ࡗ
Expensive Children in Poor Families: Out-of-PocketExpenditures for the Care of Disabled and Chronically
Ill Children in Welfare FamiliesA significant minority of poor families care for children with disabilities and chronic illnesses. This study is among the first to explore private costs resulting from children's disabilities among low-income families. We find that almost half of the sample of California AFDC families with special-needs children incurred some direct, out-ofpocket expenses in the preceding month, and about 20% incurred total costs exceeding $100. We also estimate lost employment income among low-income mothers caring for children with disabilities. We conclude that both out-of-pocket expenses and foregone earnings represent a substantial burden for many low-income families with special-needs children, and we discuss the policy implications of these findings.Chronic mental or physical impairments in childhood can impose substantial private costs on families. The costs of special medical care, therapeutic and educational services, transportation, and Center for Policy Research, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 (tmsmeed@maxwell. syr.edu).
The number of state and federal prisoners has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, but public willingness to finance prisons has not kept pace. One response has been a renewed interest in privately managed prisons. Proponents of privatization contend that private contractors, unencumbered by government procurement and personnel procedures, can provide better quality prison services at lower costs. This article uses the 1995 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities to examine claims of improved quality. The authors find that privately managed prisons perform better on some, but not all, measures of quality of confinement. Specifically, bivariate comparisons suggest that private facilities outperform both state and federal facilities in terms of the proportion of institutions that are able to avoid inmate assaults on staff members or other inmates. Even when the authors controlled for other causal variables, private prisons remained significantly less likely than federal prisons to experience violence.
Las Vegas experienced improvements in math and reading performance between 2006 and 2011. This study evaluates the benefits of these nonmarginal improvements to Las Vegas area homeowners, using a residential sorting model. We estimate households’ preferences for multiple characteristics including the proportion of proficient students in their assigned elementary school. The estimation accounts for the endogeneity of school quality using school boundary fixed effects. The welfare estimates suggest that the school quality improvements provided substantial benefits to the area's households. We find that benefit measures derived from a hedonic price model are substantially larger than our sorting model benefit measures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.