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2:12-cv-10038-DML-MJH Doc # 91 Filed 03/03/14 Pg 1 of 18
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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION THERESA BASSETT and CAROL KENNEDY, PETER WAYS and JOE BREAKEY, JOLINDA JACH and BARBARA RAMBER, DOAK BLOSS and GERARDO ASCHERI, DENISE MILLER and MICHELLE JOHNSON, Plaintiffs, v RICHARD SNYDER, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Michigan, Defendant.
Michael J. Steinberg (P43085) American Civil Liberties Union Fund of Michigan Attorney for Plaintiffs 2966 Woodward Avenue Detroit, MI 48201 (313) 578-6814 Margaret A. Nelson (P30342) Mark E. Donnelly (P39281) Rock A. Wood (P41181) Michael F. Murphy (P29213) Attorneys for Defendant Michigan Department of Attorney General Public Employment, Elections & Tort Division P.O. Box 30736 Lansing, MI 48909 (517) 373-6434 Amanda C. Goad American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Attorney for Plaintiffs
1313 West 8th Street
No. 2:12-cv-10038 HON. DAVID M. LAWSON MAG. MICHAEL J. HLUCHANIUK DEFENDANTS RESPONSE TO MOTION TO EXCLUDE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH PRICE [D/E #86]
Los Angeles, CA 90017 Telephone: (213) 977-9500 Facsimile: (213) 977-5273 John A. Knight American Civil Liberties Union of IL Attorney for Plaintiffs 180 N. Michigan Ave, Ste. 2300 Chicago, IL 60601 (312) 201-9740
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Table of Contents ......................................................................................... i Concise Statement of Issues Presented .....................................................ii Controlling or Most Appropriate Authority ..............................................ii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Argument .................................................................................................... 6 I. II. Dr. Prices opinion and testimony are relevant, reliable and requisite under Daubert and should not be excluded. ..................... 6 Dr. Prices methodology is sound and properly applied. ............... 11
Conclusion and Relief Requested............................................................. 14 Certificate of Service (e-file) ..................................................................... 15
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CONCISE STATEMENT OF ISSUES PRESENTED 1. Should Dr. Prices testimony be excluded under a Daubert analysis.
CONTROLLING OR MOST APPROPRIATE AUTHORITY Authority: Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993) Fed. R. Evid. 702 Fed. R. Evid. 401 Fed. R. Evid. 402
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INTRODUCTION Plaintiffs have moved to exclude the testimony of Dr. Price under Fed. R. Evid. 702 and the Supreme Courts ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 589 (1993). Their arguments, although phrased as compelling the exclusion of Dr. Prices testimony, are simply arguments regarding the weight and credibility of his testimony. The admissibility of the testimony is not seriously challenged. The issues they raise as to weight and credibility are more akin to cross examination issues than a basis for exclusion. It would appear they demand some type of mathematical certainty in the testimony when we are dealing with a social science, social data and certain imprecise methodology inherent to social sciences and human behavior. Plaintiffs attempt to artificially define and limit the experts area of inquiry, and then contend that the data, academic literature and analyses must be disregarded because they do not fit Plaintiffs narrow boundaries. This effort is flawed in several respects. In their effort to strike Dr. Price, Plaintiffs ignore pertinent aspects of his testimony, principles associated with the study of
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economics, and the interaction of economics and social behavior. As Dr. Price testified, the study of economics, and its interaction with social behavior (such as marriage) is not as clear cut as a mathematical formula, or an accounting ledger sheet, and he does not approach his work in this case as an accounting exercise: I did not approach this from an accounting perspective. I approached it from an economic perspective. (Ex. A., Price Dep. at 35.) This is due to the fact that the study of economics and its influence on human behavior involves variables that are not within the scholars control (as are algebraic formulae), since humans are not randomly assigned, but instead make choices such as marriage, i.e. select into certain categories. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 262-263.) Because of this, no sound economist would declare an absolute or mathematically quantifiable causation, as Plaintiffs demand by way of their motion. Instead, economists speak in terms of a correlation of data (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 207, 211-212, 260), and analyze the data using various methodologies, regression analysis, and other tools. These methods allow economists to then opine that the data suggests a causal relationship between certain variables: You make the best inference with the best available data you have because
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no data or study has data with a perfect fit. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 262, 264.) This is the approach Dr. Price used, citing to various existing databases and studies as is customary in the field of economics. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 267.) As Dr. Price noted, it is typical for economists to research and cite to various existing databases and studies, because it is virtually impossible for a single scholar to conduct a study on each question, or to devote months of study, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and various personnel to survey/study a new population for every paper/question. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 265.) Rather, groups such as Mathematical or similar groups, who specialize in gathering data, perform large studies relied upon by economists. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 265.) Likewise, Plaintiffs attacks on methodology and credibility, including a demand for specific, quantifiable net economic computations is unrealistic and ignores the realities of study associated with human behavior. Plaintiffs counsel spent hours of deposition time, attacking the numerous studies, authors, scholarly articles and databases upon which Dr. Price based his report, exploring all manner of demographic characteristics of the various populations and data sets,
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and even concluded the deposition with a challenge based on Dr. Prices personal religious beliefs. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at253-258.) However, these tactics likewise miss the mark for a motion to exclude a witness. While Plaintiffs may quibble about various demographics, studied populations or ones religious views as issues of credibility, these attacks do not change the fact that there are studies, data, and literature from which a Doctor of Economics can draw the professional opinion that there are economic benefits to a State associated with encouraging the population to marry. Plaintiffs criticisms concerning Dr. Prices reliance on studies and data concerning the entire population, comparing single people to married people, is also misplaced. First, the social data and studies are not perfectly aligned or organized to capture or identify specific subsets of a single population that Plaintiffs counsel may list, such as cohabitating, or long-term cohabitating, but instead studies reflect information gathered on marital status as single or married. Moreover, this data captures the subset of individuals who are cohabitating. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at239.) And, use of a broader data set is consistent with the fact that the Act affects a more broad population set than just those
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who are currently cohabitating. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 85, 86, 134.) The population which cohabitates is neither static or stable as such relationships tend to more readily dissolve than marriage, with individuals moving more between single status and cohabitation. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 114-115, 118.) By analyzing data on the entire population, one has a more complete picture of the economic impact, and incentives, related to policies/legislation which encourages people to marry, and which seek to capture the economic benefits to the State associated with marriage. In sum, Dr. Price has overwhelming knowledge, skill, experience, training and education to meet the requirements of Fed. R. Evid. 702. Even Plaintiffs expert, Ms. Badgett, acknowledged this during her deposition. (Badgett Dep. at 153, excerpt attached as Exhibit C.) Dr. Prices opinions are relevant, reliable and useful to assist the Court in understanding the rationale behind the subject legislation, Michigan Public Act 297 of 2011 (P.A. 297). Fed. R. Evid. 401. Accordingly, the Defendant requests that Plaintiffs motion be denied.
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ARGUMENT I. Dr. Prices opinion and testimony are relevant, reliable and requisite under Daubert and should not be excluded. Plaintiffs have challenged Dr. Prices testimony in two distinct areas as defined by Plaintiffs counsel. The first is the incentive to marry versus cohabitation cost benefits to the State, for which they claim there is no empirical data to support the opinion. Secondly, Plaintiffs allege that opinions regarding economic benefits to the State by encouraging marriage ignore certain alleged or possible costs in calculating benefits. Plaintiffs entire argument for the exclusion of Dr. Prices testimony is built upon a fatal assumption that the relevant comparison for purposes of evaluating the economic impact of the Act (P.A. 297) is marriage versus cohabitation. (R.E. #86, Brief at 3.) Yet, Dr. Prices testimony is much broader and discusses how marriage produces better economic outcomes in terms of things such as household income, propensity to commit crimes, and health outcomes as compared to non-married persons, including both single and cohabitation. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 132-133; Ex. B., Price Report.) This is in addition to the
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conclusion that based on social data, cohabiting people do not tend to stay in those unions as married people do. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 135.) Under Fed. R. Evid. 402, if an experts opinions are relevant, they should be admitted when the requirements of Fed. R. Evid. 702 are met. This is a liberal standard. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 587 (1993). For experts particularly, a proffered experts testimony must be sufficiently tied to the facts of the case such that it will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue. Id. at 591. Specifically there must be a fit or valid connection between the experts reasoning or methodology and the pertinent questionthe facts at issuebefore the Court. Id. at 591593. Again, Plaintiffs rely upon a narrower segment of the population, a marriage versus cohabitation scenario. However, using what must be a liberal standard under Daubert, such a narrow view misses much of the population, limits the usefulness of the analysis, and is not the limit of Dr. Prices opinions. Rather, Dr. Price analyzed a broader spectrum of relationships, comparing the economic value of marriage versus a gamut of other social arrangements. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 134135, 138, 158, 165):
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Q.
Do you agree with me that the population whose behavior you say the Benefit Restriction Act might influence would be cohabitating people who would otherwise get cohabitating benefits but instead are incentivized to marry, right? Well, it would be anyone that is considering marriage and this would be an added benefit of marriage and so, I mean, it doesnt necessarily have to be cohabitating couples making that decision to marry. Thats a fair clarification.1 There are some people that dont cohabitate before marriage. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 134) And the whole point of your recent report is that in your view marriage versus cohabitation has economic benefits for the state, right? I think I was actually making a broader statement about marriage versus other relationships. Well, you make some broader statements in your report certainly, but my question is more for purposes of evaluating the economic impact of the Benefit Restriction Act, the relevant comparator is cohabitation versus marriage, right? Im not sure thats exactly true. Is it generally true? Well, cohabitating unions are rather unstable and so if I were to compare the benefits of marriage to cohabitation Id have to take into account that cohabitating couples are going to move in and out of a single status. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 135.)
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The issues raised by Plaintiffs motion at R.E. #86, Brief at p. 6, contain two foundational assumptions: (1) marriage causes better outcomes than cohabitation; and (2) marginal marriages cause the same positive outcomes as marriage, generally are based on data as cited by Dr. Price concerning marriage versus non-married. Dr. Prices opinions are not restricted to cohabitation. (Ex. A, Price Dep. at 158, 160.) Therefore, Plaintiffs arguments here sound more in weight and credibility, not admissibility. Any issues pertaining solely to the weight of the evidence do not render the evidence inadmissible. While [t]rial judges must exercise sound discretion as gatekeepers of expert testimony under Daubert, they do not take on the role of St. Peter at the gates of heaven, performing a searching inquiry in to the depth of an expert witnesss soulseparating the saved from the damned. McCullock v. H.B. Fuller Co., 61 F.3d 1038, 1045 (2d Cir. 1995). This is because [s]uch an inquiry would inexorably lead to evaluating witness credibility and weight of the evidence, the ageless role of the [trier of fact]. Id. If an attack on an expert witness pertains only to the weight of the evidence, the experts opinion should be admitted. See: Daubert, 509 U.S. at 596.
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(Vigorous cross-examination, presentation of contrary evidence, and careful constriction on the burden of proof are the traditional and appropriate means of attacking shaky but admissible evidence.) The reliability of an experts conclusions goes to weight, not admissibility. United States v. Stone, 848 F. Supp. 2d 714, 719 (E.D. Mich. 2012). There is nothing in Dr. Prices testimony that supports any finding of unreliability related to the issue of marriage benefits to the State versus lack of benefits due to unmarried individuals. The only issue discussed in the motion to exclude is how much data is available for Dr. Price to form his opinions and the form the data takes. There is no dearth of empirical data as Plaintiffs claim, but merely Plaintiffs dispute about the form of the data. To promote their effort to disqualify Dr. Price, Plaintiffs seek to create subsets of data or information not specifically or separately addressed by the data and studies, to then argue that any opinion about the data is not mathematically precise. Social data, by nature of the studies, and self-reporting and choices of individuals, is not mathematically precise as Plaintiffs wish. The data does not separately study nor concern itself with cohabitation as the form of the unmarried population as Plaintiffs demand. And, it does
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not directly study or discuss marginal marriages as defined by Plaintiffs counsel, but these factors do not render the testimony inadmissible. Rather, it simply means that Plaintiffs counsel identified a subset of the social spectrum which is contained within the larger population which the studied data reflects. II. Dr. Prices methodology is sound and properly applied. Plaintiffs claim that Dr. Prices opinions violate his own stated methodology because he ignores certain possible costs associated with the Act. Those alleged costs might relate to both people who cohabit and to those in marginal marriages, or they may not exist, or be of sufficient level to be measurable by social/economic study. Plaintiffs opine that such costs may include lost tax revenue, disincentive to cohabit and an increase in the number of uninsured cohabitating persons. (R.E. #86 at p. 3.) This argument is based solely on an inability of the data to specifically quantify such losses and benefits from among the population as a whole, or as Dr. Price noted, a lack of indication in the data/literature of such costs. (Ex. A., Price Dep. at 35, 39.) Yet, as Dr. Price notes, the literature and data identify economic benefits to the State arising from incentivizing marriage. (Ex. A, Price
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Dep. at 171, 178, 181-182, 209-211, 218-219, and Ex. B, Price Report.) Thus, while there may be a lack of certain quantifiable subsets or statistics, the methodology to arrive at the conclusions is not lacking. An expert may provide expert testimony based on a valid and properly applied methodology and still offer a conclusion that is subject to doubt, but [i]t is the role of the [trier of fact] to weigh these sources of doubt. Stollings v. Ryobi Technologies, Inc. 725 F.3d 753, 765-766 (7th Cir. 2013), (citing Daubert, 509 U.S. at 595). The experts conclusions need not be unimpeachable to be admissible. Id. at 765. The admissibility inquiry thus focuses on principles and methodology, not on the conclusions generated by the principles and methodology. In re TMI Litigation, 193 F.3d 613, 665 (3d Cir. 1999), amended by 199 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2000), (emphasis added). Thus attacks on the factual bases of an experts opinion bear on the weight of the evidence rather than on its admissibility. McLean v. 988011 Ontario, Ltd., 224 F.3d 797, 801 (6th Cir. 2000). (Internal citation and quotation marks omitted.) There is nothing about Dr. Prices methodology that is suspect. Plaintiffs merely disagree with the conclusions he reaches and his lack
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of mathematical precision in a science that inherently lacks the type of mathematical precision found in physics or accounting. The studies that Dr. Price cites, his analysis of those studies, and his experience provide acceptable principles to use in reaching his conclusions and were developed with a methodology proper for the discipline of economics which he brings to these issues. Plaintiffs are attempting to leap over weight and credibility to the realm of admissibility by trying to identify any subset of the data not broken out by the studies, and citing too few examples in Dr. Prices total testimony. (See R.E. #86 at 16, 17.) The methodology used is properly applied and of sound principles. Disagreeing with the opinions rendered is an insufficient basis upon which to exclude them. The overall thrust of Plaintiffs Motion to Exclude is one of disagreement with Dr. Prices conclusions, only couched in terms of improper methodology.
