Browsing by Subject "Public Policy"
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Item Analyzing Impediments of Fair Housing Choice in Hennepin County, MN: A Resource Inventory.(1995) Stahl, Joseph GItem Atrial Fibrillation Readmissions: Temporal Trends, Risk Factors and Data Driven Modeling(2021-12) Salsabili, MahsaThis dissertation provides a background with overview of the clinical perspective, policy perspective and application of data driven modeling for atrial fibrillation (AF) and hospital readmissions. Additionally, three aims focused on temporal trends in AF hospitalization and readmission, predictors of AF readmission, and application of machine learning models in AF readmission are presented. The overall purpose of this dissertation is to develop stronger understanding of the temporal trends in AF hospitalizations and readmission and identify factors that increase the likelihood of readmission among the AF population. The value of application of machine learning algorithms to predict readmissions were assessed and compared to traditional methods. Atrial fibrillation is the most common clinically significant cardiac arrhythmia in the United States. Poorly controlled atrial fibrillation patients are likely to be hospitalized and potentially readmitted to the hospital within 30 days. The Nationwide Readmission Database (NRD) was analyzed using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD‐9) and tenth revision (ICD-10) codes to identify adult patients with a primary diagnosis of atrial fibrillation at discharge. Among those admitted with atrial fibrillation on average 57,883 individuals were readmitted per year for all-cause readmission within 30 days from 2010 to 2017. The AF index hospitalization rate increased from 10.4 per 1000 adults in 2010 to 11.1 in 2013 and dropped back to 10.4 in 2014 and increased to 10.9 in 2017. This nationally representative study of primary atrial fibrillation admissions and readmissions found that over the 2010 to 2017 time frame, crude atrial fibrillation index admissions increased, except for 2014 wherethere was a decline. Thirty- day all-cause readmission rates remained relatively stable for atrial fibrillation index patients across the study years. There is limited data regarding 30‐day readmission rates and predictors after discharge for atrial fibrillation. The 2017 NRD was assessed using ICD‐10 codes to identify the AF population. Predictors of readmissions, and performance of the predictive model were analyzed. A hierarchical mixed linear model was used on the best performing model to identify the predictors of readmission based on index admission. Presence of comorbidities such as metastatic cancer, lymphoma and severe renal failure present in index atrial fibrillation during index hospitalization predicted higher likelihood 30‐day readmissions. About 1 in 6 patients had an all-cause 30-day readmission. The patient comorbidities contributed significantly to readmission with oncology comorbidities being the top predictor. There is a lack of studies attempting to predict readmissions among AF population using various machine learning techniques. Using the 2017 NRD, we explored the performance of four common and widely used classification approaches (random forest, decision tree, gradient boosting and Naïve Bayes) in 30-day all-cause readmission for AF patients. To have a less biased and more generalizable model 10-fold cross validation was performed to train and test the data, with five variations of feature presentation. We compared and reported common key performance indicators for binary classification techniques (e.g. Area-Under Curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score) among the various classifiers. Our results reveal that Gradient Boosting has the greatest performance with an AUC of 0.667, which was followed by Naïve Bayes and Random Forest with AUCs of 0.641 and 0.640 respectively. The feature variations with comorbidities present have better performance for these three classifiers. Using Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and Naïve Bayes we get acceptable performance when assessing AF all cause 30-day readmission. Overall, the results of the dissertation show that the prevalence of AF hospitalizations and readmission is increasing over time. Presence of comorbidities among patients increased the likelihood of readmissions. The performance of linear based model and majority of the machine learning based models improved with the presence of variables representing comorbidities. The overall performance of the best performing machine learning models was similar to the linear model in predicting readmissions among the AF population.Item Challenges and Opportunities Posed by the Reform Era.(Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 1999) Courtney, Mark E.Item Children of the State: Children in the Child Welfare System, Minnesota. Executive Summary.(School of Social Work, University of Minnesota., 1992) Wattenberg, Esther; Cassidy, Donald W.Item Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisner. Report No. 3: Baseline Data Analysis for North Side Redevelopment.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2001) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisner. Report No. 4: Changes to the Public Housing Stock in Minneapolis.