Program
The NSF Economics program funds basic research in economics across all its disparate fields. Its budget has experienced a long period of stagnation and decline, with its real value in 2013 below that in 1980 and having declined by 50 percent as a percent of the total NSF budget. The number of grants made by the program has also declined over time, and its current budget is very small compared to that of many other funders of economic research. Ov…
Welfare and Work
The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the U.S. Welfare System
Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-el…
Contrasting Calculations of Marginal Tax Rates
The War on Poverty
We present a 50‐year historical perspective of the nation's antipoverty efforts, describing the evolution of policy during four key periods since 1965. Over this half‐century, the initial heavy reliance on cash income support to poor families has eroded; increases in public support came largely in the form of in‐kind (e.g., Food Stamps) and tax‐related (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit) benefits. Work support and the supplementation of earnings…
The U.S. Safety Net and Work Incentives
The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net
The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures in safety net programs grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. The increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, and single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families wit…
Trends in the covariance structure of earnings in the U.S
The Rising Instability of U.S. Earnings
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 rise in disparity of permanent incomes, a rise in earnings instability, or some portion of both. In this paper, we provide longitudinal measures that separate changes in income inequality into changes that permanently change income to new levels and t…
Welfare Reform in the Mid-2000s
This article reports on a sample of 538 African American and Hispanic women who were receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1999, 416 of whom left the program by 2005. The Hispanic women consisted of a Mexican-origin group and a second group that was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. Combining the experiences of the employed and the non-employed welfare leavers, the authors find at best a modest decline in the average pov…
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 operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximised. Here we consider a case where society instead has preferences over the actual work allocations of welfare recipients. Optimality of work requi…
Does it pay to move from welfare to work? A comment on Danziger, Heflin, Corcoran, Oltmans, and Wang
Remarks on the analysis of causal relationships in population research
The problem of determining cause and effect is one of the oldest in the social sciences, where laboratory experimentation is generally not possible. This article provides a perspective on the analysis of causal relationships in population research that draws upon recent discussions of this issue in the field of economics. Within economics, thinking about causal estimation has shifted dramatically in the past decade toward a more pessimistic readi…
Introduction to the Symposium on the Econometrics of Matching
February 01 2004 Introduction to the Symposium on the Econometrics of Matching Robert A. Moffitt Robert A. Moffitt Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Robert A. Moffitt Johns Hopkins University Online ISSN: 1530-9142 Print ISSN: 0034-6535 © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 The Review of Economics an…
The Role of Randomized Field Trials in Social Science Research
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 and continuingthrough current experimental tests of recent welfare reforms, randomized evaluations have played a strong and increasing role in informing policy. This article reviews the record of these experiments and assesses the implications of that r…
Understanding Poverty
Remarks on the analysis of causal relationships in population research
The problem of determining cause and effect is one of the oldest in the social sciences, where laboratory experimentation is generally not possible. This article provides a perspective on the analysis of causal relationships in population research that draws upon recent discussions of this issue in the field of economics. Within economics, thinking about causal estimation has shifted dramatically in the past decade toward a more pessimistic readi…
The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net
The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures in safety net programs grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. The increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, and single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families wit…
Beyond single mothers
We investigate the extent and implications of cohabitation and marriage among U.S. welfare recipients. An analysis of four data sets (the Current Population Survey, the National Survey of Families and Households, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) shows significant numbers of cohabitors among recipients of AFDC. An even more surprising finding is the large number of married women on welfare. We also…
The War on Poverty
We present a 50‐year historical perspective of the nation's antipoverty efforts, describing the evolution of policy during four key periods since 1965. Over this half‐century, the initial heavy reliance on cash income support to poor families has eroded; increases in public support came largely in the form of in‐kind (e.g., Food Stamps) and tax‐related (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit) benefits. Work support and the supplementation of earnings…
Trends in the Transitory Variance of Earnings in the United States
We decompose the rise in cross-sectional variance of male annual earnings in the United States from 1969 to 1996 into permanent and transitory components. We find that the variance of permanent earnings began rising in the the late 1970s and has continued to rise in the 1980s. The variance of transitory earnings also rose in the 1980s but declined in the 1990s. There are lags in the earnings process which require a structural model to pinpoint th…
Cohort Trends in the Lifetime Distribution of Female Family Headship in the United States, 1968–1985
We use the PSID Relationship File to estimate cohort trends in the lifetime incidence and duration of female family headship. Hazard (event-history) techniques are used to estimate movements into and out of headship, accounting for duration dependence and left-censored spells. The mean number of years spent in headship between ages 14 and 59 rose dramatically over the period. The increase arose from an increased number of headship spells, includi…