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CONCLUSION AND RELIEF REQUESTED For the reasons stated above, Defendant requests that the Court deny Plaintiffs Motion to Exclude Expert Testimony by Dr. Price. Respectfully submitted, Bill Schuette Attorney General /s/ Michael F. Murphy Michael F. Murphy (P29213) Rock A. Wood (P41181) Assistant Attorney General Attorneys for Defendant Public Employment, Elections and Tort Division P.O. Box 30736 Lansing, MI 48909 517-373-6434 murphym2@michigan.gov (P29213) Dated: March 3, 2014
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CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE (E-FILE) I hereby certify that on March 3, 2014, I electronically filed the above document(s) with the Clerk of the Court using the ECF System, which will provide electronic copies to counsel of record. /s/ Michael F. Murphy Assistant Attorney General Attorneys for Defendant Public Employment, Elections and Tort Division P.O. Box 30736 Lansing, MI 48909 (517) 373-3464 murphym2@michigan.gov (P29213)
2012-0001512-A
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2:12-cv-10038-DML-MJH Doc # 91-1 Filed 03/03/14 Pg 1 of 1
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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION THERESA BASSETT and CAROL KENNEDY, PETER WAYS and JOE BREAKEY, JOLINDA JACH and BARBARA RAMBER, DOAK BLOSS and GERARDO ASCHERI, DENISE MILLER and MICHELLE JOHNSON, Plaintiffs, v RICHARD SNYDER, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Michigan, Defendant. No. 2:12-cv-10038 HON. DAVID M. LAWSON MAG. MICHAEL J. HLUCHANIUK
INDEX OF EXHIBITS TO DEFENDANTS RESPONSE TO MOTION TO EXCLUDE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH PRICE A. B. C. Deposition of Dr. Joseph Price, Ph.D. Expert Witness Report prepared by Dr. Joseph Price, Ph.D. Excerpt from deposition of Dr. M.V. Lee Badgett, Ph.D.
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EXHIBIT A
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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION
THERESA BASSETT and CAROL KENNEDY, PETER WAYS and JOE BREAKEY, JOLINDAJACH and BARBARA RAMBER, DOAKBLOSS and GERARDO ASCHERI, DENISE MILLER and MICHELLE JOHNSON, Plaintiffs, vs. Case No. 2:12-cv-10038 Hon. David M. Lawson RICHARD SNYDER, in his official capacity as Governor of the state of Michigan, Defendant. __________________________ The Deposition of JOSEPH PRICE, Ph.D., Taken at 525 West Ottawa Street, 2nd Floor, Lansing, Michigan, Commencing at 8:03 a.m., Monday, February 3, 2014, Before Deana M. Ryan, CSR-3715.
Veritext Legal Solutions Midwest www.veritext.com 888-391-3376
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APPEARANCES: BRADLEY H. WEIDENHAMMER Kirkland & Ellis, L.L.P. 300 North Lasalle Drive Chicago, Illinois 60654 312.862.2649 Appearing on behalf of the Plaintiffs. ROCK WOOD State of Michigan State Operations Division 525 West Ottawa, 2nd Floor Lansing, Michigan 48933 517.373.1162 Appearing on behalf of the Defendant.
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DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 10 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 11 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 12 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 13
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Witness JOSEPH PRICE, Ph.D. PAGE
EXAMINATION BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: EXAMINATION BY MR. WOOD: EXHIBITS
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EXHIBIT PAGE (Exhibits attached to transcript.) DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 1 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 2 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 3 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 4 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 5 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 6 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 7 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 8 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 9 6 8 13 42 52 62 108 132 140
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Lansing, Michigan Monday, February 3, 2014 8:03 a.m. JOSEPH PRICE, Ph.D., was thereupon called as a witness herein, and after having first been duly sworn to testify to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, was examined and testified as follows: EXAMINATION BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Good morning. A. Good morning. Q. My name is Brad Weidenhammer. I represent the plaintiffs in this case. Would you please state your name for the record? A. Joseph Price. Q. Before we get into any substantive questions I just want to lay a couple of rules of the road. The first and most important one is if at any time you don't understand or don't hear one of my questions properly or completely let me know right away. If you do that then I'll try and rephrase it or restate it; is that
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fair? A. Yes. Q. And if you don't tell me you didn't understand or didn't hear I'm going to assume that you did; is that fair? A. Yes. Q. If you would like to take a break at any time just let me know and we will take the next available opportunity, okay? A. Okay. Q. Let's begin by marking as Exhibit 1 the document I'm putting in front of you now. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 1 8:04 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Tell me if you recognize Exhibit 1. A. Yes. Q. You provided us with a copy of the expert report you prepared in this case? A. Yes. Q. Exhibit 1 has all of the opinions that you're prepared to offer in this case, correct? A. Yes.
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report that you needed to put all of the bases for your opinions to support your opinions in your report? A. Yes. Q. So as you were drafting your report you made an effort to cite all of the materials, secondary sources, and data that you believed support your opinions at that time, correct? A. Yes, I did my best to cite the relevant studies. Q. And as you sit here today is there any study or set of data that you can think of that you relied on to support your opinions in this case that you did not cite in your report? A. No. The studies that I cited in report were the ones that I relied on in writing the report. Q. And you understood when you were preparing your report that your testimony in this case would be limited to the opinions and the basis for those opinions stated in your report, correct? A. Yes. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 2 8:06 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Let's take a moment to review Exhibit 2.
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Q. When you were preparing Exhibit 1 you understood that the report was meant to communicate your opinions to opposing counsel and the court, correct? A. Yes. Q. And when you were preparing your report, Exhibit 1, you understood that it was meant to communicate the basis for your opinions as well, correct? A. Yes. Q. And you understood the court would be counting on you to express your opinions and the basis of the opinions in the report, correct? A. Yes. Q. Is the report accurate to the best of your knowledge? A. Yes. Q. You cited a number of secondary sources in the body of your report, correct? A. Yes. Q. Is it fair to say that all the secondary sources you rely on to support your opinions in this case are cited in your report? A. I don't know if it would be fair to say that. There's probably other studies that influence my opinion that I might not have immediately cited in this paper. Q. Well, did you understand when you were preparing your
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A. Q. A. Q. A.
Okay. Exhibit 2 is a copy of your CV, correct? Yes. Does it appear to be a current version of your CV? It's not the most current. I mean, my CV changes from month to month as things get accepted or -- and, of course, you know, as came up in the divorce case, there was a grant that I removed from this CV that's not in the expert witness report. Q. Which grant did you remove from your CV? A. This is the Witherspoon Institute. It was actually repayment for some wages my students received. Q. The grant was a repayment for wages your students -A. That's actually why I took it out. It doesn't fit the other grants in the list. The other grants involve some kind of competitive application process, involved larger sums of money. This was a repayment for wages of my research assistant. Q. Your testimony today is the reason you withdrew Witherspoon from your CV was because it didn't fall under the same category as the other grants you listed? A. That's one reason. I mean, the other reason would be that ever since the Mark Rigor study the Witherspoon
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Institute, you know, has received certain reputation in the media. Q. What reputation has it received in the media from your understanding? A. I mean, I'm not exactly clear, but I do know some have spoken kind of -- kind of less favorably of the Witherspoon Institute since the Rigor study. Q. So based on the unfavorable viewpoint as you understand it, at least in the media, of the Witherspoon Institute you removed to remove that citation from your CV, correct? A. The other reason was that it's not a grant in the normal sense of the word and it gives the mistaken impression about my relationship with the Witherspoon Institute. Q. Your own CV gave a mistaken impression about your connection to the Witherspoon Institute? A. Well, it was listed as money received. It was not a grant in the normal sense. Q. But my original question, sir, was one of the reasons you removed the Witherspoon citation from your CV was because of the negative press the Witherspoon Institute had received? A. Yes.
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received was revised and resubmitted. Q. Which paper? A. It was the paper about maternal employment and time spent with children. Q. Where did you submit that paper? A. So the paper -- the maternal time paper was submitted to review of Economics and Household. Q. When did you first become involved in this case? A. Around November. Q. November of what year? A. November 2013. Q. Who contacted you? A. Margaret did. Q. Do you remember the specific date when you were first contacted in connection with this case? A. I don't remember the exact date. Q. Let me refer you now to Exhibit 1, please, your report, specifically paragraph one. In the first sentence of paragraph one of Exhibit 1 you write the purpose of this report is to assess the economic impact of restricting public employee health benefits to couples who are married. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. When you say restricting public employee health
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Q. And you no longer wish to be associated with the Witherspoon Institute; is that correct? A. That's not true. I feel very grateful to them. I went to their summer seminars as a graduate student and I am grateful for that opportunity. Q. Do you still support the viewpoints generally of the Witherspoon Institute as you understand them? MR. WOOD: Object to the question as vague. A. I don't know a lot about their mission statement. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Do you have a copy of your most up-to-date CV with you today? A. I do not. Q. Do you know whether you produced a copy of your most up-to-date CV as part of the materials you produced in response to plaintiff's subpoena in this case? A. So I would have produced a CV that was the most up-to-date at the time the subpoena happened. I've had other papers accepted since then. Q. Understood. Which papers have you had accepted since you produced documents in response to the plaintiff's subpoena? A. So the one paper that was accepted recently is called Pornography in Marriage and then another paper
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benefits are you referring specifically to the Public Employee Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act of 2011? A. I'm not sure. Q. Are you familiar with the Public Employee Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act of 2011? A. Yes. Q. But you're not sure in the first sentence of your report whether you're referring to that act; is that right? A. I'm not totally sure but I'm pretty sure -- yes. Q. What restriction are you referring to in the first sentence of the first paragraph of your report? A. I'm referring to the issue at hand here, which is a law that restricts public employee benefits to married couples. Q. How did you gain your understanding of that law in order to analyze its effects? A. So when Margaret contacted me she explained the basics of the legal case and asked if I could provide expert witness about the economic consequences of this law. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 3 8:12 a.m.
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BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you a document that I'm marking as Exhibit 3. Please take a look at Exhibit 3 and tell me if you've ever seen it before. A. Yes. Q. When did you previously see this document? A. I'm not sure if it was this exact format of the document, but Margaret sent me some documents when she asked me to serve as an expert witness. Q. Roughly when would that have been that she sent you some version of Exhibit 3? A. Either November or December. Q. Did you review it at that time? A. Yes, I read through the document quickly to get an idea of the issues at hand. Q. Fair to say then that you skimmed Exhibit 3 previously? A. That's quite possible. Q. Did you study it before today? A. Did I study it? I'm sure I would have read section 3. I'm not quite certain. Q. Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to speculate so either you know you studied it or -A. I don't know if I studied it carefully.
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in Exhibit 3 excludes any categories of municipal employees? A. I don't know. MR. WOOD: For the record, I object to the extent these questions call for a legal conclusion. Object to the form but he's already answered. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. To be clear I'm just asking about your understanding. If you're not able to answer the question because you're not a lawyer you can tell me that. A. Yeah. Q. Have you made any effort, though, as an expert in this case to form an understanding of specifically what types of public employees are covered by Exhibit 3 by this law versus not covered? A. No. Q. So you hadn't made it your business to determine, for instance, what proportion of all state employees are affected by the law that's in Exhibit 3? A. No. Q. Just for the sake of clarity and brevity, if I refer to Public Act 297 of 2011, if I refer to that as the Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act will you understand what I'm talking about?
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Q. Let me ask you to look at section 2 of Exhibit 3 and specifically the definition of public employee there. Section 2 B of Exhibit 3 says public employee means a person holding a position by appointment or employment in the government of this state; the government of one or more political subdivisions of the state; in the public school service; in a public or special district; in the service of an authority, commission, or board of this state or a political subdivision of the state; or in any other branch of the public. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Do you know whether that definition includes municipal employees in the State of Michigan? A. I don't know. Q. Do you know whether this definition of public employee in Exhibit 3 includes all state employees in the State of Michigan? A. I don't know. Q. Do you know whether the definition of public employee in Exhibit 3 excludes any state employees within the State of Michigan? A. I don't know. Q. Do you know whether the definition of public employee
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A. Yes. Q. Even if I refer to it as the Benefit Restriction Act you will understand that as well? A. Yes. Q. Did you make any effort as an expert in this case to understand whether the Benefit Restriction Act includes, for instance, public school teachers? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort to determine whether the Benefit Restriction Act covers street and sanitation workers? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort to determine whether the Benefit Restriction Act covers university employees? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort whatsoever to determine how many employees in the state of Michigan might be effected by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort as part of your work in this case to determine whether there are any important or large categories of workers that are excluded from the effect of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No.
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Q. Fair to say, then, you made no effort at all to determine what types of employees are affected by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. That's correct. It was outside the area of my expertise. Q. Now, let me ask you to look at section 3. (1) of the Benefit Restriction Act in Exhibit 3, please. Section 3.1 refers to a public employer. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. It says the public employer shall not provide medical benefits or other fringe benefits for an individual currently residing in the same residence as a public employee if the individual is not one or more of the following and then it lists some categories, correct? A. Correct. Q. With regard to the term public employer, do you have any understanding whether public employer as used in the Benefit Restriction Act excludes any portion of the state government? A. I don't know. MR. WOOD: I don't want to interrupt, but I want to make an objection to the extent the last question or this line of questions calls for a legal conclusion. I wanted to let him answer but get my
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A. Yes. Q. It says married to the employee is one category, right? A. Yes. Q. Now, do you have any understanding as you sit here today whether marriage in the State of Michigan is limited to opposite sex couples? A. Yes, in Michigan marriage is defined as between a man and a woman. Q. What's your basis for saying that? A. Margaret explained that to me when we first discussed the case. Q. And beyond Margaret telling you you haven't done any other research into that topic? A. No. Q. Are you familiar with the concept of common law marriage? A. Not as an expert witness. My understanding would be just as a lay person. Q. Well, do you have any understanding of the concept of common law marriage? A. No. Q. You said a minute ago that you may have some understanding as a lay person. Are you changing that
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objection on the record. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Fair enough. I understand. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Do you have any understanding of whether the definition of public employer as used in the Benefit Restriction Act covers any municipalities? A. I don't know. Q. Have you made any effort as part of your expert work in this case to determine which employers are or are not covered by the term public employer as used in the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Again, that type of information falls outside my area of expertise. Q. But the answer is no, you did not, correct? A. That's right. Q. Fair to say as you sit here today you just have no idea which employers or types of employers are or are not covered by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. That's correct. Q. Let me refer you now to section 3(1)(a) of Exhibit 3, please. This is the first category of individuals listed under section 3 to whom public employer may provide benefits, correct?
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testimony now? I'm just saying I doubt it's right from a legal sense. The question is do you have any understanding -Sure. Let me finish the question. The question is do you have any understanding of the concept of common law marriage? A. Again, just as a lay person my understanding would be common law marriage deals with states in which a couple has lived together for a period of time and is considered to be married by fact of having lived together. Q. Do you have any understanding of whether common law marriage is recognized in the State of Michigan? A. I don't. MR. WOOD: Object to form of the question, calls for a legal conclusion. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Did you make any effort as part of your work in this case to determine whether common law marriage is recognized by the State of Michigan? A. No. Q. Referring now to section 3(1)(b) of Exhibit 3, this provision allows for the provision of benefits to A. Q. A. Q.
