Abstract
We examine the relationship between credit rating levels and rating agency fees in a public finance market in which rating agencies earn lower fees and face higher disclosure requirements ...relative to corporate bond and structured finance markets. Controlling for variation in the complexity of credit analysis at the issue level, we find evidence that rating agency conflicts of interest distort credit ratings in the municipal bond market. Unexpectedly expensive ratings are more likely downgraded, and inexpensive ratings are more likely upgraded. The relationship between credit ratings and rating agency fees is driven by issuers who lose access to AAA insurance.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers—the requests from ICE to a state or local law enforcement agency to hold someone until the person can be taken into immigration custody—have ...been instrumental in supporting the growing number of deportations from the United States. However, as migrant detentions expanded after 9/11, law enforcement agencies have been increasingly reluctant to comply with ICE's detainers, due to the cost incurred by detention centers when holding immigrants for an extended period and the possible violation of migrants’ civil rights. Such reluctance has earned these law enforcement agencies the label of “sanctuary cities.” ICE has denounced this behavior, arguing that it interferes with the agency's ability to obtain custody of convicted criminals and makes communities less safe. Using data on detainers at the local law enforcement-agency level, we assess ICE's claims. We find that sanctuary policies do not hinder ICE's ability to obtain custody of convicted criminals and question the argument that such policies might make communities less safe. These findings are relevant for migration scholars and policymakers interested in gaining a better understanding of the public-safety implications of sanctuary policies aimed at immigrants in various receiving nations, including Canada, the UK, and the United States.
Home health care agencies (HHAs) are skilled care providers for Medicare home health beneficiaries in the United States. Rural HHAs face different challenges from their urban counterparts in ...delivering care (eg, longer distances to travel to patient homes leading to higher fuel/travel costs and fewer number of visits in a day, impacting the quality of home health care for rural beneficiaries). We review evidence on differences in care outcomes provided by urban and rural HHAs.
Systematic review guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) for quality appraisal.
Care provided by urban and rural HHAs.
We conducted a systematic search for English-language peer-reviewed articles after 2010 on differences in urban and rural care provided by U.S. HHAs. We screened 876 studies, conducted full-text abstraction and NOS quality review on 36 articles and excluded 2 for poor study quality.
Twelve studies were included; 7 focused on patient-level analyses and 5 were HHA-level. Nine studies were cross-sectional and 3 used cohorts. Urban and rural differences were measured primarily using a binary variable. All studies controlled for agency-level characteristics, and two-thirds also controlled for patient characteristics. Rural beneficiaries, compared with urban, had lower home health care utilization (4 of 5 studies) and fewer visits for physical therapy and/or rehabilitation (3 of 5 studies). Rural agencies had lower quality of HHA services (3 of 4 studies). Rural patients, compared with urban, visited the emergency room more often (2 of 2 studies) and were more likely to be hospitalized (2 of 2 studies), whereas urban patients with heart failure were more likely to have 30-day preventable hospitalizations (1 study).
This review highlights similar urban/rural disparities in home health care quality and utilization as identified in previous decades. Variables used to measure the access to and quality of care by HHAs varied, so consensus was limited. Articles that used more granular measures of rurality (rather than binary measures) revealed additional differences. These findings point to the need for consistent and refined measures of rurality in studies examining urban and rural differences in care from HHAs.
In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of ...Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts” as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.
Oklahoma Republican Frank Lucas, who became chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology last month, has said one of his top priorities for the current congressional session will ...be to make NOAA an independent agency that can issue legally binding rules and regulations. Washington state Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who now chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has taken aim at a research review board in the Department of Health and Human Services. Next steps The framework applies to more than two dozen federal agencies, from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as those more focused on scientific and biomedical research, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes for Health, National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Housing assistance policies may lead to improved mental health for children and adolescents by improving housing quality, stability, and affordability. We use a unique data linkage of the National ...Health Interview Survey and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development administrative data to examine the impact of housing assistance on parent-reported mental health outcomes for children ages 2 to 17 (N = 1,967). We account for selection into housing assistance using a pseudo-waitlist method that compares children receiving assistance to those who will enter housing assistance within two years of their interview. Compared to those in the pseudo-waitlist group, we find that children living in public housing have better mental health outcomes. We do not find similar benefits for children receiving vouchers. Our results suggest that housing assistance policies can have a positive impact on mental health among disadvantaged children.
The government's decision to let BP spray 1.1 million gallons of chemical dispersants a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico was a classic case of pitting the devil you know against the ...devil you don't.
How BP came to spray 1.1 million gallons of chemical dispersants a mile beneath the ocean surface is a story of scientists turning to desperate measures during desperate times. And the government's decision to let BP do so, among the most gutsy calls of the entire
Deepwater Horizon
saga, was a classic case of pitting the devil you know against the devil you don't.
Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of ...agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development.
We investigate the economic and technological determinants inducing entrepreneurs to establish ventures with the purpose of reinventing financial technology (fintech). We find that countries witness ...more fintech startup formations when the economy is well-developed and venture capital is readily available. Furthermore, the number of secure Internet servers, mobile telephone subscriptions, and the available labor force has a positive impact on the development of this new market segment. Finally, the more difficult it is for companies to access loans, the higher is the number of fintech startups in a country. Overall, the evidence suggests that fintech startup formation need not be left to chance, but active policies can influence the emergence of this new sector.
Social enterprises in the microfinance industry need to adhere to both financial and social demands. Critics argue that there is a mission drift away from the social mission, and this has motivated ...the introduction of social rating agencies to strengthen the business ethics of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Using a global dataset of 204 socially rated MFIs from 58 countries, we assess the factors that drive the social performance ratings of MFIs. Overall our results show that social ratings of MFIs are significantly related to financial performance, greater outreach especially in rural areas, well-defined social objectives, staff commitment, service quality and an enhanced customer service. We observe that various rating agencies attach different importance to each of the social indicators. The public policy implication is that social rating agencies need to become more transparent, to reduce the information asymmetries between heterogenous socially motivated investors and the focal MFI.
PDF