Causal Analysis in Population Research
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, drawing upon recent discussions in the field of economics. Within economics, thinking about causal estimation has shifted markedly in the last decade toward a more pessimistic reading of what is possible and a retreat in the ambitiousness of claims of ca…
Does it pay to move from welfare to work? A comment on Danziger, Heflin, Corcoran, Oltmans, and Wang
Trends in the covariance structure of earnings in the U.S
Welfare Reform in the Mid-2000s
This article reports on a sample of 538 African American and Hispanic women who were receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1999, 416 of whom left the program by 2005. The Hispanic women consisted of a Mexican-origin group and a second group that was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. Combining the experiences of the employed and the non-employed welfare leavers, the authors find at best a modest decline in the average pov…
Real Wages over the Business Cycle
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 the work force over the cycle have systematically different unobserved permanent and transitory wage components than those who do not. The results show that selectivity bias is present, for those with high transitory wages are more likely to lose employ…
The U.S. Safety Net and Work Incentives
The Econometrics of Kinked Budget Constraints
In the last several years, a branch of applied econometrics has developed that is devoted to the development of techniques for the estimation of demand and other functions when the budget constraint is "piecewise-linear," or "kinky"-that is, when the constraint consists of a number of segments joined together at kink points. Such constraints most frequently arise from government tax and transfer programs. But kinked constraints sometimes arise in…
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 operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximised. Here we consider a case where society instead has preferences over the actual work allocations of welfare recipients. Optimality of work requi…
Legacies of the War on Poverty
We extend the work of Haveman et al., a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. social welfare system's evolution from the start of the War on Poverty through 2012. Their work chronicled changes in the welfare system and in poverty measurement and analyzed poverty levels and trends. We extend the analysis through 2022, finding that the poverty rate declined from 2012 to 2019 mostly because of improvements in the economy and not from changes in the tra…
The PSID and Income Volatility
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other dataset in the United States. Its record of providing data for seminal research is unmatched. In this article, we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the topic. Then we review the major papers that have used the PSID to study income volatility, comparing their results to those …
The Role of Randomized Field Trials in Social Science Research
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 and continuingthrough current experimental tests of recent welfare reforms, randomized evaluations have played a strong and increasing role in informing policy. This article reviews the record of these experiments and assesses the implications of that r…
Health Care Coverage for Children Who Are on and off Welfare
Access to adequate health insurance is a key concern of families with children at all income levels. Since 1965, mothers and children on welfare have had health care coverage through the Medicaid program, which has provided a health care safety net for welfare recipients. Although most Americans are insured through their employers, families who leave welfare for employment often find themselves in jobs that do not offer health care coverage, addi…
Demographic behavior and the welfare state
The Effect of the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act on Welfare Recipients and Work Incentives
The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) altered the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in important ways, especially regarding the work incentives in the benefit formula. We use a set of data on AFDC recipients active just prior to OBRA to determine how recipients were affected by the legislation. We find that working recipients were very hard hit and that the "tax rate" implicit in the program rose to 78 percent. Th…
Entitlements
A combination of demographic aging and diversification, volatile business cycle conditions, stagnant real wages, declining employment, and policy choices have increased the need to examine the adequacy of the U.S. social safety net. Is it accomplishing what it is designed to do? Can it weather a fiscal storm? Current "entitlement" programs are in almost all cases providing important assistance to U.S. families and are improving families' well-bei…
Evaluating the Effects of Changes in AFDC
Analysts are commonly called upon to perform the difficult task of evaluating the effects of specific changes in public policy upon the behavior of individuals, such as a change in the provisions of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program relating to the benefits of those in the program who find work. When charged with such a task, analysts commonly try to answer the question by tracing the behavior of a fixed panel of individu…
The Labor Market Replacement Effect of a Negative Income Tax
Tests the hypothesis that the negative effect of a negative income tax (NIT) on employment and output is muted to the extent that those who reduce their work effort are replaced by the unemployed. Factors that determine the size of the replacement effect; Explanation of the minimum impact of NIT on aggregate employment and output or on the rate of inflation at high levels of unemployment; Influence of the elasticity of labor demand on employment.…
The Uses of Tobit Analysis
In this paper authors point out that the coefficients obtained from using Tobit-here called beta coefficients - provide more information than is commonly realized. In particular, authors show that Tobit can be used to determine both changes in the probability of being above the limit and changes in the value of the dependent variable if it is already above the limit$ and authors show that this decomposition can be quantified in rather useful and …
Underreporting and Experimental Effects on Work Effort
David Greenberg, Robert Moffitt, John Friedmann, Underreporting and Experimental Effects on Work Effort: Evidence from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov., 1981), pp. 581-589
A Computationally Efficient Quadrature Procedure for the One-Factor Multinomial Probit Model