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dependents of the employee as defined in the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Have you ever reviewed the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 with regard to dependents? A. No. Q. As you sit here today do you have any understanding of what type of dependents would or would not be covered by section 3(1)(b) of Exhibit 3? A. No. Q. Did you make it your business as an expert in this case to investigate what types of dependents might be covered by that section of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Did you ever ask anyone to explain to you who may or may not be covered by this provision of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I did not. Q. Now, refer to the next subsection, please, section 3(1)(c) of Exhibit 3. This is another category of individuals who are eligible for benefits. It says otherwise eligible to inherit from the employee under the laws of intestate succession in this state. Do
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Q. Why did you ask him that question? A. More curiosity than anything. Q. Let me refer you now to section 4, please, of the Benefit Restriction Act in Exhibit 3. Section 4 refers to collective bargaining agreements. It says if a collective bargaining agreement or other contract that is inconsistent with section 3 is in effect for a public employee on the effective date of this act section 3 does not apply to that group of employees until the collective bargaining agreement or other contract expires or is amended, extended, or renewed. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Do you have any understanding of how many public employees at the time the Benefit Restriction Act was enacted were covered by the collective bargaining agreements? A. No. Q. Do you have any understanding of the extent to which any public employee at the time the Benefit Restriction Act was enacted were covered by other contracts that would fall within section 4? A. No. Q. As a part of your expert work in this case did you
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you see that? A. Yes. Q. Did you make any effort as part of your expertise in this case to determine who might be eligible to receive benefits under section 3(1)(c) of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Did you ever ask anyone who might be covered by that section? A. Not at the time I was preparing my report. MR. WOOD: I'd like to let him answer before I object. To the extent the last two questions or this line of questions asks for a legal conclusion I would object on that basis. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. You were saying? A. At the time I prepared my expert witness report I didn't. Q. Since the time that you prepared your expert witness report have you asked anyone who might be covered by section 3(1)(c) of Exhibit 3? A. I asked Rock a clarifying question this morning. Q. What question did you ask him? A. Just how the legal issue of that worked.
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make any effort to determine the extent to which section 4 would exclude certain categories of employees from the effect of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Is it fair to say as you sit here today you have no idea who may or may not be excluded from the coverage of the Benefit Restriction Act by operation of section 4? A. That is correct. Q. Section 5 of Exhibit 3 states that the requirements of section 3 apply to all public employees to the greatest extent consistent with constitutionally allocated powers. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Did you make any effort as part of your work in this case to understand whether the limitations or constrictions of constitutionally allocated powers would exclude any categories of employees from the effect of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Fair to say as you sit here today you have no idea whether there are any categories of employees who are excluded from the operation of the statute by section
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5? A. No. Sorry, repeat. Q. Is it fair to say you have no idea -A. Yes, that is correct. I'm not a legal expert. Q. Let me refer you to up near the top of Exhibit 3, the first page. You see that it says introduced by reps and then it lists a bunch of representatives? A. Yes, I can see that. Q. Have you ever met with any of the representatives listed in that paragraph in Exhibit 3? A. No. Q. Do you know who any of those people are? A. I don't. Q. Have you ever had any communication with any legislator in the State of Michigan? A. I haven't. Q. Have you ever had any communication with the governor's office in the State of Michigan? A. No. Q. Do you know who the governor of the State of Michigan is? A. I don't. Q. Sorry? A. I do not.
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Q. Have you ever communicated with any members of any lobbying or advocacy group related to the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. As you sit here today are you aware of any Michigan lawmakers or officials who are doing any kind of economic analysis before enacting the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I don't have that information. Q. You have no idea as you sit here today? A. I have no idea as I sit here. Q. Have you as part of your work in this case made any inquiries into any economic analysis that the state may have conducted before or at the time it enacted the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I wrote my expert witness report independent of any others so I was unaware of any other analysis and I didn't inquire of any other analysis. Q. My question was did you ever inquire of any economic analysis that the state may have conducted before passing the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I did not. Q. You're being compensated for your work in this case, correct?
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Q. Before November of 2013 had anyone ever asked you to examine the potential effect of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. Before November of 2013 did you even have any idea that the Benefit Restriction Act existed? A. No. Q. Before November of 2013 had you ever conducted any economic analysis for the State of Michigan in any capacity? A. No. Q. Before November of 2013 had you ever considered the economic effect of any law before? A. Repeat that question. Q. Before November of 2013 had you ever analyzed the economic impact of any law? A. So a lot of my research deals with the economic impacts of various law changes. Q. What are some of the laws that you believe or recall having examined the economic impact of before? A. I can look through my vitae real quick and see. Q. If you don't remember off the top of your head that's fine. A. So I don't remember off the top of my head.
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A. Q. A. Q.
Yes. At a rate of $300 per hour, is that correct? That's correct. Do you have a signed retention agreement with the State? A. I have a signed contract. I'm not sure if that's the same thing. Q. Did you produce that in response to plaintiff's subpoena? A. I don't know actually. MR. WOOD: I think we sent in all the responsive documents by e-mail. Did you not get that? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: I did. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. You said you don't know? A. I don't know. Q. Do you have any copy of that contract in your possession currently? I don't mean here, I mean generally in your office, at your home? A. Yes, I have one in my office. MR. WOOD: I wanted to make sure you got that. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: No problem. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER:
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Q. Before today, so not counting today, how many hours have you billed to this matter? A. I'd have to -- I wouldn't know offhand but my guess would probably be about 20 hours. Q. 20 hours total? A. Yes. Q. Just to be clear I said bill but really what I meant was work. Same answer? A. Yeah, same answer. Q. Do you issue invoices to the State of Michigan for your work? A. I do. Q. On a monthly basis? A. I issued one recently. I'll probably issue another one after the deposition. Q. So you have issued one invoice to date? A. Yes. Q. Do you know whether you produced that invoice as part of your response to the plaintiff's subpoena? A. I submitted the subpoena materials before I created the invoice. Q. I see. You say you spent 20 hours working on this case since November 2013? A. Yes.
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A. So I wouldn't know that number offhand. Preparing the expert witness report it was about 15 to 18 hours for each of those cases. Q. Plus deposition time? A. Plus the deposition time. Q. Is that all? A. There might have been some other time just preparing for the deposition. The bulk of it was writing the expert witness report. Q. Are you being compensated at $300 an hour in those cases as well? A. Yes. Q. Let me refer you back to Exhibit 1, please, which is your report. Again, in the first sentence of paragraph one it says the purpose of this report is to assess the economic impact of restricting public employee health benefits to couples who are married. When you say assess the economic impact does that mean assess the costs and benefits basically, economic costs and benefits, I should say? A. I mean as an economist we would use the phrase economic impact more broadly as the effects on health, crime, government revenues, et cetera. Q. I guess my question is a little more fundamental.
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Q. Can you describe kind of what work comprised that 20 hours? A. Sure. The bulk of it was writing my expert witness report. Q. Anything else? A. And whatever reading or research or analysis needed to be done to write that report. Q. You served or are serving as an expert in other cases, correct? A. Yes. Q. How many? A. Two other cases. I'm serving as an expert witness in two other cases and submitted an affidavit in another case. Q. Let's start with the expert witness work. Can you identify the two other cases, please? A. Sure. There's the Divor case here in Michigan and there's a similar case of that in Virginia. Q. How many hours would you say you have billed to those two cases combined since you became involved up to today? A. Sure. Do you want to include the deposition for the other Michigan case? Q. Yes.
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However you define costs and benefits -- I understand you would define them broadly -- but however defined it was your task and mission in this case to assess both the costs and the benefits of the Benefit Restriction Act, correct? A. Yes. Q. So when you say the economic impact you're talking about the net economic impact, right? A. That is correct. Q. Benefits less cost, right? A. Yes. Q. As an economist when you assess the economic impact of something it's common to assess both the benefits and the costs, correct? A. That would be true if you needed to come up with a specific number, but, yeah, you would evaluate both the costs and benefits of the policy change. Q. But even if your task weren't to come up with a specific number, if your task is to analyze the net outcome or the net impact of something you need to consider both the costs and the benefits, correct? A. Again, if you didn't -- if you weren't getting an exact number you wouldn't be able to quantify all those pieces so if you left a piece out it wouldn't
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affect the whole picture. No, your job would be to look at both costs and benefits. Q. Right. So to be clear, as an economist examining economic impact of something you would look at both costs and benefits, correct? A. Yes. Q. Now, let me refer to paragraph nine of your report, please. Just for the record, as I'm referring to your report throughout the day you'll understand I'm referring to Exhibit 1, correct? A. Yes. Q. Look at paragraph nine, please. In paragraph nine, first sentence, you say marriage provides economic benefits to the State of Michigan by reducing welfare benefits, increasing tax revenue, and reducing costs incurred by the State related to criminal justice and health care. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. The first part of that sentence you say marriage provides economic benefits to the State of Michigan. You mean net economic benefits? A. Actually the way I phrased this sentence is economic benefits. Q. As part of your analysis in this case did you actually
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I'm generally referring to the broader impact on the State of Michigan via welfare payments, tax revenues, criminal justice, health care. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. But my question is even within the economic framework as opposed to an accounting framework did you make it your business to assess both the costs and the benefits from an economic perspective of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. Within those areas that I have access to data and expertise. Q. Yes. A. Yes. Q. Again, in paragraph nine of your report you say that restricting partner health benefits to married couples creates an additional incentive for couples to marry and this decision to marry produces economic benefits for the State of Michigan. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Is it your opinion that restricting partner health benefits to married couples produces economic benefits to the State of Michigan? A. Can you restate your question? Q. Is it your opinion that restricting partner health
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1 examine costs as well as benefits of the Benefit 2 Restriction Act? 3 A. So in this case I'm discussing the economic benefits, 4 you know. Within my area of economics I'm not aware 5 of any costs of marriage within this -- within this 6 topic of welfare payments, tax revenue, criminal 7 justice, health care. I'm not aware of studies that 8 have shown that marriage raises the costs in any of 9 these areas. 10 Q. More broadly referring to paragraph one of your 11 report, in terms of assessing the economic impact of 12 the Benefit Reduction Act, so stepping away from 13 marriage as an institution and focusing more 14 specifically on the Benefit Restriction Act, did you 15 consider both the costs and benefits of the Benefit 16 Restriction Act in forming your opinions as stated in 17 your report? 18 MR. WOOD: I object to the form of the 19 question to the extent it mischaracterizes any of the 20 language or statements in his report, but you can go 21 ahead and answer. 22 A. I mean, I did not approach this from an accounting 23 perspective. I approached it from an economic 24 perspective. When I talk about the economic impact
benefits to married couples produces economic benefits for the State of Michigan? A. Again, the way I've kind of stated it here in the report is by restricting health benefits to married couples it creates an incentive for couples to marry and marriage produces economic benefits for the State of Michigan. Q. Do you agree that it's also important to consider whether restricting partner health benefits to married couples creates any economic costs or detriments to the State of Michigan? A. That would be helpful. I wasn't aware of any while writing this report. Q. Aside from whether you were aware of any you said it would be helpful. It would be important, wouldn't it? A. Correct. Q. In fact, without understanding any costs associated with restricting partner health benefits to married couples it wouldn't be possible to opine on whether it creates a net economic benefit, correct? A. Yes. Q. Now, further down in paragraph nine you say allowing partner health benefits to extend to cohabiting couples increases the relative incentive to cohabit
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instead of marry. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Now, when you say increases the relative incentive to cohabit instead of marry are you talking about the net relative incentive? A. I'm not sure what you mean by net incentive, but it would change the incentive on the margin. Whatever information they were using to make a decision this would affect the decision. Q. And you go on to say that this shift away from marriage among heterosexual couples will result in higher costs borne by the State of Michigan, right? A. That is correct. Q. And when you say will result in higher costs, you're referring to net costs? A. I'm referring to the costs the State bears when there's less marriage via health care, education, criminal justice, tax returns. Q. But to the extent that allowing cohabiting couples to receive benefits creates benefits for the State, would that be included in this analysis of the shift away from marriage among heterosexual couples? A. If you could rephrase that it will be helpful. Q. You say the shift away from marriage from heterosexual
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rationale or whether the law is rational you're offering that opinion in the economic sense, correct? A. That's correct. Q. You're not here to offer opinions about broader moral or societal rationales for the Benefit Restriction Act, correct? A. That's correct. Q. Now, in an economic sense do you agree that a law is rational if its benefits outweigh its costs? A. I don't know how to legally answer that question. Q. Well, from the perspective -- you said that you have an opinion that this particular law, the Benefit Restriction Law, is rational from an economic sense, right? A. Yes. Q. And when you say the law is rational in an economic sense what you're saying is that it's your opinion that its benefits outweigh its cost in an economic sense, correct? MR. WOOD: Object to the form of the question. You can answer. A. Again, I don't know if I would phrase it quite that way, but as an economist I would say one rationale for
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couples will result in higher costs borne by the State of Michigan. To the extent that the shift toward marriage imposes certain costs are you balancing those out in your statement that the shift toward marriage will result in higher costs; in other words, are you including avoided costs in that? A. Again, as an economist I was focusing primarily on these broader economic costs via education, health, criminal justice. Based on my reading of the literature I didn't see any evidence that marriage would raise the cost in those areas. Q. Well, my question wasn't limited to marriage but we'll get back to that. Do you have any opinion in this case about whether the Benefit Restriction Act is rational from an economic perspective? A. Yes. The State of Michigan defines marriage as between a man and a woman and I think a state has a rational interest in promoting marriage. Q. Now, do you say it's got a rational interest in promoting marriage from an economic sense or from some other context? A. From an economic sense. Q. To the extent you're offering any opinion about the
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passing a law would be that it promotes economic benefits. Ideally you'd want to promote -- you'd want to weigh the benefits against the costs and promote those measures that would create the largest benefit. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. But as an economist would you say that a law is economically rational if its costs outweigh its benefits? A. Again, that's not the language that I would use as an economist, but I would say a rational reasoning for passing a law would be to promote economic benefits. Q. But if the rationale for a law were to promote economic benefits and your assessment as an economist suggested that it would actually result in economic costs greater than the benefits you wouldn't regard that as rational, would you? MR. WOOD: Object to the form of the question. A. If you could rephrase that, that would helpful. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. If the purpose of a law were to advance economic benefits or to capture economic benefits, and if your analysis as an economist of that law showed that the costs outweighed the benefits, then you wouldn't
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regard that law as a rational law, would you? A. Well, again, as an economist there's lots of reasons why laws would be passed. If you are asking me for an economic rationale for a law then I would use the metric that the benefits exceed the costs. Q. Right. Just to be clear, my question is in the context of the opinions you say you have about the economic rationale for this law, right? A. That's right. Q. And you said you believe that the Benefit Restriction Act is an economically rational law, right? A. That's correct. Q. So within the context of your opinion as an economist the law's benefits would have to outweigh its costs in order for you to say it's rational, correct? A. Yes. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 4 8:45 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you what I'm marking as Exhibit 4. Take a moment to review Exhibit 4, please. MR. WOOD: Just for the record it looks like this is a Supreme Court brief. To the extent
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Q. Sitting here today do you disagree with aspects of Exhibit 4? A. I'm sure there might be particular sentences but in general, no, I don't disagree with the amici brief I submitted to California. Q. Just to be clear, at the time it was submitted you didn't disagree with anything in Exhibit 4, correct? A. Again, I wasn't the one that drafted it. Q. That's not my question. My question is at the time that this brief was submitted to the Supreme Court did you disagree with anything that was in it? A. Not that I remember. Q. As you sit here today can you identify anything in particular that you disagree with in Exhibit 4? A. I'd have to read through it again, but, no, it was a general statement. Q. Now, you signed on to Exhibit 4 as an amici voluntarily, correct? A. Correct. Q. And you did it because you believed the points the brief made were important points for the Supreme Court to consider in delivering an opinion in the case, right? A. Yes, particularly with regard to child outcomes.
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you're going to ask questions of the witness that call for a legal conclusion I would object on that basis since he's not an attorney. Can I have a standing objection on that basis? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: With regard to this exhibit? MR. WOOD: Yes. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Yes. MR. WOOD: Thank you. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. So you recognize Exhibit 4? A. Yes. Q. What do you recognize it as? A. This was an Amici brief that was submitted for the case in California. Q. And this Amici brief was submitted on behalf of you and some other academics, correct? A. Correct. Q. Did you have a chance to read Exhibit 4 before it was submitted to the Supreme Court? A. Yes, I did. Q. Did you disagree with anything in Exhibit 4 before it was submitted to the Supreme Court? A. At the time, no.