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2001) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros, Reports 1-8.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2002) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros. Report No. 2: Planning for North Side Redevelopment.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2002) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros. Report No. 5: Relocation of Residents from North Side Public Housing.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2001) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros. Report No. 6: The Experiences of Dispersed Families.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2002) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros. Report No. 7: Mobility Certificates.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2001) Goetz, Edward GItem Deconcentrating Poverty in Minneapolis: Hollman v. Cisneros. Report No. 8: Replacement Housing.(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2001) Goetz, Edward GItem Essays in Inequality and Public Economics(2022-08) Malkov, EgorThis dissertation consists of three chapters which contribute to quantitative and theoretical understanding of inequality and associated public policies. The first essay studies how different should income taxation be across singles and couples. I answer this question using a general equilibrium overlapping generations model that incorporates single and married households, intensive and extensive margins of labor supply, human capital accumulation, and uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk. The degree of tax progressivity is allowed to vary with marital status. I parameterize the model to match the U.S. economy and find that couples should be taxed less progressively than singles. Relative to the actual U.S. tax system, the optimal reform reduces progressivity for couples and increases it for singles. The key determinants of optimal policy for couples relative to singles include the detrimental effects of joint taxation and progressivity on labor supply and human capital accumulation of married secondary earners, the degree of assortative mating, and within-household insurance through responses of spousal labor supply. I conclude that explicitly modeling couples and accounting for the extensive margin of labor supply and human capital accumulation is qualitatively and quantitatively important for the optimal policy design. In the second essay, I develop a framework for assessing the welfare effects of labor income tax changes on married couples. I build a static model of couples' labor supply that features both intensive and extensive margins and derive a tractable expression that delivers a transparent understanding of how labor supply responses, policy parameters, and income distribution affect the reform-induced welfare gains. Using this formula, I conduct a comparative welfare analysis of four tax reforms implemented in the United States over the last four decades, namely the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. I find that these reforms created welfare gains ranging from -0.16% to 0.62% of aggregate labor income. A sizable part of the gains is generated by the labor force participation responses of women. Despite three reforms resulting in aggregate welfare gains, I show that each reform created winners and losers. Furthermore, I uncover two patterns in the relationship between welfare gains and couples' labor income. In particular, the reforms of 1986 and 2017 display a monotonically increasing relationship, while the other two reforms demonstrate a U-shaped pattern. Finally, I characterize the bias in welfare gains resulting from the assumption about a linear tax function. I consider a reform that changes tax progressivity and show that the linearization bias is given by the ratio between the tax progressivity parameter and the inverse elasticity of taxable income. Quantitatively, it means that linearization overestimates the welfare effects of the U.S. tax reforms by 3.6-18.1%. The third essay studies the policies that are aimed at mitigating COVID-19 transmission. Most economic papers that explore the effects of COVID-19 assume that recovered individuals have a fully protected immunity. In 2020, there was no definite answer to whether people who recover from COVID-19 could be reinfected with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In the absence of a clear answer about the risk of reinfection, it is instructive to consider the possible scenarios. To study the epidemiological dynamics with the possibility of reinfection, I use a Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Resistant-Susceptible model with the time-varying transmission rate. I consider three different ways of modeling reinfection. The crucial feature of this study is that I explore both the difference between the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios and how the mitigation measures affect this difference. The principal results are the following. First, the dynamics of the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios are indistinguishable before the infection peak. Second, the mitigation measures delay not only the infection peak, but also the moment when the difference between the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios