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The Institute for Policy Research
Presentations and Panelists: “Evaluating
TANF: What Did (or Didn't) Welfare Reform Accomplish?”
Rebecca M. Blank is dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Henry Carter Adams Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, and professor of economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also co-director of the National Poverty Center at the Ford School, funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote poverty-related research. Before arriving at Michigan, she served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999. She was a professor of economics at Northwestern University and served as the first director of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. Blank’s research has focused on the interaction between the macroeconomy, government anti-poverty programs, and the behavior and well-being of low-income families. Her 1997 book, It Takes A Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty, won the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations. Her more recent books include Finding Jobs: Work and Welfare Reform (co-edited with David Card, 2000, Russell Sage Press), The New World of Welfare (co-edited with Ron Haskins, 2001, Brookings Press), and Is the Market Moral? (co-authored with William McGurn, 2003, Brookings Press). In addition to holding a wide variety of advisory and professional roles, she is a faculty affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “The
Changing Role of Medicaid: From Babies to Boomers and Beyond”
Leemore Dafny is assistant professor of management and strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and an IPR faculty fellow. Trained as an economist, Dafny uses econometric methods to investigate the impact of public health insurance on healthcare costs and expenditures and to study competition in healthcare markets. Using nationwide data on Medicare beneficiaries, Dafny has examined the impact of Medicare pricing on the quantity and quality of inpatient admissions. She has also explored the strategic behavior of hospitals in surgical fields, finding evidence that hospitals may acquire additional experience in certain surgeries in order to deter entry by other providers. Currently, Dafny is investigating the effects of quality reporting on the Medicare HMO market, as well as exploring the impacts of hospital mergers on inpatient prices. Dafny is a NBER research fellow and previously worked with McKinsey and Company and the McKinsey Global Institute in Washington, D.C. “The
Increased Role of SSI in Addressing Child Poverty”
A fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution since 2005, economist Melissa S. Kearney studies social policy, U.S. poverty, government expenditure programs. and the economics of gambling, among other subjects. Her current projects include child participation in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, teen pregnancy prevention, and inequality in the United States. In a recent paper, co-written with Mark Duggan, she finds that child SSI participation increased significantly between 1989 and 2005 (from 0.26 million to 1.03 million), and the program leads to a significant long-term reduction in the probability that a child lives in poverty. She is a NBER research fellow and a member of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. Before joining Brookings, Kearney was assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow from 1998 to 2002.
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