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Q. Let me refer you to page 14 of Exhibit 4, please. Do you have that page, sir? A. Yes. Q. Now, what you're doing on page 14 of the brief is criticizing a set of studies that show no difference between same sex parenting and parenting by biological parents, right? A. That's correct. Q. And one of the primary criticisms that you're leveling against the study is that they don't use representative samples, correct? A. Yeah, that is a major concern about that. To be super clear, it's the combination of having a small non-random, non-representative sample. I mean, it's kind of a combination of the three that really calls into question the study. Q. You say on page 14 of the brief or you agree at least with the statement that most striking is that all but one of these studies fail to involve a large random representative sample of the population, correct? A. Yes. Q. You agree with that statement, right? A. Again, that would have been my statement based on the information at the time. If I had to re-evaluate that
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statement today there's other representative -- large representative samples. Since then I've become familiar with the Potter study. Q. But, sir, the sentence on page 14 didn't refer to the Potter study, did it? A. No, that's right. Q. So, again, I'm asking you to look at the statement and concentrate on that statement in the context of this brief and tell me if you agree with it. A. Again, the challenge I'm having right now is a closer examination of the studies. Like right at this moment I don't know which studies would be included in that particular phrase. There's been several reviews in the literature. There's one by Marx. There's one by Rigor. There's one by Allen. There's one by Rosenfeld and each of them include slightly different sets of studies in their sample, so I wouldn't know offhand if the statement is true without having seen the set of studies. Q. As a general matter do you agree with me that for a study to be instructive about the outcomes of a particular policy the study population needs to be representative of the affected population? A. Not always. I mean, as economists what we often do is
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the population that I thought I was. If I wanted to collect information about, you know, the kind of benefits that companies provide I would want to make sure I had a sampling frame and that I understood, you know, that I had some kind of random sampling from within that frame. Q. Well, the reason that you're focused on random sampling in part is because you want to make sure that the sample you're getting reflects the population at large as best you can? A. That's right. Q. And that's because if the sample doesn't reflect the population at large it may reflect some subset that behaves differently or has different outcomes than the general population, right? A. Again, if you knew -- yeah, there would be concerns that your results might not apply to the population. Q. And that's because the population, any population, really is heterogenous, right? A. Yes. Q. So you may observe outcomes or effects within subsets of any group that may not apply to the entire group, correct? A. That's always possible.
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1 we look for natural experiments or opportunities to 2 learn something and then we apply the behavioral 3 insights from that population to another population. 4 What is helpful for the -- to have a clear 5 understanding of the representative population that 6 you're looking at. If I was doing a study on Sweden I 7 would be clear that I was using a representative 8 population of Sweden and it wasn't a group of people 9 that had either selected into the survey or were 10 sampled non-randomly. Both of those are going to 11 cause challenges and inference. 12 Q. Sure. And the challenges would result from the study 13 population not reflecting we'll call it the target 14 population, the affected population, correct? 15 A. No, it's actually worse than that. I mean, so imagine 16 I wanted to learn something about Michigan. I might 17 be able to draw inference about the nation as a whole 18 and we wouldn't expect Michigan to be that different 19 from the nation as a whole. For that matter, we 20 wouldn't expect them to be that different from people 21 in another county. 22 We would be more concerned if I went out 23 and I was sampling and sampling in an un-random way so 24 that I actually wasn't even learning something about
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Q. And that's one of the reasons why it's so important to use random sampling is to try to neutralize that effect, correct? A. That's one of the reasons. The other is you don't want to let people select on characteristics that you wouldn't have any control over. Q. My question was that's one of the reasons, right? A. One of the reasons. Q. The reason that you're concerned with making sure you have a representative study population is because it would be invalid to extrapolate the outcomes in the study population to the general population if it doesn't actually reflect the characteristics of that general population, correct? A. That's not always true. Q. Well, based on what I just told you in my question that would be true, correct? A. No, it's not necessarily true. If I were to know something about the general population and I wanted to know something about, say, public employees, as long as I had some general belief that public employees were similar to nationally represented population then I would feel confident extrapolating results from the bigger group to a particular group.
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Q. As long as you had a belief about that subset of population. A. Well, you would want to make sure it wasn't -- as economists we have to make assumptions and often we assume that most individuals behave about the same. We have to have some reason to believe that public employees were drastically different than the average population. Q. Well, sir, as an economist, in fact, you don't assume that most people behave the same way and that's precisely why you do regression analyses and other things to determine whether characteristics of certain individuals affect their outcomes vis a vis the general population, correct? A. Again, I think you're mischaracterizing what I'm saying. There's lots of good studies using British data that are used to inform policy in the United States. I don't think any of us would believe that the people in Britain are exactly the same as people in the United States, but we would say that their characteristics are reasonably enough similar to extrapolate from one population to another. Q. But as an empirical economist you wouldn't just take it on faith that that's true. You would examine the
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I'm trying to find the language. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Let's go off the record. (Off the record at 8:58 a.m.) MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 5 9:04 a.m. (Back on the record at 9:04 a.m.) BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Before the break I think we all noticed that your copy of Exhibit 4 is missing a little bit from the bottom of page 14 in the text. What I have marked as Exhibit 5 now and you have in front of you is an alternative copy of that same brief. If you look at page 14 of Exhibit 5 you can see down at the bottom there's the missing sentence included here, right? A. Yeah. Q. Now, returning to my original question, one of the things that the Eleventh Circuit noted about these studies they're referring to is that they used unrepresentative study populations consisting of disproportionately affluent, educated parents, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree that it's a flaw in a study to use disproportionately affluent members if you're studying
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relevant characteristics that you at least believe may affect the outcomes of your study and try to determine whether your study population and your target population have similar characteristics, correct? A. If that was reasonably possible then, yes, you would do that. Q. Now, returning to Exhibit 4, please, in the second paragraph on page 14, the bottom of the page, the brief quote, approvingly from the Eleventh Circuit, which is recognizing or criticizing some studies of gay and lesbian parenting and notes that one of the significant flaws in those studies is the use of unrepresentative study populations. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Specifically they single out populations consisting of disproportionately affluent people, right? It's at the bottom of page 14. A. I don't see the part about the affluent. Q. Are you on page 14? A. Yes. Q. It says -A. Use of unrepresentative population consisting -Q. Of disproportionately affluent, educated parents. MR. WOOD: Do we not have the full copy?
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child outcomes? A. Yes, though I probably list the others. I mean, this one is listed last for a reason. The others are a bigger issue, but I would agree that if you wanted to study a population you wouldn't want to focus primarily on affluent or highly educated individuals. Q. My question was a little simpler than that. My question was do you agree it's a flaw in the study to use a disproportionately affluent population if you're studying child outcomes? A. No study is perfect, but that would be considered a flaw of a study is to over-sample a group that's not representative of the population. Q. So to be clear, you agree that it's a flaw in a study to use a disproportionately affluent population, correct? A. Again, with the caveat that no study is perfect, so this would be a potential flaw in something you would want to, you know -- I think the other issues listed on there are bigger flaws. Q. I'm not asking you right now about the other issues. My question is more focused and I would like your answer to be focused on my question. Do you agree that it is a flaw in a study
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to use a disproportionately affluent population when you're studying child outcomes? A. Again, with the caveat that it wouldn't ruin the study but it would be a flaw. Q. Well, whether it would ruin the study is a different question, right? A. Yeah. Q. But it's a flaw in the study, right? A. That would be a flaw. Q. Do you have any understanding as you sit here today, based on your review of the literature, whether income or affluence affects things like the decision to marry? A. Yes, generally people that are poor are less likely to marry. Q. But as a more general statement you agree that affluence or income affects the decision to marry, right? A. Again, the way I would say -- I mean, we generally phrase it is that people with lower income are less likely to marry, but the flip of that would be that, yes, incomes correlated with marital status. Q. So in other words, income influences the decision to marry, right?
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fertility. Q. Is it your understanding based on your review of the economic literature that income affects the educational outcomes of children? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding that income affects the likelihood of incarceration? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding that income affects health outcomes? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding that increase in income tends to improve health outcomes? A. That's generally found to be true. Q. Do you generally think that's true? A. I believe it's true. Q. Is it your understanding that increasing income tends to diminish the likelihood of incarceration? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding that increase in income also diminishes the likelihood of committing a crime? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding or your belief that increasing income decreases one's consumption of
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A. Among other things but, yes, income could be a factor. Q. I'm not asking about other things right now. I'm asking a narrow question about income. A. Yes, income is a factor that affects marriage. Q. Based on your understanding of the economic research do you agree that income affects the likelihood of a couple staying married? A. There's, again, some caveats, but, yes, in general if a couple experiences an income shock then it often increases the likelihood of divorce. Q. So you agree with me that income influences the likelihood of a couple staying married? A. In general, yes. Q. Do you agree with me that income affects the timing of when one decides to get married? A. Yes, that would. Q. Do you agree that income affects the likelihood of a couple having children? A. Yes. Q. In fact, income affects the likelihood of women, whether they're a couple or not, of having children, correct? A. I don't know about specifics on populations but I do know that on average income results in higher
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health care? A. Rephrase that. Q. Is it your understanding that increase in income decreases consumption of health care? A. We'd have to kind of -- do you want to be more careful about how you use health care? So higher income people are going to be able to have a healthier lifestyle, but given that they have more income they might, you know, spend more money on health care at any level of health. Q. That's a fair qualification. A. Income is going to be positively correlated with health. Q. Is it your understanding that income is correlated or associated with rates of smoking? A. I imagine that's true. I imagine people that have higher income are less likely to smoke. Q. You have no reason to doubt that, do you? A. No. Q. Is it your understanding that income is correlated to rate of drug use? A. I would believe that to be true. Q. Is it your understanding generally that income is correlated to improvements in the diet?
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A. That's probably true. Q. Is it your understanding that income is also correlated with rates of exercise? A. It's probably true. Q. You have no reason to doubt it? A. No. Q. Now let's talk about education levels. Is it your understanding that differences in education levels can affect the decision to marry? A. Yes. Q. So people with different levels of educational attainment approach the decision to marry differently, right? A. That's correct. Q. And their rates of marriage are different, aren't they? A. Yes. Q. Is it your understanding that educational attainment affects the likelihood of a couple staying married? A. I don't know for sure but I would guess that to be true. Just to back up, so the relationship between education and marriage is a little more tricky because people that are more educated wait longer to
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A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment affects health outcome, correct? A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment is correlated with life span; is that right? A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment is correlated with consumption of welfare benefits, correct? A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment is correlated with consumption of all sorts of public benefits, correct? A. That's correct. Q. What about employment status? Employment status affects decisions to marry, correct? A. Yes. Q. And employment status affects the likelihood of a couple staying married; is that right? A. Yes. Q. Employment status affects the likelihood of one having children; is that fair? A. Yeah, via -- I mean, the only results I know about are via income, but if employment leads to more income -I mean, that one is a harder -- actually I don't know
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get married, so it would depend on what point in time you look at. Over the long run you would expect people with more education would be more likely to marry. Q. But more generally, it's your understanding that educational attainment affects people's decision to marry, correct? A. Yes. I don't know if -- at certain points in time it would cause them to either marry or not marry. It could go either way depending on how old you are. Q. Right. So educational attainment affects people's decision to marry, right? A. That's right. Q. Educational attainment affects the likelihood of having children, correct? A. Actually, I don't know on that one. Q. Educational attainment of the parents affects the educational outcomes of children in general, correct? A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment affects likelihood of incarceration, correct? A. Yes. Q. Educational attainment also affects likelihood of incarceration for one's children, correct?
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the answer on that. If the mother is working then fertility goes down. If the mother is making more income then fertility -- yeah, I don't think there would be a clear answer on that one. Q. Employment status affects the likelihood of incarceration, correct? A. Yes. Q. That holds true not only for the employed person but also for their children; is that fair? A. I don't know of any specific studies but I would believe that to be so. Q. Employment status affects health outcomes, correct? A. Again, I wouldn't be totally sure on that one. Q. You just don't know one way or the other? A. I don't know. I could imagine, you know, some kinds of employment might lead to more injuries, yeah, but on average I'm not quite sure. Q. But aside from theorizing right now that's not something you've studied? A. That's not something I've studied. Q. Is employment status correlated with life span? A. I don't know. Q. Not something you've studied? A. No.
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MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 6 9:16 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you a document I'm marking as Exhibit 6. Please take a look and tell me if you recognize Exhibit 6. A. Yes. Q. What do you recognize Exhibit 6 as? A. This is a handbook chapter I wrote for a handbook called Research Handbook on Economics of Family Law. Q. The title -- it's about a lot of factors that influence marriage, correct? A. That is correct. Q. Let me refer you to page six of Exhibit 6. Do you have that? A. Yes. Q. On page six in the first full paragraph you're discussing the Shultz 1994 study, correct? A. Correct. Q. About midway through the paragraph one of the things that you point out is that Shultz finds that AFDC benefit levels have small but statistically significant effect on all young woman, but they have a
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A. Again, I'm summarizing his -- I didn't conduct the analysis myself but I would -- given what I've written here I would say that's probably true. Q. I know you didn't conduct the study yourself but you cited it and discussed it in your research handbook, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you wouldn't have cited and discussed a study that you thought was invalid without pointing that out, right? A. Yeah, that's right. Q. Do you agree with me at least with regard to this Rosenzweig study that there was a subset of the population of young women that had a particularly large effect in terms of AFDC benefits, correct? A. Correct. Q. So do you agree with me it would be invalid to take the size of the effect on young women from poor families and extrapolate it to assume the size of the effect on all young women? A. That's true. You would want to use a caveat about the fact that it affects one population and not another. Q. And you'd also want to know the extent to which the subset of the population's outcomes differ from the
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particularly large effect on young women from poor families. Do you see that? A. Point this out again. Q. Midway through the paragraph beginning, Shultz 1994. MR. WOOD: Can I point it out? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Please do. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. The sentence, he finds that AFDC benefit levels. A. I guess I was confused because that's going to be referring to the Rosenzweig paper. Q. Fair enough. You're referring there to the Rosenzweig April 1999, right? A. Yes. Q. And he finds that AFDC benefit levels have a small but statistically significant effect on all young women, right? A. Yes. Q. That's what you say here in Exhibit 6? A. Yes. Q. And you also say in Exhibit 6 that he found a particularly large effect on young women from poor families, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you accept that finding as valid?
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general population, correct? A. Again, I mean -- I'm not familiar with the details of his study offhand but I'm sure he controlled for the other characteristics so he's isolating the effect of income, so he's holding those other things constant, you know, girls from lower income have a bigger effect than girls from higher income. Q. So knowing that that particular subset of the population with low income exhibited disproportionate or different outcome than the rest of the population, right? A. Yes. In the case -Q. Hold on. It would then be invalid to extrapolate the outcomes for the low income woman to the population in general, correct? A. So in this case he's looking at the effect of welfare benefits and so you would say in the case of welfare benefits, which we would expect to affect poor people more than rich people, that that particular effect, the welfare benefits, wouldn't necessarily want to apply to the whole population. Q. It would be invalid in that case to apply the unrepresentative sample outcomes to the larger population, correct?