becomes prominent. These results are robust to various modeling assumptions.Item Flattening the Eviction Curve: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of the Brooklyn Center Tenant Protection Ordinance(2024-02-29) Gramlich, JackThis paper uses two quasi-experimental methods—synthetic control (SC) and difference-in-differences (DiD)—to evaluate the effects of the 2022 Brooklyn Center Tenant Protection Ordinance. The ordinance was adopted at a time when eviction filings were on the rise across the state. Descriptive statistics provide an indication that after the ordinance was adopted, Brooklyn Center’s eviction rate did not increase by as much as the eviction rate in other parts of suburban Hennepin County. For SC models, I compared Brooklyn Center to most other Hennepin County cities. I found statistically significant evidence that the ordinance reduced eviction rates in the period 37-48 weeks after policy adoption. This result survived several placebo tests (though it was sensitive to whether Brooklyn Park was included in the donor pool). Results for filing rates did not survive all placebo tests. For DiD, I drew from a sample of most block groups in suburban Hennepin County. Conditioning on pre-treatment covariates via doubly robust DiD, I found the policy brought reduced eviction rates and filing rates in some of the first eight months after policy adoption. DiD models survived a wide variety of robustness checks. SC and DiD provided consistent evidence of reduced eviction rates in some periods of time. The two methods produced mixed evidence on filing rates, and did not produce strong evidence of policy effects for other outcomes. This paper concludes that when evictions spiked across Minnesota following the expiration of COVID-19 eviction moratorium policies, the City of Brooklyn Center flattened the eviction curve.Item Forty Years on the basis of sex: Title IX, the "Female Athlete" and the Political Construction of Sex and Gender(2013-08) Sharrow, ElizabethThis project employs a policy feedback framework to analyze how American political institutions grapple with inequities in educational settings, and how policy design and implementation matter for social change. Using archival data and quantitative data, I explore how political battles over the implementation of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 have shifted social and political understandings of sex and gender. I argue that battles over the implementation and meanings of the law's application to athletics have recursively altered political meanings of sexed bodies and political repertoires of gender. Further, debates over the meaning of policy have constituted the "female athlete" as a political figure germane to Title IX's policy domain, as well as broader social change over the past forty years. This dissertation historicizes the politics of Title IX, focusing mainly on the implicit definition and application of its central clause, "on the basis of sex", to the domain of athletics (and sports vis-à-vis classrooms). Throughout, the work is guided by my main research question: How have battles over the implementation of Title IX altered political and social understandings of sex and gender? Each chapter analyzes a different decade in order to illustrate the difficulties in settling cultural change (especially to gender roles) through political intervention and rights-based legislation. Attention to the politics of sex inherent to sports in Title IX illustrates how policy has cemented certain embodied understandings of what sex (and sex at the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and ability) means. In sports, "sex" is defined as a category of the body, and this meaning has been re-naturalized through political battles of the past forty years. Athletics were not mentioned in the original congressional legislation, but institutions of American government charged with implementing the law quickly became embroiled in debates over how to address severe disparities in college athletic opportunities between women and men. Throughout the 1970s, sports emerged as the most politically contentious realm of Title IX's implementation. Over the past forty years, the application of the law to sports has fueled more persistent political clashes regarding the meaning of equality than has its application to educational settings. I argue that a tension between "sex-blind" enforcement in education and "sex-conscious" guidelines for sport continues to fuel political battles over the law. Consequently, this policy designed to end discrimination "on the basis of sex" came to naturalize sex as a characteristic of bodies. Title IX's policy design did so in the realm of sports, but not in classrooms. Classrooms were by and large sex-integrated, educating girls and boys in the same spaces "regardless of their sex". Sports, were sex-segregated, first dividing girls from boys into different spaces, "by virtue of their sex". This on-going mechanism of policy design constitutes what I refer to as the "Paradox of Title IX", and this work demonstrates how it has developed and been reified through political battles over the policy. The history of sports as a U.S. policy domain demonstrates how policy development and political battles can come to generate unexpected and uneven outcomes and tensions, even within purportedly "successful" policy interventions. Although Title IX has had many positive outcomes, applying an intersectional lens helps to understand some of the law's on-going limitations.Item Housing Issues.