New Faculty Fellows

Winter 2004, Volume 26, Number 1

This fall, the Institute is pleased to welcome four new faculty members from four departments—economics, management and strategy, political science, and sociology.

Raquel Bernal

A labor economist, Raquel Bernal received her Ph.D. in economics from New York University this year. Interested in labor market performance, Bernal has in particular honed in on questions related to women’s employment—especially how maternal employment affects children’s cognitive development. Called “cognitive ability” or “skill endowment” by social scientists, it remains a black box. “Although we can account for many observable individual characteristics such as education, race, and experience, we still cannot explain a large part of the wage variation,” she said. “This is why economists, like myself, are trying to understand what determines ability at the early stages of life.”

In her dissertation, "Mothers’ Employment, Child Care Decisions, and the Well-Being of Their Children," Bernal found that a child of a full-time working mother in child care during the first five years of life can have as high as a 10.4 percent reduction in ability test scores. In this same paper, she assessed the impact of policies related to parental leave, child care, and other incentives to stay at home after birth on women’s decisions and children’s outcomes.

A related project, in collaboration with Michael Keane at Yale University, has the two researchers developing an economic model that they hope will accurately estimate the interplay between a mother’s employment and her child care choices, including the quality of that care, to pinpoint the effects these have on her child’s cognitive ability.

Bernal has also raised her investigative scope to a macro-level to consider how public policies on maternal and paternal leaves affect intrahousehold decision-making, family structure, intergenerational mobility, and income distribution. She is working on this project with Anna Fruttero of New York University.

Leemore Dafny

Economist Leemore Dafny studies the effects of competition in the healthcare sector on healthcare quality and costs. Do hospitals behave like businesses, and what are the policy implications of this behavior? How do hospitals and health plans react to financial incentives in the Medicare program, and how might public insurance programs be structured to take advantage of, or reduce, these responses? An assistant professor of management and strategy at Kellogg and an IPR faculty fellow, she received her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2001. She is a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in 2001-02.

In a recent paper “How Do Hospitals Respond to Price Changes?,” Dafny investigates hospitals’ responses to large reimbursement increases for Medicare patients with certain diagnoses. She finds that hospitals—especially for-profit ones—responded to these price changes by “upcoding” patients to diagnoses that had the largest reimbursement increases, garnering an extra $330-$425 million per year. But the upcoding did not affect quality of patient care or increase the number of patients admitted to higher-paying diagnoses. “These findings suggest that hospitals generally do not alter their treatment or admissions policies in response to reimbursement changes, but they do maximize their revenue through upcoding,” she said.

In another paper “Entry Deterrence in Hospital Procedure Markets: A Simple Model of Learning-by-Doing,” she asks whether hospitals try to increase the volume of their “specialty” surgical procedures to deter competition. Dafny looked at hospital data on electrophysiological studies (EP), an invasive cardiac procedure. In markets where potential competitors were “on the fence” with regard to entry, those hospitals that were already practicing EPs experienced a significant increase in the procedure in the year Medicare announced a prospective reimbursement increase. Her results suggest that hospitals might establish so-called “centers of excellence” as competitive deterrents.

Jeffery Jenkins

Jeffery Jenkins, assistant professor of political science and an IPR faculty fellow, specializes in the study of Congress, political parties, and American political development. His research interests have led him to examine the determinants of congressional roll-call voting; analyze the electoral linkage between representatives and their constituents; study the emergence and development of congressional institutions; and test the robustness of contemporary theories of Congress using historical data.

Before joining Northwestern’s faculty, he was an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University and a postdoctoral fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999.

In one project, Jenkins is studying how constituency, party, and underlying values affect the actions of individual members of Congress, such as in casting a roll-call vote. Jenkins is comparing the relative behavior of those members seeking re-election with lame-duck members, who are serving their remaining time in office without constituent restraints. His research has confirmed what others have found: Lame-duck members, as well as their re-election-minded colleagues, do not “shirk”—or significantly alter their voting patterns.

While some academics have argued that these null findings mean constituent preferences matter little to individual members of Congress, Jenkins is pursuing another theory—lame ducks continue representing their constituents’ interests because their preferences are closely aligned to those of their constituents. He is also considering such factors as their behavior in previous non-congressional positions, their socioeconomic background, and comparing individual survey responses to their voting records.

Jenkins is currently at work on two book manuscripts: “Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government,” co-authored with Charles Stewart III of MIT, and “Investigating the Effects of Party: Legislative Politics and the American Civil War.” He has published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and Studies in American Political Development.

Celeste Watkins

With appointments in the departments of sociology and African-American studies, Celeste Watkins is attacking a host of research issues ranging from urban poverty and social policy to nonprofits, governmental organizations, and race, class, and gender. The assistant professor received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in June.

Her current project and dissertation subject, "The Incomplete Revolution: Constraints on Reform in Welfare Bureaucracies," is an ethnographic analysis of the implementation of welfare reform on the front lines of service delivery. Through her field work in two welfare offices in Massachusetts, she hopes to lay bare some of the issues hiding behind the “rhetoric of welfare reform.” Her findings indicate that case workers, whose jobs have been irrevocably shaped by welfare-reform benchmarks, fulfill dual and sometimes conflicting roles: those of an eligibility compliance officer and a welfare-to-work advocate. It is difficult for case workers to fulfill an advocacy role when their clients “protest their institutional powerlessness” by concealing pertinent information. “It allows these mothers to exercise their power within the organization and broker for some level of control,” Watkins said.

Another part of the project focuses on the issue of race in welfare offices. In analyzing the welfare office of a white, working-class community on the East Coast, Watkins found this same welfare office acted as a site either for community integration or alienation depending on how case workers defined newcomers. Interestingly, she discovered case workers’ use of the office as a way to integrate newcomers was tied not so much to their views on racial diversity per se, but to their views of urban culture, a construct tied to race in the workers’ minds.

Watkins co-authored “Creating Networks for Survival and Mobility: Social Capital Among African-American and Latin-American Low-Income Mothers” with Silvia Domínguez (Social Problems, 2003). It investigates how low-income African-American and Latin-American women create and use social networks to obtain resources for daily survival and socioeconomic mobility.