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A. You wouldn't want to multiply that effect by the whole population, but that sub-population is still part of the whole population so you would still expect that there would be -- that there'd be some consequence of part of the population that you care about. Q. But the point would be that you wouldn't want to assume that the entire population behaves the same way as the subset, correct? A. That's correct. Q. As an empirical economist you certainly wouldn't make that sort of assumption without data to back it up, correct? A. I mean you'd have to clarify what you meant by having data to back it up. Q. If you were studying a subset of the population like young women from poor families. A. Yes. Q. Before you extrapolated results or outcomes from those young women from poor families to the general population you would want data showing that the general population had the same outcomes, right? A. Again, it would depend on the type of treatment I was looking at. In this case I would be cautious about applying a change in welfare benefits to the whole
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applying it to a general population. Q. Right, and that's because the subset of the population may exhibit characteristics that are not representative of the larger population, right? A. Again, it's not the characteristics that are as much of a concern. It's the response to the treatment might differ across those groups. Q. By response to the treatment you mean outcomes, right? A. Actually when I say response I mean the change in outcomes. Q. Right. A. Not just the levels. I mean, do they change more than another group? Q. Right. Just to be clear about what you're saying, the point is that the change in outcomes for the subset population may not be the same change in outcomes you see for the general population? A. That is always possible. Q. Let me refer you again to your report in paragraph 36. Do you have that, sir? A. Yes. Q. In paragraph 36 you're discussing this Alm and Whittington study, which looks at the effect of a tax penalty on women's behavior, correct?
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population whereas something like pension reform I might have less concern because it's something that would affect a broader set of the population. Q. In other words, in that context in pension reform you would have an empirical basis to believe that the entire population would exhibit similar outcomes, right? A. Or they would be kind of -- they would be eligible to be treated by the treatment. Q. But whether they're eligible to be treated by the treatment versus the outcomes that are generated by it are two different questions, right? A. You're going to have to clarify that question. Q. Why don't you first clarify what you meant by they're eligible to be treated. A. Sure. So if I were talking about, say, the pension reform in Sweden this would be something that would affect, you know, a broad swath of the population. It wouldn't be limited to just low income people. So I would expect that, you know, a broad based result like that could be applied to another broad based population whereas something like you pointed out with the AFDC benefits, which only affects a certain part of the population, would be more concerned about
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A. Yes. Q. One of the things you say about the Alm and Whittington study is that when evaluated at the maximum tax penalty for women in the sample the elasticity is negative 1.25, suggesting that for this group, for whom the tax penalty might be particularly salient, a ten percent increase in the tax penalty can reduce the probability of a woman marrying by 12.5 percent, right? A. Yes. Q. With regard to the Alm and Whittington study what you're saying is that there's a subset of the broader population they studied that showed different outcomes or different change in outcomes than the general population, correct? A. That's correct. Q. And that's partly because they were in a subset that sort of experienced the tax penalty in a more sort of at the maximum level, right? A. Yeah. The elasticity takes into account how much you're affected by the tax penalty, so that would already be accounted for, so it must be something with maybe higher income women being more familiar with the tax penalty than women more in the middle of the
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income distribution. Q. But for whatever reason the results were lumpy across the population, in other words, right? A. They differed for different groups within the population. Q. So you could divide it up say along income lines and you might see different outcomes for each income distribution? A. Yeah. Q. And you might say the same for educational attainment, right? You don't know but you might? A. Yeah, that's right. Q. Now, as part of your work in this case did you study how many previously unmarried couples got married because of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I think it's -- I did not. I'm trying to think if it would have been possible. I did not. Q. So as you sit here today you have no idea whether even a single couple to date has gotten married because of the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. Again, what I'm doing as an expert witness report is drawing from other -Q. Sir, my question is not about your report. I just want for the sake of time to kind of cut this short.
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the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I don't know. Q. And that's not something you even studied, is it? A. Again, as an economist we draw from the insight of other -- and this is particularly important when we're trying to forecast a future policy change. Actually in that case that would be impossible to know what's going to happen so what you try to do is draw from the insights of similar policies in other places. Q. Is it your understanding that there was a time period when the Benefit Restriction Act was in effect? A. I don't know the answer to your question. Q. So you don't know as you sit here today whether the Benefit Restriction Act ever went into effect; is that fair? A. That is fair. Q. So it's fair to say as you sit here today you haven't studied what actual effect the Benefit Restriction Act has had to date, correct? A. That is correct. Q. As part of your work in this case did you make any effort to estimate or forecast how many couples you might expect to get married as a result of the Benefit Restriction Act?
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1 My question is as you sit here today do you know or do 2 you not know whether a single couple got married 3 because of the Benefit Restriction Act? 4 MR. WOOD: Object to the form of the 5 question to the extent you're cutting off whatever 6 explanation he's trying to give you that would answer 7 your question. 8 A. In all of the studies that I've cited in my report it 9 would be almost -- it would be very difficult to 10 isolate which specific couples were influenced by the 11 policy. What you observe is changes in marriage rates 12 and you can attribute those changes in marriage rates 13 to a policy change. 14 Again, none of these authors would purport 15 to identify specific individuals that were 16 specifically affected by a particular policy, even 17 those polices that have a large change in marriage 18 rates. 19 BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: 20 Q. Now I'd like you to focus on my question, which is as 21 you sit here today do you know one way or another 22 whether any couple -- I'm not asking you to identify 23 the couple -- I'm asking you whether you know one way 24 or the other whether anyone got married as a result of
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A. I do not. Q. So as you sit here today you're not able to provide any estimate of how many couples you might expect to get married as a result of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. My expert witness report was in broad terms of the general effect of these types of policy changes. Q. So the answer is no, you're not able to provide any estimate of the number of couples you would expect to get married as a result of the Benefit Restriction Act, correct? A. That's correct. Q. As part of your work in this case did you make any effort to identify or quantify the number of unmarried couples who would be affected by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I looked at the number of unmarried couples in Michigan. I didn't restrict it to the groups that were legally affected by this policy change. Q. You're aware as you sit here today that the Benefit Reduction Act applies to a small subset of the Michigan population; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. And you didn't make it your business to determine how
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many people in that small subset would be affected by the Benefit Restriction Act, correct? A. I didn't have access to the data to do that. Q. So the answer is no, you didn't do it? A. That's correct. Q. So as you sit here you don't know how many of the couples who might potentially be affected by the Benefit Restriction Act are opposite sex versus same sex, fair? A. That's correct. Q. And as you sit here today you don't know how many of the couples affected by the Benefit Restriction Act were receiving other qualified adult or domestic partner benefits at the time the law passed, right? A. That's correct. Q. As you sit here today you don't have any idea how many couples affected by the law would even use domestic partner benefits if they were made available to them, right? A. Again, that information is a forecasting question and the way you would conduct that is rely on changes in marriage rates from other similar policies. Q. And that's not an analysis you ever conducted, is it? A. No, that's correct.
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A. I wouldn't be able to guess so I don't know. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea what proportion of state employees are male versus female? A. I don't know. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea of the proportion of municipal employees that are male versus female? A. I don't know. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea whether the proportion of employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act are male versus female? A. I don't know. Q. Do you have any idea as you sit here today what proportion of state employees are married versus unmarried? A. I don't know. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea what proportion of municipal employees in Michigan are married versus unmarried? A. I don't know. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea what proportion of the employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act are married versus unmarried? A. I don't know.
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Q. As you sit here today, do you have any idea how many people are employed by the State of Michigan? A. No. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea how many people are employed by municipalities within the state? A. No. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea how many public employees are potentially affected by the Benefit Restriction Act generally? A. No. Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea whether the cost of municipal employee salaries or benefits are covered by state funds? A. Not specifically. Q. Generally? A. I'm trying -- I mean, I read Baggett's expert witness report but I don't remember them. Q. So your answer is as you sit here today you don't know how much or if any of the cost of municipal employee salaries or benefits is covered by state funds; is that fair. A. So my guess would be -Q. I'm not asking you to guess.
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Q. As you sit here today do you have any idea what proportion of unmarried state employees are in a relationship with another state or municipal employee? A. I don't know and I wouldn't -- I mean, most of the questions you're asking are for data that wouldn't be available to your typical expert economist. Q. What efforts did you make to obtain data related to these questions I'm asking you? A. I didn't. I mean, I went to the American Community Survey, a publicly available data set, and used data to do some basic analysis. Q. So to be clear what you did is you looked at the ACS data, right? A. Right. Q. Beyond looking at that data did you make any effort whatsoever to determine whether there were more specific information about Michigan public employees? A. Again, I didn't know if that was part of my role as an expert witness. I didn't know if I was allowed to consult with other people for additional data. I wrote my expert witness report independently so, no, I did not consult or seek out additional data. Q. So regardless of what your reasons were the fact remains that you did not make any effort to obtain any
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data specific to Michigan public employees; is that fair? A. Specific to Michigan public employees, yes. Q. And you didn't make any effort to obtain demographic information about any Michigan public employees; is that fair? A. Again, as I stated -- I know this isn't the answer to your question. Q. I'd like -A. I made an effort to obtain data on individuals in the state of Michigan using publicly available data but not specifically on public employees. Q. Just for the sake of time -- I mean, this is friendly advice -- but when you're find yourself saying this doesn't answer your question the likelihood is I'm going to ask you the question again. A. That's fine. But, again, a lot of the questions you're asking are helpful to have a clarifying statement along with them. Q. To be clear, did you make any effort to obtain data that would tell you about, for instance, the average income of Michigan public employees? A. Again, that was not data I would have had available, no.
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impinge on people's private information? I'm not sure what you're asking. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Did you ever approach any representative of the State of Michigan and say tell me what data you have that might be relevant to specifically public employees? A. Again, at the time I didn't know that was a legal option for me. I wrote my expert witness report independently from other people. Q. Did you ever go to any representative of the State of Michigan and ask them whether they had any publicly available information about public employees? A. I did not. I used data that I was already familiar with. Q. So you did not ever go and seek that data out, correct? A. I didn't know it was an option for me at the time. Q. And it never occurred to you while you were preparing your report that you might ask the State of Michigan for whatever data it might have about the subset of the population you're studying? A. Again, I thought that was outside the purview of my role as an expert witness. Q. Did somebody tell you that was outside the purview of
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Q. Did you make any effort to find the data? A. No, I did not. Q. So you don't know one way or another as you sit here whether it's available, right? A. Fair enough, sure. Q. The same goes for any other type of data about Michigan public employes generally, you just don't know as you sit here whether it's available or not? A. That's correct. Q. Now, one of the things you could have done to try to obtain information specific to Michigan public employees would be to ask representatives of the State for that type of data or whether it existed, right? A. Again, I didn't know if that was an option for the support, so, yes, I did not do that. Ask your question again. Q. I understand. First of all, you didn't do that, right? A. I did not do that. Q. But you understand that's something you could have done? MR. WOOD: Object to the form of the question. Are you talking about publicly available date or data that you are suggesting we would go and
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your role as an expert witness? A. No. This is my first time being an expert witness. I didn't know. Q. So you just assumed that as an expert witness you shouldn't ask for additional data about the specific subset of the population you're studying; is that right? A. Again, collecting and analyzing data takes an enormous amount of time and I didn't believe it was part of my role as the expert witness in this case to expend that type of time and resource. Q. Did you ever ask any representatives of the State of Michigan, including the people who retained you, whether you should invest that time to get that data specific to the subset of the population you were studying? A. I did not. I just assumed it to not be reasonable within the time frame. Q. Did you form any assessment of how much time would even be required to obtain that data? A. I did not but based on past experience it would have been a lot of time. Q. Well, since you don't know in what form the data exists or what data there are you don't have any idea
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how much time it would take, do you? A. That's fair enough. Q. Did you ever go to any representative of any municipality in Michigan to seek data from them specific to their public employees? A. Again, if you think about the time required to collect a random sample of municipal employers that would have been far beyond the reach of my expert witness report. Q. Sir, did you ever ask any representatives of any municipalities whether they had data specific to their public employees? A. I did not. Q. Since you never asked them whether they had data specific to their public employees you have no idea how much time would be involved in obtaining or assessing that data, fair? A. Not completely fair. I have collected data from local government units before and I knew from that experience that in order to collect a random sample of that type of data it would have been a very demanding task. Q. Did you ever speak with any of the lawyers who retained you in this case about whether they were willing for you to make the effort to obtain data
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Q. And you agree with me or it's your understanding at least that the Benefit Restriction Act only affects people whose employers offered domestic partner benefits, right? A. I don't know that. Q. Well, the law has the effect of prohibiting offering domestic partner benefits, right? A. Yes. Q. So that would only affect you if your employer offered domestic partner benefits, right? A. Not necessarily. It would affect all employers that have offered those benefits in the future. Q. Right, but with that caveat it affects only people whose employers currently offer domestic partner benefits or who might have offered them in the future, fair? A. Yes, but, again, it's not -- so that actually includes all the public employers since they all potentially could offer those benefits. Q. Did you ever do any assessment of the likelihood of, you know, what proportion of the employers affected by the Benefit Restriction Act were likely to offer domestic partner benefits in the future? A. Again, as an economist there isn't a clear way to
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specific to public employees in the State of Michigan? A. I did not ask. Again, I felt my role as an expert witness was to conduct my own independent report. I didn't know I could ask for data from counsel. Q. And even aside from asking for data from counsel, but you understood generally as an economist that you sometimes have to ask for data from governmental organizations, right? A. Generally as an economist we try to gather data from larger bodies that have aggravated the data, such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Q. But you said just a moment ago you have experienced gathering data from municipalities, right? A. Sure. Q. So you've done it before, right? A. Yes. Q. So you know it's possible to do it? A. It's possible. Q. You didn't do it here? A. It's very hard. I did not do it here. Q. Now, it's your understanding in a general sense that the Benefit Restriction Act applies only to public employees in Michigan, correct? A. Yes.
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collect that information. I mean, it's really challenging to know what a public employer might decide to do in the future or what things might change to affect their decision. Q. You agree with me that the Benefit Restriction Act only affects people who are not already married? A. Not necessarily. It will affect anyone who has to make a marriage decision at some point in the future. So couples that are currently married may not always be married so they would then reenter that pool of people who could potentially be affected. Q. All right. But at any given point in time the Benefit Restriction Act only affects unmarried people, right? A. At any point in time, but, again, as an economist you kind of want to think about who the affected population is as being anyone that could potentially be in that state at some point in the future. Q. My point is similar and narrower. At any given point in time the Benefit Restriction Act affects people who are not married, right? A. Yeah. Again, I mean, marriages can dissolve quickly, but, yes, in general the largest effect would be on those that are not currently married at a specific point in time.
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Q. But at any time you're either married or you're not married, right? A. Well, so -Q. Is that right? A. But -Q. Is that right? A. Let me answer your question. Q. Well, that one is a simple one. A. Yes. At any point in time you're either married or not married. But when you think about the benefits of marriage it will affect your decision both to marry and to un-marry. So in that sense something that promotes marriage or creates an incentive to marry or stay married would affect both the decision of un-married and married people. Q. Do you know how many municipalities were offering other qualified adult benefits or domestic partner benefits at the time the Benefit Restriction Act was passed? A. No. Q. No idea? A. No idea. Q. Not something you studied at all? A. No.
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exactly the same but they could be similar. One could be much higher, one could be much lower. I don't know. Q. Right, so they can differ across communities, right? A. That's right. Q. So from one community to the next you can't assume as an empirical matter that the average income in those communities is similar, right? A. I mean, any two given communities there would be a chance that they would differ in their average income. Q. Right. So as you sit here today do you have any understanding of whether the communities or the municipalities that were offering other qualified adult benefits at the time Benefit Restriction Act was passed tended to have higher or lower income in the community than on average in the state? A. Again, you're looking at the wrong comparison because -Q. Sir -A. Can I finish? Q. I would like you to answer my question because you may think that I am focused on the wrong thing but I would like to -A. I don't know.
