Sule Alan

The Effects of Drug Subsidies on Out-of Pocket Prescription Drug Expenditures by Seniors: Regional Evidence from Canada

Between 1970 and 1986, all Canadian provinces introduced some version of a prescription drug subsidy for those aged 65 years or over and since 1986, all the provinces have increased copayments or deductibles to some degree. Employing a first-order approximation to the welfare gains from a subsidy, we find evidence that these subsidies have been less redistributive than an absolute per household cash transfer but slightly more redistributive than a transfer that would increase each households income by the same percentage. Such evidence may have relevance for predicting the redistributive effects of a potential national prescription drug plan for seniors in the US.

Estimation of Panel Data Regression Models with Two-Sided Censoring or Truncation

This paper constructs estimators for panel data regression models with individual specific heterogeneity and two-sided censoring and truncation. Following Powell (1986) the estimation strategy is based on moment conditions constructed from re-censored or re-truncated residuals. While these moment conditions do not identify the parameter of interest, they can be used to motivate objective functions that do. We apply one of the estimators to study the effect of a Danish tax reform on household portfolio choice. The idea behind the estimators can also be used in a cross sectional setting.

Do Disaster Expectations Explain Household Portfolios

It has been argued that rare economic disasters can explain most asset pricing puzzles. If this is the case, perceived risk associated with a disaster in stock markets should be revealed in household portfolios. That is, the framework that solves these pricing puzzles should also generate quantities that are consistent with the observed ones. This paper estimates the perceived risk of disasters (both probability and expected size) that is consistent with observed portfolios and consumption growth between 1983 and 2004 in the United States. I find that the portfolio choice of households that have less than a college degree can be partially explained by expectations of stock markets disasters only if one allows for a large probability of labor income loss at the same time. Such disaster expectations however, are not revealed in the portfolios of educated and wealthier households; simple per-period participation costs to stock market coupled with preference heterogeneity explain their participation and investment patterns.

Subprime Consumer Credit Demand: Evidence from a Lender's Pricing Experiment

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and January 2007. We find that individuals who tend to utilize their credit limits fully do not reduce their demand for credit when subject to increases in interest rates as high as 3 percentage points. This finding is naturally interpreted as evidence of binding liquidity constraints. We also demonstrate the importance of truly exogenous variation in interest rates when estimating credit demand elasticities. We show that estimating a standard credit demand equation with nonexperimental variation leads to seriously biased estimates even when conditioning on a rich set of controls and individual fixed effects. In particular, this procedure results in a large and statistically significant 3-month elasticity of credit card debt with respect to interest rates even though the experimental estimate of the same elasticity is neither economically nor statistically different from zero.

Estimation of Panel Data Models with Two-Sided Censoring

It is straightforward to construct moment conditions for two-sided censored panel data regression models with strictly exogenous explanatory variables. The contribution of this note is to show that one set of these moment conditions uniquely identify the parameters of the model under a natural full-rank condition.

Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit

We show that grit, a non-cognitive skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in the childhood period and can be fostered in the classroom environment. Our evidence comes from an evaluation of a randomized educational intervention implemented in elementary schools in Istanbul. Outcomes are measured via a novel incentivized real effort task and actual school grades on core subjects. We find that treated students are 1) more likely to choose to undertake a more challenging and more rewarding task against an easier but less rewarding alternative, 2) less likely to give up after failure, 3) more likely to exert effort to accumulate task-specific ability, and consequently, 4) more likely to succeed and collect higher payoffs. The intervention also has a significant impact on school grades: We find that treated students are about 3 percentage points more likely to receive top grades in core academic subjects.

Precautionary Wealth Accumulation: Evidence from Canadian Microdata

This paper estimates the effect of labour income uncertainty on wealth accumulation using two data sources. Wealth information is obtained from the master files of the new Canadian Survey of Financial Security 1999 (SFS). Labour income risk proxies are constucted by industry using the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) between 1996 and 2001. The empirical results suggest the presence of a strong precautionary saving motive among Canadian households for broad definitions of wealth. Furthermore, consistent with the buffer-stock-saving model, the level of precautionary funds significantly increases when households face liquidity constraints.

Fostering Patience in the Classroom: Results from Randomized Educational Intervention

We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children’s intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children’s own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The results persist almost 3 years after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and are robust across different experimental elicitation methods. The effects also extend beyond experimental outcomes: we find that treated students are significantly less likely to receive a low “behavior grade.”

Income and Consumption: A Micro Semistructural Analysis with Pervasive Heterogeneity

We develop a model of consumption and income that allows for pervasive heterogeneity in the parameters of both processes. Introducing codependence between household income parameters and preference parameters, we also allow for heterogeneity in the impact of income shocks on consumption. We estimate the parameters of the model using a sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, covering the period 1968–2009. We find considerable codependent heterogeneity in the parameters governing income and consumption processes. Our results suggest a great deal of heterogeneity in the reaction of consumption to income shocks, highlighting the heterogeneity in the self-insurance available to households.

Gender Stereotypes in the Classroom and Effects on Achievement

We study the effect of elementary school teachers’ beliefs about gender roles on student achievement. We exploit a natural experiment where teachers are prevented from self-selecting into schools, and, conditional on school, students are allocated to teachers randomly. We show that girls who are taught for longer than a year by teachers with traditional gender views have lower performance in objective math and verbal tests, and this effect is amplified with longer exposure to the same teacher. We find no effect on boys. We show that the effect is partly mediated by teachers’ transmitting traditional beliefs to girls.