Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finding but a reduction in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early 2014.

The University of California became a “public trust” in 1879 as part of a larger revision of California’s Constitution approved by California voters. The University henceforth gained the exclusive power to operate, control, and administer the University of California, becoming virtually a fourth branch of state government, a "constitutional corporation . . . equal and coordinate with the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. It was a watershed moment in the history of California’s land-grant public university, fundamentally shaping the state’s subsequent development of the nations, and the world’s, first coherent approach to building a mass higher education system. Status as a public trust set UC on a spectacular course, helping it to create an internal academic culture and drive to meet the socioeconomic needs of the state relatively free of the often contentious political interventions found in many other states. UC emerged as one of the most productive and prestigious university systems in the world. Yet over the past six or so decades, the unusual status of the university’s governing board has been on occasions a source of frustration for lawmakers who have wanted to be more directly involved in controlling and formulating university policy, from admissions practices and tuition, to how funds are raised and spent, what academic programs UC should or should not provide, and proposals to revise the membership and authority of the Regents. The following provides an historical account of how and why the University of California gained this unusual level of autonomy. In essence, and in the context of 1870s California, delegates to the state’s second and last constitutional convention in 1878 heard the complaints of UC’s president Daniel Coit Gilman shortly before he left in frustration to become the head of Johns Hopkins University, and chose to protect it from further “legislative control and popular clamor.” Ultimately, the delegates and the voters chose the university’s lay board with a representative mix of Californians and lawmakers, the Regents, over the legislature as the best way to organize and promote UC.

This paper evaluates the health impact of a central piece in the U.S. safety net for families with children: the Earned Income Tax Credit. Using tax-reform induced variation in the federal EITC, we examine the impact of the credit on infant health outcomes. We find that increased EITC income reduces the incidence of low birth weight and increases mean birth weight.  For single low education (12 years or less) mothers, a policy-induced treatment on the treated increase of $1000 in after-tax income is associated with a 0.17 to 0.31 percentage point decrease in low birth weight status.  Given roughly 10.7% of treated children were low birth weight, this represents a 1.6% to 2.9% decline.  These impacts are evident with difference-in-difference models and event study analyses, and show larger impacts for births to African American mothers. Our results suggest that part of the mechanism for this improvement in birth outcomes is the result of more prenatal care and less negative health behaviors (smoking). Additionally, we find a shift from public to private insurance coverage, and for some a reduction in insurance overall, indicating a potential change in the quality and perhaps quantity of coverage.  We contribute to the literature by establishing that a policy-driven increase in income and labor supply can improve health, and illustrating a health impact of a non-health program. More generally, we demonstrate the potential for positive external benefits of the social safety net.

We implement a gym-attendance incentive intervention and elicit subjects' predictions of their postintervention attendance. We find that subjects greatly overpredict future attendance, which we interpret as evidence of partial naiveté with respect to present bias. We find a significant postintervention attendance increase, which we interpret as habit formation, and which subjects appear not to predict ex ante. These results are consistent with a model of projection bias with respect to habit formation. Neither the intervention incentives, nor the small posttreatment incentives involved in our elicitation mechanism, appear to crowd out existing intrinsic motivation. The combination of naiveté and projection bias in gym attendance can help to explain limited take-up of commitment devices by dynamically inconsistent agents, and points to new forms of contracts. Alternative explanations of our results are discussed.