(1975) Shippee, B. WarnerItem How do Minnesota School Board members learn to do their jobs?(2009-06) Conlon, Thomas JuliusSchool boards in Minnesota largely function as volunteer or lowly-compensated elected bodies whose members are not professionally trained for their jobs, yet the public demands accountability and results from their local public school districts. This descriptive study examined how a random sample of 322 Minnesota school board members learned to do their jobs under such conditions, as largely autonomous bodies with various differences between school districts. A hard copy of a survey was sent to the identified sample, with a response rate of 66.1%. The study found that, while neither informal, formal, nor external professional transfer skill learning methods solely dominated, whereas Marsick and Watkins (1992) believed that 90% of workplace learning takes place through informal means. Skills requiring large degrees of interpersonal interaction, negotiation, or political awareness were learned predominantly through informal (and to a lesser extent external professional transfer) means, while skills in key duties were largely learned through formal means. Demographic characteristics gathered yielded virtually no differences among groups. Challenges faced by formal training providers of school board members included whether or not the training methods (formal versus informal) were effective for certain tasks or duties, if learning improved using formal methods, and if certain areas not currently covered in formal training might be needed. The study concludes with a call for further research into the experiences of learning to be a school board member.Item Locating the State: Dual Visibility in Contemporary American Government(2018-08) Rosenthal, AaronThis dissertation examines how government is made visible in the lives of Americans, how this visibility varies across social groups, and what political consequences flow from this variation. Using in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and quantitative analysis, I argue that public policy changes have created a racial divide in the way government manifests itself in the lives of Americans. Over the last 50 years, public benefits that disproportionately favor white Americans have grown increasingly hidden, while taxes and poverty programs perceived as mostly assisting people of color have risen in their conspicuousness. In addition, the decline of the civil rights legislation has clashed with the growing visibility of the criminal justice system, particularly due to the rise of mass incarceration and broken windows policing. As a result, government is most visible to white Americans as an entity that wastes “their” tax dollars on “welfare” programs, while the criminal justice system has become a uniquely visible face of government for people of color. This visibility helps explain why political trust has fallen to historic lows, but importantly by highlighting that this distrust is tied to different parts of the state, this dissertation illuminates the different political consequences caused by this distrust. Where white distrust tied to a concern over tax dollars is a politically mobilizing force, distrust of government pushes people of color away from the political process because it is rooted in a fear of the criminal justice system. Ultimately, this dual visibility dynamic promotes a racially patterned political inequality that hinders the prospects of progressive policy.Item MN StoryCollective: Citizen Storytelling(2024-08-01) Inglis , Maximillion; Neuser , Abrahm; Olson, Julia; Williams, MattThe Minnesota Story Collective (MNSC), an initiative of the State of Minnesota, was established to collect and analyze qualitative narratives from diverse community members. This effort aims to provide state agencies with a flexible and ongoing source of qualitative data to ensure that programs, policies, and practices better meet the needs of all families. In Fall 2023, MNSC collected a substantial dataset through community events and an online portal, creating an opportunity to more deeply understand key communities or subgroups in Minnesota, including: youth, single parents, and parents of children with identified special health needs. This project was undertaken to analyze the collected narratives and identify recurring patterns and themes within the data of these three subgroups. The analysis focused on three key research questions: (1) What are the frequently recurring ideas shared by participants? (2) What do these stories reveal about the lived experiences of Minnesotans? (3) How can the MNSC initiative be effectively communicated to potential users to enhance policy-making processes? Through thematic analysis, the study identified seven primary themes across the narratives: Home, Region/Place, Events, Community, Institutions, and Needs (with subcategories of Barriers to Needs and Needs Met). These themes were further explored within the context of the three target populations, providing insights into the unique challenges and experiences faced by each group.