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Abstract Background The largest poverty alleviation program in the US is the earned income tax credit (EITC), providing $60 billion to over 25 million families annually. While research has shown positive impacts of EITC receipt in pregnancy, there is little evidence on whether the timing of receipt may lead to differences in pregnancy outcomes. We used a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design, taking advantage of EITC tax disbursement each spring to examine whether trimester of receipt was associated with perinatal outcomes. Methods We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis of California linked birth certificate and hospital discharge records. The sample was drawn from the linked CA birth certificate and discharge records from 2007–2012 (N = 2,740,707). To predict eligibility, we created a probabilistic algorithm in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and applied it to the CA data. Primary outcome measures included preterm birth, small-for-gestational age (SGA), gestational diabetes, and gestational hypertension/preeclampsia. Results Eligibility for EITC receipt during the third trimester was associated with a lower risk of preterm birth compared with preconception. Eligibility for receipt in the preconception period resulted in improved gestational hypertension and SGA. Conclusion This analysis offers a novel method to impute EITC eligibility using a probabilistic algorithm in a data set with richer sociodemographic information relative to the clinical and administrative data sets from which outcomes are drawn. These results could be used to determine the optimal intervention time point for future income supplementation policies. Future work should examine frequent income supplementation such as the minimum wage or basic income programs.

The crop-livestock integration model is the main path for the sustainable development of agriculture and animal husbandry in China, and farmers' participation behavior is critical to the formation of this model. So this paper based on a field survey data of 615 farmers in 10 pilot counties of Crop-Livestock Integration (CLI) in the dairy industry in the east, middle, and west of Inner Mongolia, the relationship among transaction costs, farmers' decision-making of participating in the CLI model, and income effects was analyzed using the Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model in this paper. The results show that under the current market environment, the proportion of farmers participating in the CLI model is 37.56% of the farmer surveyed. The high costs of information searching, negotiation, and execution are the critical factors to inhibit farmers from participating in the CLI model. The results of the counterfactual test of the ESR model show that the effect of the CLI model on the income of participated farmers is not noticeable, while the effect is more significant on the income of non-participating farmers. Moreover, there is no obvious heterogeneity in the effects of the farmer level and “farmers-to-farm” level CLI models on farmers' income. Based on these conclusions, this paper proposes that the government should actively promote the establishment of the information-sharing platform and training mechanism about the CLI model, reduce farmers' costs in information searching and negotiation, optimize the incentive policy of the CLI model, incorporate the farmers planting forage into the subsidy scope of the CLI model, improve the economic benefits of farmers participating in the CLI model, and stimulate the enthusiasm of farmers participating in the CLI model, so as to effectively promote the realization of the CLI model in the animal husbandry industry.

This paper analyses the impact of the poverty alleviation relocation (PAR) program on rural household income and evaluates the heterogeneous income effects of various relocation modes, based on a panel dataset of relocated households from 16 counties in eight Chinese provinces. The results show that participation in the PAR increases the income of both rural and urban resettlers. More specifically, it has a significant positive effect on agricultural and wage income for rural and urban resettlers, respectively. Further analyses show that the income increase for rural resettlers was mainly due to agricultural technology training and that the income increase for town resettlers was attributed to medical security. For the village resettlers, policies should focus on strengthening the development of local industries and training of agricultural technologies. For the urban resettlers, non-agricultural employment and public services in the urban resettlement areas should be promoted.

Indirect rebound effects on the consumer level occur when potential greenhouse gas emission savings from the usage of more efficient technologies or more sufficient consumption in one consumption area are partially or fully offset through the consumers’ adverse behavioral responses in other areas. As both economic (e.g., price effects) and psychological (e.g., moral licensing) mechanisms can stimulate these indirect rebound effects, they have been studied in different fields, including economics, industrial ecology, psychology, and consumer research. Consequently, the literature is highly fragmented and disordered. To integrate the body of knowledge for an interdisciplinary audience, we review and summarize the previous literature, covering the microeconomic quantification of indirect rebounds based on observed expenditure behavior and the psychological processes underlying indirect rebounds. The literature review reveals that economic quantifications and psychological processes of indirect rebound effects have not yet been jointly analyzed. We derive directions for future studies, calling for a holistic research agenda that integrates economic and psychological mechanisms.

Women’s breast cancer (BC) in Africa is detrimental to development, given the role women play in their families and society’s well-being. Policymakers should be alerted to the effects of BC. This paper describes the income impact of breast cancer and assesses factors that influence income and productivity among women with BC. Cross-sectional data were collected using questionnaires on 200 women with clinically confirmed BC cases in Southwest Nigeria over 6 months. About sixty-one percent (61.5%) of the women with clinically confirmed BC cases were self-employed, 62% were absent at the workplace for 7 days, indicating that 31.8% suffered productivity loss at the workplace on average. Sixteen percent of women in the group were absent at the workplace for an average of 10 days, showing a 45.5% productivity loss at the workplace. Lastly, 22% of the women were absent at the workplace for more than 2 weeks on average. An increasing incidence of BC among women causes a 26.2% decrease in productivity level at the workplace. The results from simple linear regression corroborate the findings from the descriptive statistics that BC has a significant but inverse effect on women’s income and productivity. It showed that an increase in the number of confirmed cases of BC will decrease economic impact and productivity by 13.5% and 19.5%, respectively. These findings urgently call for the attention of the policymakers.