{"title":"The Roof is on Fire: Wildfires' Effect on Housing Prices","authors":"Victor Sierra","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3545603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3545603","url":null,"abstract":"Regression analyses have been commonly applied to studying the relationships between wildfires and housing prices in local markets. My study conducts a regression analysis on a panel of local markets using county-level data. It contributes to climate and housing literature by estimating the impact of wildfires on housing prices across the Western United States using a robust least squares regression. Most models estimate wildfire effects on housing prices using direct data from wildfire activities or acres burned due to wildfire as their variables of interest. Wildfire activity data is not easily accessible on the county-level; thus, this model utilizes average annual maximum temperatures to measure changes in climate over time which exacerbate and contribute to more frequent wildfire activities. (Westerling et al., 2007). My study finds that as the average maximum temperature increases within a county, the housing prices will generally decrease in value. The results of these effects are found to be statistically significant. Specifically, one percentage point increase in the growth rate of average maximum temperature reduces the growth rate of housing sales price by an average of 0.149 percentage point. These results can provide policymakers and researchers more information about land use in wildfire-prone areas and the impact wildfires have on housing markets.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78579618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Government Assisted Programs and Unemployment Reduction in Developing Economies: A Study of Nigeria and Ghana","authors":"Prof Edwin Agwu","doi":"10.32327/ijmess/8.4.2019.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32327/ijmess/8.4.2019.18","url":null,"abstract":"This paper sets out to comparatively analyze various programs developed by the governments of Nigeria and Ghana towards alleviating unemployment. The inadequacies which have bedeviled these government assisted programs and their consequent failures warrant a review and reconsideration. The research employed qualitative case method with interviews as tools for data collection. Findings revealed a plethora of evidential facts with respect to perception of entrepreneurship in these countries which hinged on challenges such as inadequate funding, lack of requisite trainings, dearth of entrepreneurship education as well as the enabling environments. Most obvious among these challenges are the complete lack of governmental supports for the programs they propagated leading to the failure of various employment alleviation programs. This paper recommends the enactment of clear-cut policies by the governments under the leadership of a specialized ministry (ministry for entrepreneurship). Furthermore, a review and inclusion of entrepreneurship in the academic curriculum at all levels of the educational system will endear students to entrepreneurship studies. Finally, a holistic support of the organized private sectors in achieving a quantifiable target of full-fledged entrepreneurs within a decade will assist in unemployment reduction.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80554020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disclosure and Competition for Capital","authors":"Stephanie F. Cheng, Christine Cuny, Hao Xue","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3402345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3402345","url":null,"abstract":"Ownership segmentation in the municipal bond market gives rise to competition among local issuers for a limited supply of capital. We consider the disclosure implications of this competition for capital, using Moody’s 2010 recalibration of the municipal rating scale. The recalibration placed lowly upgraded issuers at a disadvantage relative to their highly upgraded peers within the same market segment. We develop a model in which two municipal bond issuers compete for investors’ capital by choosing bond yields. The model predicts the issuer that is disadvantaged by the recalibration is more likely to improve its disclosure to better compete with its advantaged peer if (i) the rating upgrade that its peer receives is higher and (ii) competition for capital is fiercer. Empirically, we find that the disadvantaged issuers provide more and timelier financial disclosures after the recalibration. This improvement in disclosure quality increases in the extent of the issuer’s disadvantage, arises only if we consider peers with whom the issuer directly competes for capital, and is pronounced when the local capital supply is constrained. Our analytical and empirical analyses support the idea that a competitive disadvantage in raising capital in segmented markets can motivate issuers to improve disclosure quality. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85241160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does Equalizing Assets Spur Development? Evidence From Large-Scale Land Reform in Peru","authors":"Michael Albertus, Bogdan G. Popescu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3668577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3668577","url":null,"abstract":"Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the “Great Divergence” between rich and poor countries over the last few centuries. Large landowners who fear being eclipsed by the masses or rival industrial elites and seek to preserve social and economic rents under-invest in public goods, block rural-urban migration, and keep peasants poor and subservient. By eliminating large landowners and enabling new policy initiatives, extensive land reform holds potential to vastly and directly improve peasant livelihoods, facilitate human capital formation, and enhance economic and social mobility. We demonstrate that this failed to occur in Peru despite a sweeping land reform that redistributed half of all private land to peasants. Using original localized land reform data and a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits unevenness in reform implementation, we show that greater land reform intensity in Peru generated more poverty and stunted human development. This occurred because land reform encouraged rural demographic stasis, generated widespread land informality and property rights instability, and reduced political competitiveness. Although the government’s distortionary management of post-reform cooperatives certainly did not maximize their development potential, evidence suggests that Peru’s land reform failed to promote development because of broader inherent features of the reform.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"27 9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77229757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Burris, Katie Moran-McCabe, Nadya Prood, K. Blankenship, Angus Corbett, A. Gutman, Bethany Saxon
