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Impact of legal and public policy changes on social and economic behavior

Ozbeklik, Ismail Serkan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1185350130

Abstract Details

2007, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Economics.
My dissertation consists of two chapters investigating impact of various legal and public policy changes on several important social and economic behaviors in the United States. The first chapter examines the long-term impact of legalized abortion on teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing, which has been in constant decline since the early 1990s in the U. S. My argument is that to the extent that it prevented unwanted births, legalized abortion could have reduced the likelihood of the teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing for the cohorts born after the legalization. This is analogous to the argument of Donahue and Levitt (2001) for crime but extends their analyses to a different context. I adopt a non-parametric approach that allows me to separately estimate the effects of the legal changes concerning abortion in the repeal states in 1970 and Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 on Whites and African-Americans. My results show that legalized abortion can potentially account for a little less than one third of the decline in the teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing among 15-17 years olds for African-Americans and a little more than one third of this decline for Whites in the 1990s. The second chapter explores two approaches to allow for the effect of eligibility to participate in Medicaid to differ across individuals. The first approach allows for interactions between eligibility and demographic variables in the linear probability model, which does not require distributional assumptions on the error terms. The second is based on a switching probit model and has the advantage of letting newly eligible individuals to be different from those previously eligible in terms of both observed and unobserved characteristics. By exploiting exogenous policy changes in Medicaid eligibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we estimate the average Medicaid participation rate of many demographic groups. We also estimate how different demographic groups respond in terms of Medicaid participation to a hypothetical policy experiment of increasing income limits for Medicaid eligibility by 10 percent in 1995. Our results suggest that there are large variations among demographic groups in participation rates and in their reactions to a policy change.
Bruce Weinberg (Advisor)
Economics, Labor
abortion legalization; teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing; Roe v. Wade; DDD; Medicaid; take-up; heterogeneous treatment effect; switching probit model; linear probability Model

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ozbeklik, I. S. (2007). Impact of legal and public policy changes on social and economic behavior [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1185350130

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ozbeklik, Ismail. Impact of legal and public policy changes on social and economic behavior. 2007. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1185350130.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ozbeklik, Ismail. "Impact of legal and public policy changes on social and economic behavior." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1185350130

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1185350130
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© 2007, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.