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Q. Do you have any idea whether the municipalities that were offering these other qualified adult or domestic partner benefits at the time that the Benefit Restriction Act was passed have average income levels that are consistent with the general population of Michigan or higher or lower? A. I don't know, but if I use the broader base of public employers my guess would be that public employers employ a range of incomes. I would imagine -- I don't have the information offhand, but I would imagine it wouldn't be that different from the overall State of Michigan. Q. Well, aside from imagining those let's break that down. You agree with me, right, that different communities in Michigan, different municipalities have different income levels on average, right? A. Yes. Q. So in other words, the average income in Grand Rapids might differ from the average income in Detroit, right? A. Yes. Q. You don't know one way or the other whether that's true as you sit here today, right? A. I mean, it could be. I mean, they're not going to be
Q. So the answer is you don't know whether or not communities in which other qualified adult benefits were being offered at the time the Domestic Partner Act was passed were higher or lower income on average than the statewide population? A. Yeah, I don't know that. Q. Let's look for a moment back at your report at paragraph one, please. Now, again in the first sentence you say the purpose of the report is to assess the economic impact of restricting public health benefits to couples who are married. Does that mean as part of your analysis you considered the cost and benefit of this policy with regard to all public employers? A. When I wrote this report I was referring to the general principle of restricting public health benefits to couples who are married. Maybe rephrase your question. Q. For instance, you didn't exclusively focus in your report on sort of the economic costs and benefits only to the state's benefit? You were focusing on sort of the state government more broadly includes municipalities and other subdivisions; is that fair? A. Yeah. I'm not -- for the state of Michigan I'm not
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sure who exactly covers particular costs that I looked at so that would be a fair statement. Q. So the record is clear, in your report you took it as your project to assess the economic impact of restricting public employee health benefits on the state at large, including both state and municipal governments, right? A. I tried to focus my efforts on the types of expenditures that a state would do as opposed to what municipals would cover. Q. But in terms of assessing whether the policy change creates a net economic benefit you took into account the economic benefits and costs across municipalities in the states, right? A. It's possible some of the things I discussed might also be covered by municipalities, but in my report I tried to kind of clarify what types of changes would result in either savings for the state or an increase in revenue for the state. Q. Did anyone ever tell you that you should focus your attention in your report only on state expenditures versus municipal expenditures? A. Margaret mentioned that it would be important to focus on the impact on the state as opposed to the impact on
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if you think I'm crossing the line. We can talk about it then. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. But do you agree as an economic matter the Benefit Restriction Act could have both potentially costs and benefits for municipalities as well as state government? A. Yeah. I haven't studied that specifically, but, yes. Q. As a general matter you assume that's true, right? A. Yes. Q. So let me ask you again. Did you make any effort as part of your work in this case to assess the costs and benefits created by the Benefit Restriction Act as pertaining to municipalities? A. If those costs and benefits operate through the general patterns that I discussed related to crime, health, then, yes. But I didn't focus specifically on the costs and benefits to municipalities. I focused primarily on the costs and benefits to the state. Q. I think you said a moment ago that you don't have a firm understanding of which costs and benefits occurred to the state versus municipalities? A. Again, I'm not an expert on public finances. I tried my best to think about which of these costs and
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local municipalities. Q. She did? Did she explain why that was important? A. She explained that there was a question about whether the state had a rationale for restricting employee benefits, public employee benefits, to married couples. Q. And she said for that reason you should focus on your analysis for state costs and benefits versus municipal? A. She asked the question as an economist would the state have an economic reason for wanting to restrict public employee health benefits to couples who are married. MR. WOOD: To the extent you're trying to ask questions that go beyond what's permissible by FRCP 26 I want to make sure we don't cross those boundaries, so to the extent you're asking for questions that relate other than to compensation facts or data that the party attorney provided and expert considered in forming the opinions to be expressed or identifying assumptions that the party attorneys provided and that the expert relied upon, then I object. I'm not sure if you're crossing into that or not. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: I'll trust you to object
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benefits would reasonably accrue to the state. I tried to focus on those. Q. Is it your understanding that like a premise for your work in this case is that the state legislature could rationally pass a law that created benefits for the state but created offsetting larger costs for municipalities? A. I don't know about that. Q. You just didn't think about that at all, right? A. No. Q. Do you have any idea how many state versus municipal workers are benefited by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I don't know. Q. And you don't know the extent to which state funds go toward paying municipal employees, correct? I think we could have had that before? A. Yeah, I don't know. Q. In paragraphs 20 to 22 of your report, if you could look at that, please. Here you're discussing the relationship between marriage and increased income, correct? A. Correct. Q. You say that marriage causes increases in income at least among men?
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A. That's correct. Q. In paragraph 21 you looked at ACS data and you tried to quantify the extent of that marriage premium for men, right? A. That is correct. Q. We'll come back to sort of the initial point of whether marriage, in fact, creates income increases. For now I want to focus on the second part of your discussion under the heading marriage and income where you discuss the increased tax revenue to the state. The point of your analysis in paragraph 22 is that given your review that marriage increases men's income and household income that results in increased tax revenue to the State of Michigan, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you say in paragraph 21 that marriage on average is associated with increase in income for men, right? A. Yes. Q. And a decrease in income for women, right? A. That's true on average. Q. You quantify that in raw numbers at least working out to about $23,000 per year in annual income for men? A. Yes. Q. And a negative $3,000 per year for woman on average?
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A. Yes. We generally like to control for a few of the factors that might be correlated with marriage as a way to account for some of the other differences. Q. Did you make any effort to assess whether the marriage premium you discussed in paragraph 21 is present across all income levels? A. I did not. Q. Did you make any effort to determine whether the marriage premium discussed in paragraph 21 is consistent across all educational attainment levels? A. I did not. Q. Did you make any effort to determine whether the marriage premium you discussed in paragraph 21 is consistent across geographic regions in the state? A. I did not. Q. You didn't bring the numbers down in that way? A. No. Q. Now, in paragraph 22 you lay out some calculations for what you believe would be the increased tax revenue to the State of Michigan based on the marriage premium you discussed in paragraph 21, right? A. Yes. Q. To be clear, the tax revenue numbers -- did you calculate those based on the gross marriage premium or
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A. Yes. Q. And then in the last sentence of paragraph 21 you say adjusting those differences by demographic characteristics reduces both income and unemployment by half, right? A. That's correct. Q. What are the demographic characteristics you used to control those factors? A. These were listed earlier in my report. I'll point those out. It's in point number 12, my regression is adjusted for age, race, ethnicity, education, and citizenship status. Q. So once you control for those variables the gross number of 23,000 for men was cut in half, right? A. That's correct. Q. And typically the adjusted numbers are the more reliable numbers in your view, right? A. It depends on what you're trying to do with the numbers or what the interpretation of the numbers are. Q. So if you were trying to apply those numbers to a broad population you would want to adjust them, right? A. Yes. Q. So that's why you did the adjustment you did, isn't it?
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the adjusted marriage premium? A. The gross marriage premium. Q. Why did you decide to do that? A. Again, that was -- everything in the previous paragraph had been written in terms of those and I include a statement that adjusting these differences by demographic characteristics reduces both the income and employment gap in half. So one of the challenges with regressing adjusting is then you're going to have to specify the levels, so regression adjusting is going to help you adjust the gap. It won't help you a lot to adjust the levels. You'd have to make a number of assumptions about where to place the level. I use the raw gaps, but presumably then, you know, if someone wanted to think of the adjusted as being the more reliable they can, you know, cut it in half if they wanted. Q. So in general terms you would expect that if you adjusted the income tax increase that you discuss in paragraph 22 by the same demographic characteristics you used in paragraph 21 you would expect it to be reduced by about half? A. Actually I'm not sure if you could do it -- there's
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some non-linearities in the way the tax code works so I'm not exactly sure you could do it. Q. It's just not something you calculated as part of your report? A. Again, based on what I described earlier about regression adjusting doesn't help you very well in getting levels and I needed to see levels through the taxing program. No, I did not. Q. So let's talk for a moment about kind of an average couple. Let's assume that the man -- they're married. Let's assume the husband works for a public employer so he's affected by the Benefit Restriction Act and he's also paid by a public employer. The wife is not. She works somewhere else or doesn't have a job, it doesn't matter. For that couple if the husband is a public employee his increased salary would be a cost to his employer, right? A. I mean, it depends on how you do the accounting. Usually based on the Korenman Neumark the increased income for men operates primarily through productivity, so when you thought about from the employer's perspective there would be the cost of paying the extra income but they would be gaining the benefits of the extra productivity.
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that right? A. Again, the data is not available to do that. Q. So in terms of expenditures you don't have any understanding, you didn't study whether the marriage premium you discussed in general would lead to increased expenditures at the state or municipal level in the State of Michigan, right? A. Can you rephrase your question? Q. You didn't study whether the marriage premium you discussed in paragraph 21, if it held true for Michigan public employees if it would or would not increase State expenditures? A. You're going to have to say that one more time. Q. Let me break it down. We discussed a moment ago that if you're a public employee, right, and if the marriage premium that you say occurs occurs to that employee then they get paid more, right? A. That's correct. Q. That's the whole point of it, right? A. Right. Q. If a public employee gets paid more that extra pay comes from the public employer, right? A. Again, not necessarily. I mean -Q. They are not paid by a third-party, are they?
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Q. But in terms of expenditures from the State there would be an increased expenditure dollar for dollar comparison with the increase in the public employee's salary, right? A. It's not necessarily true. If that public employee can do the work -- if he can be more productive then actually the state might need fewer people to hire. I'm just saying it's not super clear whether by paying the worker more it's going to cost the public employer more money. Productivity can change everything. Q. But you didn't study the extent to which state employees or municipal employees might benefit from the marriage premium as a result of productivity versus any other factor? A. I cite it pretty clearly in my discussion. I didn't look at it specifically for Michigan. I'm citing the work of Korenman and Neumark. Q. With regard to Michigan public employees, you didn't study whether -- number one you didn't study whether Michigan public employees actually exhibit this marriage premium, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you also didn't study whether marriage leads Michigan public employees to be more productive; is
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A. You're saying that the income of the individual goes up and one way the income could go up is by moving to a better job. Q. Regardless whether they move to a different job or not they're being paid more than they were before, right? A. That's correct, and not necessarily by the public employer. Q. Understood, but assuming that they remain public employees, right, and their income goes up, that comes out of the public employer's budget, right? A. Again, I'm not making that assumption that -Q. I'm asking you to make an assumption for the purpose of my question. A. Okay. Q. Let's do it again. Public employee, salary goes up, right? Are you with me so far? A. Sure. Q. The increase in that employee's salary if they then remain employed by a public employer comes from the public employer, right? A. Yes, if they stay with the public employer. Q. That was part of my question. A. Again, that's not an assumption I would make in terms of evaluating the marriage premium.
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Q. You just don't know one way or the other, right? A. I'm saying marriage changes lots of things in the way men work and one of those changes could be whether they're employed and who they're employed by. Q. Right, as you sit here today you have no idea whether marriage in your view would cause men to leave public employment or enter public employment? A. I don't know that. Q. Just don't know? A. Yeah, and that's why I do not make that assumption. You're saying assume he stays with the public employer. I'm saying I wouldn't make that assumption. Marriage changes lots of things. Q. I'm using an example. In my example I said make this assumption that he stays with the public employer, sure? A. Yes. Q. If you make that assumption, if he gets $1,000 salary increase that's a $1,000 extra in expenditure from his employer, right? A. Yes. Q. That's just simple math, isn't it? A. Yes. Q. So the increased income tax revenue from that extra
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lower the expenditures of his employer. Q. In the context of public employees and public employers do you have any understanding to the extent to which public employers are free to sort of add or subtract jobs based on productivity? A. I don't know specifically but I do know if workers are more productive they lower the expenditures of the firms they work for. Q. As a general matter that may be true but would you agree with me that if workers are subject, for instance, to a collective bargaining agreement then there may be set numbers of jobs and productivity may not be a factor in lowering other expenditures, fair? A. Again, but if a -Q. Is that fair, before you go on? A. As a broad statement you're right. That expenditures might not operate through salaries, but if a worker is more productive then it's quite possible the city might be less likely to be sued or the workers are less likely to engage in costly mistakes. I mean, there's a number of ways in which worker productivity can affect the municipal -- the public employer's expenditures. Q. Fair enough. In paragraph 22 of your report you try
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$1,000 is what percent roughly? Less than ten percent, right? A. Sure. Q. So the benefit in terms of increased income tax revenue in a $1,000 increase would be less than $100, right? A. Okay. Q. Right? A. Yes. Q. But the additional expenditure from that $1,000 salary increase is dollar for dollar, it's $1,000, right? A. But again you're focusing on -Q. Just focus on my question, please. A. You're asking me about the expenditures and you're ignoring the fact that if a worker is more productive then you don't have to spend as much money on other things. Q. I'm asking you about expenditures so I would like you to focus your answer on expenditures. If a public employee gets a $1,000 raise the expenditures of that public employer goes up by $1,000? A. Not necessarily. I was trying to be clear that if a worker is more productive then he can do the work of two or one-and-a-half or whatever it is and that will
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to quantify the expected benefit from the marriage premium that you identified in paragraph 21, right? A. That's correct. Q. But in your report you never try to quantify the potential effect of increased municipal or state salaries that might result from the marriage premium you identified, correct? A. I did not because, again, the marriage premium can operate by taking on a new employer. That's my rationale for not including that particular expenditure in the report. Q. My question wasn't about your rationale. My question was in your report do you attempt to quantify the effect of your marriage premium that you discuss in paragraph 21 in terms of additional expenditures and employee salaries? A. No. Q. In your report do you attempt to quantify at all the decreases in tax revenues from same sex couples who might relocate to a different state because of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I do not. Q. Do you have any empirical basis to say one way or the other same tax couples might leave the state as a
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consequence of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I do not. Q. That's just not something you considered at all, right? A. No. Q. No, you didn't consider it? A. I did not consider that. Q. In your report do you consider at all or calculate the cost of increasing -- the State increasing the ranks of the uninsured as a result of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. Just the issue of Medicaid, and so when marriage rates go up you have less people receiving Medicaid. I would imagine that would also mean that you'd have less people that are uninsured as well. Q. But the effect of the Benefit Restriction Act -- one of the effects is to take away benefits from some people that might otherwise have them, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you consider in your report or forming your opinions at all the cost to the State of people who were previously covered by health insurance no longer being covered by health insurance? A. I don't.
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MR. WOOD: No. (Recess taken at 10:09 a.m.) MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 7 10:20 a.m. (Back on the record at 10:20 a.m.) BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Now, I'm handing you what I've marked as Exhibit 7 which is a copy of one of the studies you cite in your report, correct? A. Correct. Q. In your report paragraphs 23 through 24 you discuss Exhibit 7, correct? A. Yes. Q. And you cite the Sampson study for the proposition that marriage reduces crime, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you cite any evidence or data other than Sampson for the proposition that marriage reduces crime? A. That is correct. Just the one, just the Sampson study. Q. You only cite the Sampson study to the proposition that marriage reduces crime, right? A. Yes.
