Robert M Schmidt

University of Richmond | UR · Department of Economics

Introduction This study describes the characteristics of, services received by, and labor market outcomes of applicants with visual impairments to three state vocational rehabilitation programs. Our objective is to both document cross-state variation in vocational rehabilitation clientele and services and provide new insights on the longitudinal la...

The process of “transitioning” to adulthood for youth with disabilities has long been recognized to be an important but understudied public policy concern. This paper evaluates the labor market effects of Virginia's school-to-work vocational evaluation program, PERT. Using a unique panel data set containing more than a decade of labor market and se...

We evaluate the impact of vocational rehabilitation (VR) services on employment outcomes of adults with physical disabilities. Using detailed panel data from the Virginia Department of Aging and Rehabilitation Services in state fiscal year 2000, we estimate a structural model of participation that accounts for the potentially sudden onset of physic...

We construct a structural model of participation in vocational rehabilitation for people with mental illness. There are multiple services to choose among, and each has different effects on employment, earnings, and receipt of DI/SSI. This is the first paper to jointly estimate VR service receipt, employment outcomes, and DI/SSI receipt. We estimate...

This article utilizes administrative data to examine both short- and long-term employment impacts for people with cognitive impairments who applied for vocational rehabilitation services in Virginia in 2000. These data provide long-term quarterly information on services and employment outcomes. We model behavior, allow for multiple service choices,...

This special volume is dedicated to David H. Dean who passed away on August 11th, 2013. This dedication describes David’s impact on the academic research on disability and, most notably, the vital interaction between research and policy. It discusses his influence in shaping perspectives on evaluating the effectiveness of programs to increase emplo...

We examine the association between the receipt of vocational rehabilitation (VR) services and Federal Disability Insurance using a unique panel data source on persons who applied for assistance from Virginia’s VR program in 2000. Three central findings emerge: first, VR services are associated with lower rates of participation in disability insuran...

Numerous studies have investigated the impact of class size on student outcomes. This analysis contributes to this discussion by isolating the impact of class size on student outcomes in higher education by utilizing a natural experiment at a selective institution which enables the estimation of class size effects conditional on the total number of...

The public-sector Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) program is a $3 billion federal-state partnership designed to provide employment-related assistance to persons with disabilities. There is, however, relatively little-known about the long-term efficacy of VR programs. This paper utilizes unique and detailed administrative and employment data to exami...

Economic demography is an area of study that examines the determinants and consequences of demographic change, including fertility, mortality, marriage, divorce, location (urbanisation, migration, density), age, gender, ethnicity, population size and population growth. This article reviews and critically evaluates important macroeconomic dimensions...

Vehicle personal property taxes recently existed in 31 states. Using data collected during the phaseout of the tax in Virginia, we analyze the effect of differing tax rates on the personal vehicle count and value data in 134 locales. We find that each increase in the effective property tax of one percentage point leads to a reduction in vehicular c...

This special issue of the European Journal of Population focuses on possible economic consequences of low fertility in Europe. This introduction reviews the history of falling fertility in Europe and the literature that explores its causes, its potential implications, and possible policy responses. It also summarizes the evolution of thinking about...

The Ticket to Work legislation (1999) introduces private-sector competition into the provision of return-to-work services for persons with disabilities who receive Disability Insurance (DI) payments. This article examines the likely effects of the Ticket to Work initiative using data from the Social Security Administration's Project NetWork experim...

The study presents benefit-cost ratios for 14 disability cohorts served by the Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Program. The earnings impacts are estimated in a quasiexperimental framework using an internal comparison group. The earnings data are from a unique national panel constructed by linking client data of the Rehabilitative Services Administra...

Ignorance about the costs, case loads and case mixes of different hospitals within the public health system constitutes an important obstacle to reforming health care spending in many developing countries. National (tertiary) hospitals generally receive significantly larger budgets, per patient, than lower-level (district) hospitals. One reason for...

Building upon recent Barro models that account for the impacts of various economic and political factors conditioning the pace of economic growth, we evaluate the merits of alternative specifications that expose the impacts of demographic change. For a sample of 89 countries, we arrive at the qualified judgment that rapid population growth exerted...

National hospitals in developing countries command a disproportionate share of medical care budgets, justified on the grounds that they have a more difficult patient case mix and higher occupancy rates than decentralized district hospitals or clinics. This paper empirically tests the hypothesis by developing direct measures of the severity of patie...

PIP This study examines the impact of dependency on savings between 65 less developed countries (LDCs) and 23 developed countries over time and cross-sectionally since 1960. The study tests a modified Leff model and the Mason life-cycle framework. Empirical estimates address potential simultaneity between savings and output growth. The price indice...

The widely-observed finding in the literature showing little or not relationship between population growth (and dependency) and saving requires modification based on panel and cross-section estimation of aggregate country data. While such a relationship is still weak in the hybrid Leff-type model, it is now found consistently over time and by stage...

The results of recent correlations showing a negative impact of population growth on economic development in cross-country data for the 1980s, versus "nonsignificant" correlations widely found for the 1960s and 1970s, are examined with contemporaneous and lagged components of demographic change, convergence-type economic modeling, and several stati...

The article examines the relative contributions of human and physical resources in the production of private undergraduate education. The research methods are noteworthy in three respects. First, the theoretical orientation emphasizes interdependence among inputs and outputs in higher education. The significance of simultaneity among quality studen...

This study undertakes a detailed empirical assessment, based on international cross-country data for the period from the 1960s, of the correlations between aggregate population and per capita output growth. Two notable findings are obtained. First, the correlations, which in earlier decades were not statistically significant, have turned strongly n...

Household-level fertility research was examined with the broader contexts of the demographic transition and public policy. The Easterlin-Crimmins (1982, 1985) model was the framework chosen for the examination. It was modified and applied to a sample of rural Egyptian households. An interesting dimension of the Easterlin-Crimmins framework is the p...

The article examines the relationship between achievement and expenditure in primary and secondary public education. The estimation methods are noteworthy in three respects: (1) socioeconomic effects are treated via an “unobservable variables” technique; (2) measures of school district expenditure are valued in constant dollars by constructing loca...

When the automobile was developed near the beginning of the last century, it was the relatively new fuel gasoline, not the familiar ethanol that became the fuel of choice. We examine the intersections of the early development of the automobile and the petroleum industry and consider the state of the agriculture sector during the same period. Throug...

The authors develop and estimate a model of post-war Australian migration which highlights an endogenous treatment of government policy and includes three equations explaining the emigration rate, the Government's Immigration Programme rate, and the immigration rate. The model permits the separate identification of long-run population growth influe...

There has been an increasing emphasis in recent decades on providing effective services to youth with disabilities in the process of transitioning from high school into post-secondary education and employment. While the importance of vocational assessment for this population has been discussed, to date there have been no studies of its long-term im...

Numerous studies have investigated the impact of class size on student outcomes. This analysis contributes to this discussion by examining the impact of class size on student outcomes in higher education. Additionally, this paper investigates the importance of student load (total number of students taught across all courses) in educational outcomes...