Using a Canadian-American Natural Experiment to Study Relative Efficiencies of Social Welfare Payment Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study whether social welfare recipients may end up paying more for their grocery if social welfare payments are more concentrated over time. We first present a theoretical model showing that lower incomes in general and a lower lower bound of the income distribution lead to less mobility for poorer consumers. This causes local stores to have more market power and increase their prices when the incomes of poorer people go down and/or when the number of poorer people goes up. Secondly, we verify these theoretical findings by using a natural experiment to study links between food prices and the more restrictive timing of social welfare payments in Montreal, Canada compared to the timing in Bangor, Maine. We find some statistically significant evidence of : i) a negative effect on prices in the week of social welfare check issue ; ii) increasing prices over a month. We also find that some socio-economic factors such as a higher percentage of single-parent families in one area may increase prices charged by grocery stores in that area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".