Click on the titles to read
abstracts and download the papers.
Published Papers
Do
Employment
Subsidies Work? Evidence from Regionally Targeted Subsidies
in Turkey
(with Gordon Betcherman and
Carmen Pages), December 2009. IZA Discussion paper No. 3508. Labour
Eonomics (forthcoming)
This paper
studies the effects on
registered employment and number of registered establishments of two
employment subsidy schemes in Turkey. We implement a
difference-in-differences methodology to construct appropriate
counterfactuals for the covered provinces. Our findings suggest that
both subsidy programs did lead to significant net increases in
registered jobs in eligible provinces (5%-13% for the first program
and 11%-15% for the second). However, the cost of the actual job
creation was high because of substantial deadweight losses,
particularly for the first program (47% and 78%). Because of better
design features, the second subsidy program had lower, though still
significant, deadweight losses (27%-46%). Although constrained by
data availability, the evidence suggests that the dominant effect of
subsidies was to increase social security registration of firms and
workers rather than boosting total employment and economic activity.
This supports the theory that in countries with weak enforcement
institutions, high labor taxes on low-wage workers may lead to
substantial incentives for firms and workers to operate informally.
Working Papers
Does
Uninsurance Affect the Health Outcomes of the Insured? Evidence from
Heart Attack Patients in California,
November 2008. University of Maryland mimeo. Mentioned
in "The Economic Case For Health Care
Reform"
(Council of Economic Advisers).
One of the
major challenges confronting
policy makers today is the persistently high rate of U.S. residents who
do not have health insurance. Any health care reform that aims to
tackle this issue requires a solid understanding of the effects of
uninsurance on society. In this paper, I examine the impact of
uninsured patients on the health outcomes of the insured. I focus on
one measure of health outcome, the in-hospital mortality rate of
insured heart attack patients, and implement panel data models using
patient discharge data from California hospitals for the period
1999-2006. Overall, my results indicate that uninsured patients have an
economically significant effect on the health outcomes of insured heart
attack patients. I show that these results are not driven by unobserved
characteristics of insured heart attack patients or hospitals and that
they are robust to a host of specification checks. My results indicate
that eliminating uninsurance would reduce the annual number of insured
heart attack deaths by 125-200, roughly corresponding to a 3-5%
reduction in the total number of deaths. My calculations place the
marginal cost of a statistical life year saved from reducing
uninsurance between $38,093 and $63,569, implying that reducing
uninsurance may be a cost effective way of improving the health
outcomes of heart attack patients.
Work in Progress
The
Effects of Immigration on Native Crime: Evidence from Hurricane Mitch
(with Mircea Trandafir).