{"title":"Health Equity in Housing: Evidence and Evidence Gaps","authors":"S. Burris, Katie Moran-McCabe, Nadya Prood, K. Blankenship, Angus Corbett, A. Gutman, Bethany Saxon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3490008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3490008","url":null,"abstract":"This report is the third in a series of reports exploring the role of law in housing equity and innovative uses of law to improve health equity through housing. The reports are based on extensive literature scans and semi-structured interviews with people who are taking action in housing policy and practice. The full series includes: Report I: A Vision of Health Equity in Housing; Report II: Legal Levers for Health Equity in Housing: A Systems Approach; Report III: Health Equity in Housing: Evidence and Evidence Gaps; Report IV: Creative People and Places Building Health Equity in Housing; Report V: Governing Health Equity in Housing; and Report VI: Health Equity through Housing: A Blueprint for Systematic Legal Action. This report outlines what we know and don’t know about the impacts of 30 legal levers, and how they are influencing health equity in housing. It takes a “cold-eyed view�? to wipe the slate of misconceptions and unwarranted confidence in existing legal levers, to help us better structure future efforts as the experiments they are. This report reviews not only the existing evidence for the levers, but clearly outlines the lingering questions we still have about how these legal levers are impacting health — setting the stage for our recommendations coming in a later report.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75002392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Reliant are Older Americans on State and Local Government Pensions?","authors":"Philip Armour, M. Hurd, S. Rohwedder","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3489348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3489348","url":null,"abstract":"State and local government pension plans cover about 19.5 million participants, and many participants are heavily reliant on these pensions for retirement income. Most of these plans, however, are underfunded. Based on data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examined the lifetime work histories of those observed at ages 67 to 72 in 2004, 2008, or 2014. Seventy-seven percent of single persons and 61 percent of couple households had never worked for state or local (SL some of the cuts are paid for by reduced taxes; and the affected households will bequeath less.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88163596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poverty Traps and Disaster Insurance in a Bi-Level Decision Framework","authors":"Raimund M. Kovacevic, W. Semmler","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3515648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3515648","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we study mechanisms of poverty traps that can occur after large disaster shocks. Our starting point is a stylized deterministic dynamic model with locally increasing returns to scale possibly generating multiple equilibria paths with finite upper equilibrium. The deterministic dynamics is then overlayed by random dynamics where catastrophic events happen at random points of time. The number of events follows a Poisson process, whereas the proportional capital losses (given a catastrophic event) are beta distributed. In a setup with fixed insurance premium per unit of insured capital, a fraction of the capital might be insured, and this fraction may change after each event. We seek for an optimal strategy with respect to the insured fraction. Falling below the instable equilibrium of the deterministic dynamics introduces the possibility of ending up in a poverty trap after the disaster shocks. We show that the trapping probability (over an infinite time horizon) is equal to one when the stable upper equilibrium of the deterministic dynamics is finite. This is true regardless of the chosen amount of insured capital. Optimization then is done with the expected discounted capital after the next catastrophic event as the objective. Our model may also be useful to assess risk premia and creditworthiness of borrowers when a sequence of shocks at uncertain times and of uncertain size occurs.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74439374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Expanding Public Health Insurance on Safety Net Program Participation: Evidence from the ACA Medicaid Expansion","authors":"L. Schmidt, Lara D. Shore-Sheppard, Tara Watson","doi":"10.3386/W26504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W26504","url":null,"abstract":"The expansion of public insurance eligibility that occurred with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions may have spillover effects to other public assistance programs. We explore the impact of the ACA on two large safety net programs: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). We use a county border-pair research design, examining county-level administrative measures of EITC and SNAP participation in contiguous county pairs that cross state lines where the county on one side of the border experienced the Medicaid expansion and the county on the other side did not. This approach allows us to focus narrowly on differences arising from the ACA Medicaid expansion choice, implicitly controlling for local economic trends that could affect safety net participation. Our results suggest that the Medicaid expansion increased participation in SNAP, and possibly in the EITC, in counties that expanded relative to nearby counties that did not expand. We corroborate and extend these results using individual level data from the American Community Survey (ACS). Our results show that access to one safety net program may increase take-up of others.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75703805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Food and Social Security at the Margins: The Parhaiyas of Jharkhand","authors":"A. Somanchi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3540956","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3540956","url":null,"abstract":"A recent survey of all Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) households in two blocks of Jharkhand reveals that their existence remains precarious due to disrupted livelihoods, limited access to education and other public services, and continued exploitation. The public distribution system has become an important source of support for them: most PVTG households have ration cards and receive the bulk of their monthly food rations. Social security pensions also help, but exclusion rates are higher and pension payments have recently been disrupted by Aadhaar-related problems, as have a range of other schemes. In spite of these useful social security measures, food insecurity remains common among PVTGs: more than 40 per cent of households reported that some members had slept hungry ‘a few times’ or ‘many times’ during the three months preceding the survey.","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89673727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Welfare Magnet Hypothesis: Evidence from an Immigrant Welfare Scheme in Denmark","authors":"Ole Agersnap, A. Jensen, H. Kleven","doi":"10.3386/w26454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/w26454","url":null,"abstract":"We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50 percent, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed and reintroduced. Based on a quasi-experimental research design, we find sizable effects: the benefit reduction reduced the net flow of immigrants by about 5,000 people per year, and the subsequent repeal of the policy reversed the effect almost exactly. The implied elasticity of migration with respect to benefits equals 1.3. This represents some of the first causal evidence on the welfare magnet hypothesis. (JEL F22, H53, I38, J15)","PeriodicalId":10619,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Economy: Social Welfare Policy eJournal","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82478764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}