Environmental Politics: the Structuring of Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Mass Environmental Attitudes*

This paper explores the impacts of political party identification and political ideology on two dimensions of mass environmental beliefs—awareness of environmental problems and support for environmental reform. We argue that while the environmental movement's mobilization of public awareness of environmental problems was essentially non-partisan, more recent movement efforts to achieve environmental reforms have taken a discernible “reform liberal” stance of advocating state regulation of the private sector. Neither political party identification nor political ideology has a substantial effect on awareness of environmental problems. Anti-laissez-faire political liberalism proves to be highly correlated with support for environmental reform, particularly among the middle class. Despite the major impact of political liberalism on support for environmental reform, there are no partisan differences in such support. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the notion that political-ideological differences in support for environmental reform exist despite political parties.     

Strong,healthy, energized: Striving for a healthy weight in an older lesbian population

The Office on Women’s Health funded five pilot healthy weight intervention studies for lesbian and bisexual (LB) women, which included a program called Strong. Healthy. Energized (SHE). SHE was a 12-session program, targeted toward LB women age 60 and older, which focused on exercise, including a pedometer to track steps; nutrition; stress management; and group discussions. The program enrolled 39 participants. Waist circumference decreased by 3.7% across the group (p < .01). Participants with the lowest one-third baseline step count saw a marked step increase. This intervention was effective in improving health behaviors and short-term health outcomes for older LB women.     

Cohort size and schooling choice

We develop a perfect-foresight overlapping generations model to investigate the effects of cohort size on schooling decisions and cohort-specific welfare measures. A set of sufficient conditions are presented which ensure the existence of an unique sequence of human capital rental rates and schooling choices for any sequence of cohort sizes. We calibrate the partial equilibrium model using data on schooling investments and aggregate wages over the period 1920 through 1980, and use the parameters to assess the magnitude of lifetime cohort wealth and schooling elasticities computed with respect to the entire cohort size sequence. We find that the equilibrium response of schooling to perturbations in the cohort size sequence is small, so that the adverse effects of increases in the size of own and neighboring cohorts on cohort wealth are not significantly migrated by adjustments in schooling investments within our modelling framework.This research was partially supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01-HD28409 and by the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. Comments and suggestions by three anonymous referees have resulted in a substantially improved paper. Francis Gupta provided extremely able research assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are attributable to me.     

Minimum Wage Effects on Labor Market Outcomes under Search,Matching, and Endogenous Contact Rates

Building upon a continuous‐time model of search with Nash bargaining in a stationary environment, we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare. Although minimum wage increases may or may not lead to increases in unemployment in our model, they can be welfare‐improving to labor market participants on both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. We discuss identification of the model using Current Population Survey data on accepted wages and unemployment durations, and show that by incorporating a limited amount of information from the demand side of the market it is possible to obtain credible and precise estimates of all primitive parameters. We show that the optimal minimum wage in 1996 depends critically on whether or not contact rates can be considered to be exogenous and we note that the limited variation in minimum wages makes testing this assumption problematic.     

An Equilibrium Model of Health Insurance Provision and Wage Determination

We investigate the effect of employer‐provided health insurance on job mobility rates and economic welfare using a search, matching, and bargaining framework. In our model, health insurance coverage decisions are made in a cooperative manner that recognizes the productivity effects of health insurance as well as its nonpecuniary value to the employee. The resulting equilibrium is one in which not all employment matches are covered by health insurance, wages at jobs providing health insurance are larger (in a stochastic sense) than those at jobs without health insurance, and workers at jobs with health insurance are less likely to leave those jobs, even after conditioning on the wage rate. We estimate the model using the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and find that the employer‐provided health insurance system does not lead to any serious inefficiencies in mobility decisions.