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Q. Have you made any effort in your report to quantify or estimate the likelihood that the Benefit Restriction Act would more likely motivate some couples to marry than it would motivate other couples to leave the state? A. I don't. Q. Do you know whether any neighboring states around Michigan have similar employee benefit restrictions? A. I don't. Q. That's not something you tried to find out? A. No. Q. Did you consider or quantify at all for purposes of your report the lost tax revenue from the domestic partner benefits that have been prohibited by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. Repeat that again. Q. Were you aware that benefits are taxed, right? A. I wasn't aware of that. Q. So fair to say that you didn't calculate any lost tax revenue from the loss of other qualified adult benefits; is that fair? A. That's fair. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Do you mind if we take a short break?
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Q. Did you survey the literature for other studies concerning connection between marriage and criminal behavior? A. I don't remember. Q. So as you sit here today you can't recall whether you looked beyond Sampson for any other competing studies of the relationship between marriage and crime? A. I might have looked at -- it's likely I looked at other studies. I don't remember exactly which ones I looked at. Q. You say it's likely. As you sit here today you can't say whether you did or didn't? A. I can't say whether I did or didn't. Q. As you sit here today you don't know whether there's another study out there that shows something directly the opposite of Sampson; is that fair? A. That's fair. Q. Let's discuss Sampson for a moment. First of all, Sampson studied 500 men who came of age in the 1940s; is that right? A. Correct. Q. Sampson didn't study any women, right? A. No. Q. And all of the subjects in Sampson came of age in the
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1940s, late 1940s, right? A. That's correct. Q. And all of the 500 men that Sampson studied grew up in the Boston area? A. That's correct. Q. And all the men that Sampson studied spent time in a reform school of some type; is that right? A. They refer to them as delinquents. I'm not sure but I believe that to be true. Q. Let me refer to page 466 of Sampson. A. Sure. Q. Second full paragraph, third sentence in that paragraph discusses 500 men it says committed to reform schools in Massachusetts during adolescence in the 1940s were the original subjects of the classic study? A. Yes. Q. You agree with me that all 500 men were in reform school? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me that selection into marriage was different in the 1940s and '50s than it is today? A. Yes. Q. And do you agree that selection into cohabitation was
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affected by the Benefit Restriction Act were high school dropouts? A. I don't have -- I don't know. Q. Do you have any reason to believe any of them were? A. I'm sure there's some that didn't complete high school. Q. Well, you're sure or you assume that? A. I would assume there were some. Q. You're not sure? A. I'm not sure. Q. You didn't know? A. I don't know. Q. As you sit here would you just assume that it's a small fraction of public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act that are high school dropouts? A. I don't know. Q. You just have no idea? A. I mean, I'm thinking of sanitation workers or -- I can think of a number of public employee type jobs for which they might not have high school degrees, but I don't know. Q. That would be speculation on your part? A. That would be speculation. Q. I think we covered this earlier, but you don't have
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different in the '40s, '50s, and '60s than it is today? A. Yes. Q. Do you have any idea how many of the public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act ever spent time in reform school? A. I don't. Q. Do you have any idea how many of the public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act have a criminal record? A. I don't. Q. Did you make any effort to find that out? A. No. Q. Do you have any idea whether any of the partners of any of the public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act have criminal records? A. No. Q. And you didn't try to find out that data either, right? A. No. Q. Now, most of the 500 people that Sampson studied were high school dropouts, correct? A. Yes. Q. Do you have any idea how many of the public employees
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any information about educational attainment rates for any of the public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. That's right. Q. Now, cohabitation was rare amongst cohorts of men that Sampson studied; is that right? A. That's right. Q. Do you recall even what rate cohabitation -- at what rate the Sampson cohort cohabitated? A. I don't and, again, it probably would hinge on what we call cohabitation. Q. But that's not something you analyzed in connection with your opinions in this case anyway, right? A. That's right. Q. Now, Sampson in his cohort hypothesizes a number of mechanisms by which marriage might reduce criminality, right? A. That's correct. Q. And Sampson and his co-authors pose them as hypotheses, not conclusions, right? A. That's correct. Q. And so Sampson didn't conclude that marriage operates through any particular mechanism to reduce criminality; isn't that fair?
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A. That's fair. Q. But they hypothesize that it might operate to reduce criminality -- marriage might operate to reduce criminality through -- for possible mechanism? A. Yes, it's very common in these papers to hypothesize some possible changes. Q. One of the hypothesis that the Sampson authors put forward was that a marriage creates an inter-dependent system of obligation, mutual support, and restraint, right? A. That's correct. Q. Is it fair to say that cohabitation also creates an inter-dependent system of obligation, mutual support, and restraint? A. Possibly but certainly to a lesser extent than marriage. Q. You say certainly to a lesser extent than marriage. Is that something you've studied? A. I've looked at differences between cohabiting and married couples. If we thought about an inter-dependent system of obligation I would have to say that cohabiting couples are much more likely to dissolve so I would view that as an obligation to each other.
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do the same thing that a live-in partner can. Q. And you agree with me that a live-in partner, a cohabiting partner, would exercise a degree of restraint than none? A. Yeah, quite possibly. Q. And that's not something you have studied, is it? A. No. Q. The next mechanism that the Sampson cohort hypothesized about were changes to the daily structure and routine of individuals and that that pulls individuals from deviant peers? A. Yes. Q. That's your understanding of what Sampson hypothesized? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me cohabitation also creates changes to a person's daily structure and routine? A. Yes. Q. And you agree that cohabitation Affects the routine of individuals, pulls them away from deviant peers? A. Again, I would have to clarify this. In this case it would probably depend on the gender of the cohabiting partner. I think in general we believe women as playing a domesticating role in pulling them away from
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Q. But you agree that cohabiting couples certainly have a higher degree of inter-dependent systems of obligation than single people, right? A. Yes. Q. And so a person who is cohabiting in a couple also has a higher degree of mutual support than a single person, right? A. Again, in all these studies we always refer -cohabiting couples fall somewhere in the spectrum between single and married couples. Q. My question was you agree with me that cohabiting couples will have an enhanced degree of mutual support versus single people, right? A. I would suppose that would be true. Q. It's not something you've studied? A. It's not something I've studied. Q. Would you agree with me that cohabiting couples restrain each other's behavior to a greater extent than a single person is restrained; is that fair? A. That's fair. Q. A single person doesn't have a partner that's restraining them; is that right? A. They could have a boyfriend or girlfriend -- I mean, the question is whether a boyfriend or girlfriend can
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their male friends. I wouldn't be able to say whether that's true if both partners are men. Q. My question was just cohabitation. A. Yes. Q. Generally cohabitation you would expect pulls individuals away from deviant peers, right? A. I would suppose that to be true. Q. I mean, the whole concept behind this hypothesized mechanism is that if you're cohabiting with someone you're spending a bunch of time with them and have much less time to spend with your deviant peers, right? A. Yes. Q. So that part of it would be equally applicable to same sex and opposite sex cohabiting couples? A. The fact about pulling you away from the single life and deviant peers that are associated with that that would be true. Q. The next mechanism that the Sampson study hypothesizes is that marriage allows for monitoring one another's behavior and creates a vested interest in exerting control over one another's actions, right? A. That's correct. Q. So beginning with the first part of that -- I mean,
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you agree with me that cohabitation also affords much greater opportunity for the partner to monitor the other's actions and behaviors? A. Yes. Q. And also the cohabiting partner has an interest in exerting control over their partner's actions, right? A. Again, it's relative to what you compare it to. They're going to have a smaller vested interest than a married couple but a larger vested interest than a single person. Q. When you say smaller vested interest than a married couple is that based on data? What are you basing that? A. That would be based on probability that the couple stays together in the long run. Cohabiting couples tend to be rather unstable and so married couples are going to have a larger vested interest in each other's behavior because they're going to be reaping the benefits of that relationship for a longer period of time. Q. You don't disagree that cohabiting couples have a vested interest in exerting control over each other's actions? A. Again, I'm saying it would be larger than someone that
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A. No. Q. No, you have not studied that? A. I haven't studied it specifically, but if you were to ask my expert opinion on whether or not cohabiting couples would exert -- would have a lower vested interest in their partner I would say yes, based on their assessment of the possibility of the union continuing into the future. Q. Now, Sampson says that they want to be clear that the result of the paper doesn't confirm the existence of any of the mechanisms they have discussed, right? A. That's right. Q. And you agree with that statement? A. That's true about much of this literature. Q. The final mechanism Sampson hypothesizes is the psychological transformation in individuals that can cause them to be more serious about life and take more responsibility? A. Yes. Q. Now, first of all, have you undertaken any effort to analyze the extent of psychological transformation in men who came of age during the Sampson cohort versus people now? A. No.
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was uncoupled but smaller than someone who was married. Q. But that's a qualitative statement. You haven't tried to quantify the extent to which married couples versus cohabiting couples' vested interest differs? A. Well, I mean, one example is that -- one notable difference between cohabiting couples and married couples is often married couples will often engage in sequential educational investments whereas for cohabiting couples they will do them simultaneously. Q. Right, but my question was a little narrower than that. You haven't tried to directly quantify or measure the extent of the vested interest between married couples in controlling each other's actions versus cohabiting couples, correct? A. No. Again, the general opinion of most economists is that cohabitation falls someone on a spectrum between married and singlehood. Q. Now, I would like you to answer my question. A. Ask your question again. Q. So you haven't studied or tried to quantify the differences between the amount of vested interest married couples have in controlling each other's actions versus cohabiting couples?
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Q. Do you have any understanding one way or the other where the extent of that psychological transformation that the Sampson authors hypothesize is the same or different today than it was then? A. I don't know. Q. And do you agree with me that cohabiting couples also would exhibit some psychological transformation causing them to be more serious about life and taking more responsibility? A. I don't know actually. Q. That's not something you've studied? A. I mean, I've studied data on cohabiting and married couples but it's -- I don't know how a survey would ask you if you have had a psychological transformation but it's one of the hypothesized channels through which behaviors changes. Q. So as an empirical economist you probably wouldn't touch a hypothesis like that, it's not something you can study; is that fair? A. I mean, I guess if you had well crafted questions about -- I mean, yeah, it probably wouldn't be something we could focus on per se. Now, the last part about being more serious about life and taking more responsibility, that's
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probably something we would -- that would be a little more measurable than whether it resulted from psychological transformation. Q. And that may be measurable but you haven't measured it, have you? A. No. Q. The Sampson study primarily compares single men to married men, right? A. Yes. Q. If doesn't compare cohabiting to married men, does it? A. I don't think so. Q. As we discussed before, the authors point out that cohabitation was rare among that cohort anyway, right? A. Yes. Q. But the Sampson authors said that they saw hints in the data that suggested that that crime suppressing association that they observed may not be limited to marriage, right? A. Yes. Q. What they're saying is they're suggesting cohabitation may capture the crime suppressing association that they observed, right? A. Yeah. I think most of us would say cohabitation is going to capture some of those benefits. It's a
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Q. So Sampson doesn't offer an opinion other than to say other relationships between besides marriage might capture the crime suppressing benefits, right? A. Sure. Q. Fair to say Sampson doesn't support the proposition that moving couples from cohabitation to marriage will have any effect on crime, right? A. His data wouldn't allow him to say that, yes. Q. So as you sit here you wouldn't say that Sampson gives you sufficient data to opine that moving couples from cohabitation to marriage will reduce crime, right? A. Again, since cohabiting couples are rather unstable they kind of move in and out of singlehood, so, yeah, this paper would not provide the clearest comparison between cohabitation and married couples. Q. Well, it doesn't provide any comparison, does it? A. That's correct. Q. So as you sit here today can you point to any data that you cite in your paper for the proposition that moving cohabiting couples from cohabitation to marriage will have any effect on crime, right? A. Nothing that I cite here in my report. Q. You didn't re-analyze Sampson's data to get at that question, did you?
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middle ground between married and singlehood. Q. My question was about what the Sampson authors are suggesting when they saw that they saw hints in the data that crime suppressing association may not be limited to married. What they're suggesting is that other relationships may also capture those crime associations, correct? A. Yes, but again, I wouldn't characterize them as saying that it has the same effect as marriage. They're saying it has some of the same crime suppressing effects as marriage. Again, the way I would read that is cohabitation falls again on the spectrum between marriage and singlehood. Q. They don't discuss the spectrum. A. That's right. Q. Sampson doesn't address any spectrum between singlehood and marriage, right? A. No, but, again, his data wouldn't allow him to -- I mean, the data is too thin in that area for him to rule out that they were different. Q. Or the same? A. Yeah. Q. He just doesn't know? A. That's right.
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A. I do not. Q. Going back for a moment to a couple of things you said earlier, you noted that cohabitation is generally in your view less stable and committed than marriage, right? A. That's correct. Q. Do you have any idea what the divorce rate was amongst the Sampson cohorts? A. I don't know. Q. So you don't know as you sit here today whether the divorce rate amongst the Sampson cohort is lower or higher than the dissolution rate of cohabiting couples generally today, right? A. Yeah, I don't know. Q. You just don't know that? A. No. Q. You don't know that? A. Right. Q. As you sit here, with regard to the Sampson study itself and the results you cite, you can't say confidently that the married relationships to the Sampson cohort were more or less stable than cohabiting couples, right? A. That's right.
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Q. And so with regard to evaluating the mechanisms that Sampson hypothesizes and that you discuss in your report you can't confidently say that those mechanisms with regard to the Sampson cohort wouldn't be the same or even greater with regard to cohabiting couples today, right? A. That's true. Q. In your report, paragraph 25, you note that the state spends money to capture and incarcerate criminals, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you have any idea how many municipal employees have committed crimes in the past year in Michigan? A. I don't know. Q. Do you have any idea how many public employees have committed crimes in Michigan in the last ten years? A. I don't know. Q. For any time period? A. No. Q. Do you have any data about the propensity of partners of public employees in Michigan to commit crimes? A. I don't know. Q. You don't have any idea about what the crime rate is for the public employees or their partners?
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A. Q. A. Q.
No. So you don't know if it's impossible or not? I don't. So you say it's impossible but you don't have any basis for that statement, do you? A. My basis would be that I worked with crime statistics before, either the uniform crime reporting or the Neiberg data, and I don't remember ever seeing any information about whether you're a public employee. Q. So aside from not remembering those designations and those two databases -A. Well, they're the two most important databases on crime in the US. Q. Right. But you didn't look for any other data in the State of Michigan specific to Michigan public employees' criminality or their partners, right? A. No. Q. So you just don't know whether it would have been possible or impossible to get that data, do you? A. No, I don't. Q. Based on your previous answers I suppose you'll agree with me that you have no idea how much crime related expenditure would likely be avoided as a result of the Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act, right?
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A. So the justice department -- I doubt the justice department breaks down crime rates by public employee status or partner status. Q. I didn't ask what they did. I asked what you did. A. I don't know. Q. It sounds like you don't know whether they break that data out by public employee or not, right? You just said you doubt that they do, but you don't know, do you? A. I would have to check but I don't know. Q. And that's not something you tried to find out as part of your work in this case, right? A. No. Q. One of the things you could have done was go to municipalities or the state government and try to find out the extent to which they have data on the propensity of public employees or their partners to commit crime, right? A. Again, that falls into the realm of nearly impossible or very costly given the task at hand. Q. Well, did you ever try to do that? A. I did not. Q. Did you ever ask whether that data has been compiled somewhere by the state government?
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A. Q. A. Q.