A PROBLEM OF ESTIMATION that has long confronted many economists is the difficulty of estimating the parameters of equations with limited dependent variables on cross-section time-series (i.e., panel) data. While there are widely available packaged computer programs for estimating either (a) cross-section probit and Tobit models or (b) simple permanent-transitory, random-effects panel models with continuous dependent variables, there are no avail…
The Effect of Unemployment Insurance on Unemployment
Robert Moffitt, Walter Nicholson, The Effect of Unemployment Insurance on Unemployment: The Case of Federal Supplemental Benefits, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 1-11
The Tobit Model, Hours of Work and Institutional Constraints
Evaluating the Effects of Changes in AFDC
Analysts are commonly called upon to perform the difficult task of evaluating the effects of specific changes in public policy upon the behavior of individuals, such as a change in the provisions of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program relating to the benefits of those in the program who find work. When charged with such a task, analysts commonly try to answer the question by tracing the behavior of a fixed panel of individu…
The Econometrics of Piecewise-Linear Budget Constraints
Robert Moffitt, The Econometrics of Piecewise-Linear Budget Constraints: A Survey and Exposition of the Maximum Likelihood Method, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 317-328
The Econometrics of Piecewise-Linear Budget Constraints
In this article maximum likelihood techniques for estimating consumer demand functions when budget constraints are piecewise linear are exposited and surveyed. Consumer demand functions are formally derived under such constraints, and it is shown that the functions are themselves nonlinear as a result. The econometric problems in estimating such functions are exposited, and the importance of the stochastic specification is stressed, in particular…
The lagged effect of the 1981 federal AFDC legislation on work effort
The Lagged Effect of the 1981 Federal AFDC Legislation on Work Effort
The Estimation of Wage Gains and Welfare Gains in Self-Selection Models
In this paper we consider the basic self-selection model for the effects of education, training, unions, and other activities on wages. We show that past models have ignored 'heterogeneity of rewards' to the activity--i.e., differences across individuals in the rate of return to the activity--as a source of selection bias. We model such heterogeneity, show how its presence can be tested, and draw out its implications for the wage and welfare gain…
The Effect of the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act on Welfare Recipients and Work Incentives
The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) altered the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in important ways, especially regarding the work incentives in the benefit formula. We use a set of data on AFDC recipients active just prior to OBRA to determine how recipients were affected by the legislation. We find that working recipients were very hard hit and that the "tax rate" implicit in the program rose to 78 percent. Th…
Real Wages over the Business Cycle
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 the work force over the cycle have systematically different unobserved permanent and transitory wage components than those who do not. The results show that selectivity bias is present, for those with high transitory wages are more likely to lose employ…
Demographic behavior and the welfare state
An Estimate of a Sectoral Model of Labor Mobility
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 mismatch. We estimate the relative importance of each hypothesis and find that the bulk of labor mobility is caused by mismatch rather than by sectoral shift. We then try to put a value on society's match--specific information. That is, we ask to what…
Poor Support
The Econometrics of Kinked Budget Constraints
In the last several years, a branch of applied econometrics has developed that is devoted to the development of techniques for the estimation of demand and other functions when the budget constraint is "piecewise-linear," or "kinky"-that is, when the constraint consists of a number of segments joined together at kink points. Such constraints most frequently arise from government tax and transfer programs. But kinked constraints sometimes arise in…
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 O.S. transfer system. In this paper we use 1986 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine the effect of Medicaid on the labor supply and welfare participation decisions of female heads of family. A key contribution is the…
The Growth of Earnings Instability in the U.S. Labor Market
Peter Gottschalk, Robert Moffitt, Lawrence F. Katz, William T. Dickens, The Growth of Earnings Instability in the U.S. Labor Market, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1994, No. 2 (1994), pp. 217-272
Lone Parenthood
Cohort Trends in the Lifetime Distribution of Female Family Headship in the United States, 1968–1985
We use the PSID Relationship File to estimate cohort trends in the lifetime incidence and duration of female family headship. Hazard (event-history) techniques are used to estimate movements into and out of headship, accounting for duration dependence and left-censored spells. The mean number of years spent in headship between ages 14 and 59 rose dramatically over the period. The increase arose from an increased number of headship spells, includi…
Welfare and Work Incentives
The effect of employment and training programs on entry and exit from the welfare caseload
To policymakers, the major attraction of employment and training programs for welfare recipients is that they hold out the prospect that recipients can be moved off the rolls and to self-sufficiency in the private labor market, thereby decreasing welfare costs and caseloads. This article considers the possibility that such programs may also affect the attractiveness of welfare in the first place, either by making welfare less desirable because th…
Health Care Coverage for Children Who Are on and off Welfare
Access to adequate health insurance is a key concern of families with children at all income levels. Since 1965, mothers and children on welfare have had health care coverage through the Medicaid program, which has provided a health care safety net for welfare recipients. Although most Americans are insured through their employers, families who leave welfare for employment often find themselves in jobs that do not offer health care coverage, addi…
Economics (57 obras) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (31 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Econometrics (21 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Demographic economics (20 obras) · Welfare (20 obras) · Labour economics (18 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Mathematics (15 obras)