Keith Finlay

Parental Substance Use and Foster Care: Evidence from Two Methamphetamine Supply Shocks

Foster care caseloads have almost doubled over the last two decades, but the cause of the growth is poorly understood. We study the role of parental methamphetamine (meth) use, which social workers have linked to recent growth in foster care admissions. To mitigate the impact of omitted variable bias, we take advantage of two significant, exogenous supply-side interventions in meth markets in 1995 and 1997, and find robust evidence that meth use has caused growth in foster care caseloads. Further, we identify the mechanisms by which increased meth use caused an increase in foster care caseloads. First, we find that treatment for meth abuse caused foster caseloads to fall in situations where a child was removed because of parental incarceration, suggesting that substance abuse treatment is a substitute for foster care services and more generally an effective demand-side intervention. Secondly, we find that parental meth use causes an increase in both child abuse and child neglect foster care cases. These results suggest that child welfare policies should be designed specifically for the children of meth-using parents.

Is Marriage Always Good for Children?: Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration

Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as instrumental variables in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on the high school dropout rate of black and Hispanic children. We find that unobserved factors drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child education, at least for children of women whose marriage decisions are affected by incarceration of men. For Hispanics we find evidence that these children actually may be better off living with a never-married mother.

Who Benefits from Tax Evasion

In this paper, we examine the distributional effects of tax evasion, using results from theoretical, experimental, empirical, and especially the general equilibrium literatures on tax evasion. Much – if not all – of this evidence concludes that the main beneficiaries of successful tax evasion are the tax evaders themselves, with distributional effects that largely favor higher income individuals. However, when general equilibrium adjustments in commodity and factor prices are considered, the distributional effects become considerably more complicated. The work on tax compliance is also put in the broader context of the distributional effects of other types of criminal activities, where similar forces seem to be at work. We conclude with some suggestions for future research.

Bootstrap Methods for Inference with Cluster-Sample IV Models

Microeconomic data often have within-cluster dependence. This dependence affects standard error estimation and inference in regression models, including the instrumental variables model. Standard corrections assume that the number of clusters is large, but when this is not the case, Wald and weak-instrument-robust tests can be severely over-sized. We examine the use of bootstrap methods to construct appropriate critical values for these tests when the number of clusters is small. We find that variants of the wild bootstrap perform well and reduce absolute size bias significantly, independent of instrument strength or cluster size. We also provide guidance in the choice among possible weak-instrument-robust tests when data have cluster dependence. These results are applicable to fixed-effects panel data models.

Willingness-to-accept pharmaceutical retail inconvenience: evidence from a contingent choice experiment.

Objectives Restrictions on retail purchases of pseudoephedrine are one regulatory approach to reduce the social costs of methamphetamine production and use, but may impose costs on legitimate users of nasal decongestants. This is the first study to evaluate the costs of restricting access to medications on consumer welfare. Our objective was to measure the inconvenience cost consumers place on restrictions for cold medication purchases including identification requirements, purchase limits, over-the-counter availability, prescription requirements, and the active ingredient. Methods We conducted a contingent choice experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers that presented participants with randomized, hypothetical product prices and combinations of restrictions that reflect the range of public policies. We used a conditional logit model to calculate willingness-to-accept each restriction. Results Respondents’ willingness-to-accept prescription requirements was

Implementing Weak Instrument Robust Tests for a General Class of Instrumental Variables Models

14.17 (

Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders

9.76–

WEAKIV: Stata module to perform weak-instrument-robust tests and confidence intervals for instrumental-variable (IV) estimation of linear, probit and tobit models

18.58) and behind-the-counter restrictions was

Is Mississippi's prescription-only precursor control law a prescription to decrease the production and raise the price of methamphetamine?

9.68 (

Is Marriage Always Good for Children? Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration

7.03–