Essays on the effects of devolution.

Abstract

The United States during the 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a major paradigm shift in the role and scope of the federal government. In particular, Congress' Contract with America and President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform transferred significant responsibilities to state and local governments as well as to individuals, and concurrently reduced the involvement of the federal government in a variety of public programs. In <italic>Essays on the Effects of Devolution,</italic> I explore the consequences of policy changes enacted during the 1990s and 2000s in order to gauge the economic response of those affected, assess the benefits and burdens of these policies, and glean lessons from these experiences. I study a major funding cut to the National Endowment for the Arts to determine whether individual donors were able to compensate arts organizations for their losses in funding. I also examine the trends in material well-being of low-income mothers before and after welfare reform. As a result of these kinds of devolutionary policies, the federal government has become increasingly reliant on policy tools that are broader in their goals. To address this issue, I study the effect of the dependent exemption and the Earned Income Tax Credit on households' labor supply decisions.