Biography:
Dr. Manasi Deshpande is an American labor economist and associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Her primary research areas are empirical public finance and labor economics, with a focus on the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs and their interaction with labor markets. Her work has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other leading journals. Dr. Deshpande is also the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scientists "who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study."
Dr. Deshpande received her BA in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, and her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Student Lecture: 24 October 2024
Evidence on the Income Effects of Social Safety Net Programs
This lecture will discuss recent research on the income effects of social safety net programs, and how income effects can manifest in different ways, including through formal work, informal work, and illicit work.
Faculty Lecture: 25 October 2024
Evaluating Recent Crackdowns on Disability Benefits: Effects on Income and Health Care Utilization in Australia
Countries across the developed world have enacted reforms to restrict entry onto disability benefits and remove current DI recipients. We evaluate the effects of these DI crackdowns on the most comprehensive set of outcomes available to date, including earnings, government benefits, family income, and health care utilization. Using a 2014 reform to Australia's Disability Support Pension that removed many young recipients, we find that, on average, DI removal had a net zero effect on household income and increased prescriptions for strong mental health drugs. However, the averages mask heterogeneity by family structure. For removed recipients living with family, family members increased their earnings by enough to offset the lost DI income, and the increase in mental health prescriptions was minimal. In contrast, removed recipients living alone did not increase their own earnings or have family support, and their use of mental health drugs, especially strong antipsychotics, increased dramatically---likely as a coping mechanism. In a welfare analysis, we find that behavioral adjustments offset nearly half of the welfare loss for recipients living with family but almost none for those living alone. Government savings exceed household willingness to pay to avoid DI loss for those living with family, but not for those living alone.