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Essays on Health, Environment, and Public Policy
No full textIn this dissertation, I examine the impact of public policies on health and well-being across three different contexts. My research explores how elements of the physical and policy environment influence health and educational outcomes.
In Chapter 1, I study a policy that reduced air pollution and its effects on cognitive performance among schoolchildren. Using detailed administrative data covering the universe of public school students in Texas and North Carolina, I examine if reducing pollution from diesel-powered school buses affects student academic outcomes. To do so, I leverage variation from the installation of emissions control devices called retrofits, of which over 9,000 were installed between 2004-2014. I find that installing retrofits increased math and reading test scores by 0.02 standard deviations for the average retrofitting district. By scaling these estimates by the fraction of the bus fleet retrofitted, I estimate that improving air quality by this margin for all school bus riders would raise district-average test scores by 0.05 standard deviations, which is equivalent to an improvement in teacher quality of half a standard deviation. Treatment effects are stronger for students who live farther from school and grow with years of exposure. I also compare installing retrofits with other investments studied in the education literature, such as reduced class sizes or intensive tutoring programs. I show that retrofitting buses was a very cost-effective investment in terms of gains in academic achievement per dollar spent. These results suggest that school bus retrofits were an effective intervention that had substantive benefits beyond improvements in health. I close with a discussion on how these results can be extended to the transition to electric school buses.
In Chapter 2, I study the relationship between income and health in the context of tax policy targeted at low-income mothers. While the correlation between income and health has been well established, the causal relationship is not well understood. In this chapter, I estimate the long-run effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on outcomes for low-income mothers in the United States. Using variation from federal and state expansions over three decades, I examine a range of health and economic outcomes observed up to 15 years after becoming a parent. In general, I find little evidence of long-run broad-based effects of EITC benefits for adults, in contrast to previously documented positive long-run effects for children. I find suggestive evidence of long-run mental health improvements, but estimates are imprecise. I also find some evidence of long-run improvements in physical health and economic outcomes for Black mothers. Despite fade-out of short-run effects of the EITC, improvements in maternal health may still be an important mechanism for how safety net programs create long-lasting benefits for children.
In Chapter 3, Michel Boudreaux and I study a statewide health policy on initiation of contraceptive methods. Delaware Contraceptive Access Now (DelCAN) was a statewide initiative implemented in 2015-2019, which executed a coordinated bundle of reforms to improve access to all types of contraception, particularly long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). While most program components targeted publicly subsidized patients such as Medicaid and Title X, some components were applicable to all patients, such as clinical training and a public awareness campaign. In this study, which was published in PLOS ONE, we examine the impact of DelCAN on LARC initiation among privately insured women using a national commercial claims database and a difference-in-differences design. We estimate that DelCAN increased the probability of a LARC insertion among privately insured women in Delaware age 15-44 by 0.4 percentage points in an average year, a 13% increase from baseline. We also estimate that DelCAN increased LARC adoption in the immediate postpartum setting by 0.3 percentage points per year, which is a large increase relative to baseline. Treatment effects were stronger among individuals under age 30. Our study population had free access to all types of contraceptives via the ACA mandate, but our results suggest that clinical training and public awareness play important roles in ensuring access to the full range of contraceptives. These results help inform current and future policymakers in states engaged in similar contraceptive access policies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Author Under Sail The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902
No full textIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Spirit Truth -- 2. From Absorption to Theatricality and Back Again -- 3. "I Will Build a New Present" -- 4. Sons as Authors -- 5. Fathers as Publishers -- 6. The Daughter as Author -- 7. Lovers as Authors -- 8. At Sea with the Family -- 9. Yellow News, Yellow Stories -- 10. The Return Home -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About Jay WilliamsIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
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