Not in specific terms. In general terms? No. You never performed any calculations related to that, did you? A. No, but, again, it's general principle that -Q. I'm not asking you about general principle. I'm asking you about the specific thing I asked you. A. No. Q. Sitting here today you don't have any empirical basis to say that any criminal justice expenditures would be avoided as a result of the Domestic Partner Restriction Act, do you? A. Again, my expert witness report would be based on the understanding that marriage changes behavior in men and one of those behaviors would likely be crime and as a result the State of Michigan would save money by having men commit less crime. Q. My question specifically was with regard to men who would be affected by the Benefit Restriction Act. So as you sit here today you have no idea whether the Benefit Restriction Act specifically will have any impact on criminal expenditures? MR. WOOD: Object to form of the question.
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I don't understand the question in terms of vague or broad. Are you limiting it to some specific individuals? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Counsel, as you know that's an improper objection. MR. WOOD: It's a question. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: You can object on the basis of vague or ambiguous. MR. WOOD: Vague and ambiguous. A. Maybe you could reask the question. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Sure. As you sit here today you don't have an empirical basis to say one way or the other whether the Benefit Restriction Act itself will have any impact on criminal expenditures in the State of Michigan, fair? A. Not fair. I would say -- I have no reason to believe that the effects of marriage would be any different for public employees of Michigan than it would be for the general population. Q. But, again, the characteristics of the population affected by this law is not something that you ever concerned yourself with, correct? A. Could you restate your question?
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MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 8 10:46 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Sir, I'm going to hand you what I have marked as Exhibit 8. Tell me if you recognize Exhibit 8, please. A. Yes. Q. What do you recognize this as? A. This is a report created by Mathematica about the effects of marriage on health. Q. And this is the report that you cite in paragraph 27 of your report; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. Now, the Wood paper is what's known as literature review, right? A. That's correct. Q. So Wood didn't actually conduct a new study. What Wood did instead was survey the literature related to the effect of marriage on health and reported kind of what a lot of other people found, right? A. That's correct. Q. And then synthesize kind of and summarized those findings, is that fair?
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A. Yes. Q. Now, if you look again at your report for a moment, paragraph 27. Second sentence of paragraph 27 you say that Wood reports that married individuals experience higher levels of overall health and thus have fewer doctor visits and shorter average hospital stays? A. That's correct. Q. You don't identify a comparator in that sentence, do you? A. I don't. Q. But the comparator is single people, right? A. I'd have to check. Q. As you sit here today you can't remember whether Wood is comparing single people to married people versus cohabiting people to married people? A. Again, I'd have to check it. Q. Before you do that let me ask you, when you were preparing your report and forming your opinions in this case did you make any effort to concentrate on studies that compared cohabiting couples to married couples? A. I don't remember. I don't know. Q. So you couldn't say that was a priority of yours in forming your opinions and doing research that
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Q. Well, we discussed earlier at some length you don't have any information about income and educational attainment and all sorts of other factors, right, with regard to public employees in Michigan, right? A. I don't have specific information to the characteristics of public employees in Michigan. Q. So as you sit here today you don't know whether that population is just like or different than the general population, fair? A. Again, I don't have any reason to believe that they would be different than the general population. Q. But that's not something that you've analyzed, right? A. That's correct. Q. Let me refer you to paragraph 26 of your report, please. In paragraph 26 you state that marriage results in overall health and lower levels of medical expenses. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. And you cite this Wood paper for Mathematica as support for that proposition, correct? A. That's correct. Q. And you discuss the Wood paper in paragraph 27 of your report, right? A. Yes.
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underlies them? A. Yeah, I don't remember if that was a priority of mine. Q. Do you agree with me that the population whose behavior you say the Benefit Restriction Act might influence would be cohabiting people who would otherwise get cohabiting benefits but instead are incentivized to marry, right? A. Well, it would be anyone that is considering marriage and this would be an added benefit of marriage and so, I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be cohabiting couples making that decision to marry. Q. That's a fair clarification. A. There are some people that don't cohabit before marriage. Q. Fewer all the time, though, right? Well, that's a fair clarification. The two states of being that you're primarily concerned with comparing in your report are cohabitation versus marriage, right? A. Those would be the -- yeah, that's probably a fair comparison, yeah. Q. Because what you're saying in your report is that by denying cohabiting couples these health benefits you are dis-incentivizing people to cohabit versus marriage?
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married. Q. And not if you're cohabiting, right? A. Or if you're single. Q. But if you're single there's no one you would be covering anyway, right? A. Again, this line between cohabiting and singlehood is rather fluid and so I could imagine a single person considering should I marry or should I cohabit, I think in that case or -- yeah, I just don't know if the comparison is super clear between cohabiting and married because people move in and out of cohabitation. Q. The question is not about whether people move directly from singlehood to marriage or through cohabitation and then to marry or cohabitation and never marry. The point is even if you're single and you're evaluating what kind of relationship do I want to have with my partner the two alternatives are cohabitation and marriage or remaining single, right? A. Yes. Q. And your point is that there are economic benefits to the state for influencing people to choose marriage versus cohabitation, right? A. That's correct.
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A. Yes. Q. And the whole point of your report is that in your view marriage versus cohabitation has economic benefits for the state, right? A. I think I was actually making a broader statement about marriage versus other relationships. Q. Well, you make some broader statements in your report certainly, but my question is more for purposes of evaluating the economic impact of the Benefit Restriction Act, the relevant comparator is cohabitation versus marriage, right? A. I'm not sure that's exactly true. Q. Is it generally true? A. Well, cohabiting unions are rather unstable and so if I were to compare the benefits of marriage to cohabitation I've have to take into account that cohabiting couples are going to move in and out of a single status. Q. Right, but, again, the point is the economic incentives that you're creating -- that the legislature is creating in your view are incentives not to cohabit but instead to marry, right? A. My understanding is they're creating an incentive to marry. You can only have these benefits when you're
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Q. Is it fair to characterize that as the thrust of your report? A. Again, the Benefit Restriction Act is going to create an incentive for people to marry and then once they enter that marital union then the state gets to reap the benefits of marriage. If they enter a cohabiting union then there's actually -- I mean, the evidence is such that it might not last that long so they would be back into the single state. Q. But also marriage might not last? A. That's true. Q. Whether people move in or out of the relationship is kind of -- let's put that to one side. A. Sure. Q. The Benefit Restriction Act in your view changes the incentive between cohabitation and marriage, right? A. Yes. Q. And before the Benefits Restriction Act in some locations for some public employees they had the option of either cohabiting or marrying and getting the same sort of other qualifying adult benefits, right? A. Yes. Q. The variable here is taking away -- making unequal the
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benefits between cohabitation and marriage, right? A. Yes. Q. So it's that inequality between cohabitation and marriage that you're studying the economic impact of in your report, right? A. With the caveat that -- you need to be careful because people don't stay in cohabiting unions. Q. Well, they don't stay in marriages either all the time, right? A. That's right, but the cohabitation dissolution rates are much higher than marriage rates. Q. And that's one of the reasons that you believe that marriage creates greater sort of economic benefits to the state than cohabitation? A. That's right. Q. So that's built into the analysis? A. Yeah. I mean, you would say, hey, there's married people, there's people who aren't married, and some of those people are going to be single or cohabiting and you're saying what's the economic benefit of encouraging more people to enter the married group. So then you would want to compare it to people who aren't married. Some of them are going to be cohabiting and some are going to be single.
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Q. You never reviewed the underlying data or studies that Wood reviews, right? A. That's correct. Q. You just cite Wood? A. I cite Wood. Q. Take it at face value, right? A. That's right. Q. Did you make any effort to compare demographic characteristics within the studies that Wood reviews versus the public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. Again, I didn't have any data on employees, so, no. Q. In footnote seven to paragraph 27 of your report you also cite the Umberson study, right? A. Yes. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 9 10:57 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you what's been marked as Exhibit 9. The title of the Umberson study is Family Status and Health Behaviors: Social Control as a Dimension of Social Integration, right? A. Yes.
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Q. Right, but you're sort of identifying differences that you believe exist between marriage and cohabitation, right, like length of the relationship, for instance, right? You said that was an important caveat between marriage and cohabitation, right? A. That's right. Q. But my question was more fundamental. At heart what you're opining on in your report is the economic impact of the state passing this law, the Benefit Restriction law, which makes unequal the economic incentive to marry versus cohabit, right? A. That's right. Q. Let me ask you to look at Wood, which is Exhibit 8, at page five, footnote one. Do you have that? A. Yes. Q. What Wood says in footnote one is this review does not examine the effect of cohabitation on health or the differing health effects of marriage and cohabitation. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me Wood doesn't provide any empirical or even qualitative basis to distinguish between health outcomes and cohabitation of marriage? A. Yes.
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Q. The Umberson study is based on data from the national sample of the US from 1974 to '75, correct? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me that society has changed with regard to its attitude toward marriage since the mid 1970s? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me that people select into marriage differently now than they did in the 1970s? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me that people select into cohabitation differently now than they did in the 1970s? A. Yes. Q. Do you agree with me that the sort of demographic characteristics of people who cohabit now are different than they were in the 1970s? A. Yes. Q. And the same goes for marriage, the demographic characteristics of people who marry now are different than the demographic characteristics of people who married in the 1970s, correct? A. Yes. Q. Did you make any effort to compare the demographic
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characteristics of the study population in Umberson to the population in the United States today? A. I did not. Q. Did you make any effort to assess or quantify the demographic differences that exist between the 1970s in the US and now which you think might affect the selection into marriage? A. No. Q. And did you make any effort to assess changes in the demographic characteristics of the population in the '70s versus now with regard to selection into cohabitation? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort to determine whether the population in the data set studied by Umberson is similar to or different from the demographic characteristics of public employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act? A. No. Q. What about with regard to the state of Michigan generally? A. No. Q. Now, you in certain parts of your report looked at data from the ACS data set, right?
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Q. So you had already encountered Wood and Umberson in some other context before you got involved in this case; is that fair? A. Yes, I'm sure. Q. As you sit here today you don't recall doing additional search to determine whether there are other important studies in the literature regarding marriage and health effects, fair? A. So what I imagine I did is that I did another search and remembered that I had seen the Wood paper before and Umberson and used those. Q. I'm not asking you to imagine. A. I don't know the extent to which I surveyed the literature. Q. Are you certain that you surveyed literature? Can you sit here and tell me that you're certain that you surveyed the literature regarding marriage and health effects? A. I don't know for sure. Q. Do you remember any aspect of performing a search of the literature for studies related to marriage and health effects? A. I don't remember specifically. Q. So you don't remember as you sit here whether you
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A. Q. A. Q.
American Community Survey. And that was specific to Michigan, right? That's correct. Did you ever compare the demographic characteristics you discern from the ACS data against the population study by Umberson? A. No. Q. Did you ever go back and perform any re-analysis of Umberson's data? A. No. Q. You took Umberson at face value? A. Yes. Q. Did you do a survey of the literature regarding connection or possible connection between marriage and health outcomes as part of your work preparing your report? A. I don't remember but I imagine I did to some extent. Q. Well, to some extent. You don't remember the extent? A. I don't remember the extent to which I did. Q. How did you come across Wood and Umberson? A. I believe I was already familiar with the Mathematica report and probably came across the Umberson paper at some point over my graduate school experience but I wouldn't be able to pinpoint exactly when.
looked, for instance, at studies that might have contradictory findings versus Wood and Umberson? A. Yeah, I don't remember. Q. That wasn't a priority of yours in preparing your report? A. I'm sorry, it was a priority but I don't remember if I did it or not. Q. So your testimony today is that you searched -- you may have searched the literature and didn't find any other studies that you thought were more relevant than Wood and Umberson with regard to your opinions in this case? A. I don't know. Q. You just don't know? A. I don't know. Q. Do you know whether there are any differences in income, average income, or income distribution amongst the Umberson data set versus State of Michigan? A. I don't know. Q. Same question with regard to drug use. A. I don't know. Q. Same question with regard to alcohol use? A. I don't know. Q. Same question with regard to smoking.
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A. I don't know. Q. Do you know whether Umberson controlled for smoking in her study of the population in the 1970s with regard to marriage and health outcomes? A. I don't know if she did. Q. Did you make any effort to control for that variable in applying Umberson outcomes or results in the population of Michigan today? A. If you could be more clear what you're asking. Q. Well, if there was a different rate of smoking, for instance, in the 1970s generally than there is today that might have some effect on health outcomes, right? A. Yes. Q. And if smoking were a covariant with marriage decision then smoking might influence health outcome vis a vis married and unmarried people, correct? A. Correct. I would believe marriage would reduce smoking and that relationship would lower the mortality of married people. Q. But that's not something that you studied, right? A. That's right. Q. And you didn't make any effort to understand smoking rates in Umberson versus the public employees who were affected by the Benefit Restriction Act, right?
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A. No. Q. Now, Umberson in Exhibit 9 page 312 -- at the bottom of the first column on 312 she says because of the cross-sectional nature of data used for the study the health behaviors of individuals before marriage and parenting cannot be determined. Do you see that? A. Point that out again. Q. The very bottom of the first column on 312. A. Okay. Q. The last line begins because of? A. Yep. Q. Again, it says because of the cross sectional nature of data used for the study the health behaviors of individuals before marriage and parenting cannot be determined? A. Yes. Q. It says the selection explanation cannot be disproved, right? A. That's correct. Q. But evidence from perspective studies diminish its plausibility? A. That's fair. Q. So Umberson basically says I can't determine whether the relationship between marriage and health outcomes
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A. That's correct. Q. And you didn't make any effort to understand any sort of relevant health influencing variables between the Umberson data set and the Michigan population today, right? A. That's correct. Q. And same question with regard to Umberson versus the employees who are affected by the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. That's correct. Q. Do you agree with me that gender roles generally have changed in this country since the 1970s? A. Yes, probably but -Q. Probably yes? A. Yes. Q. Did you make any effort to determine the extent to which gender roles in the 1970s can be compared to gender roles amongst the population in Michigan today? A. No. Q. Did you make any effort to determine the extent to which gender roles in the population that Umberson studied in the '70s are comparable to gender roles amongst employees who were affected by the Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act?
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is causal, right? A. Yeah. She's saying she can't disprove that it's not causal and then she has the caveat but evidence from perspective studies diminish its plausibility. Q. Of course she doesn't say how plausible she thought it was in the first place, right? A. That's true. Q. So she doesn't say that this can be proved or disproved, right? A. Again, I mean, you're asking about whether she felt it was plausible to begin with. I mean, given theoretical considerations I think, you know, many authors in the study come into the study with a prior hypothesis that marriage will have positive effects so, you know, the fact they can't disapprove that wouldn't change that. Q. So as an empirical matter the data couldn't prove one way or another is causally related to health outcome per Umberson? A. Again, the way the scientific method would work is we pose a hypothesis and it's evidence consistent with the hypothesis, then it buttresses the claim, but, you know, if evidence arrives that contradicts the hypothesis then you have to revise your hypothesis.
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Q. We know that people select differently into marriage? A. That's right. Q. So what Umberson says is that selection can't be ruled out as a cause of the marriage and health effect, right? A. But she also says that the other evidence mentions its plausibility. Q. Understood. But it can't be ruled out, fair? A. Given the evidence in her study. Q. Right. Within sort of the four corners of Umberson's study she says my study doesn't rule out that selection is what accounts for the health outcomes we observed correlated with marriage, fair? A. Fair. Q. If you look at page 316 of Umberson, please. First of all on page 316 -- actually it begins at the bottom of page 315 in Exhibit 9. First of all, under the heading discussion and conclusion, do you see that? A. Yes. Q. And then if you look at the last couple of lines of that column on page 315 it begins the present findings indicate that gender, marital, and parenting roles are associated with mortality related behaviors, right? A. Yes.
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is a potential mechanism but the process --the exact process suggested by that framework would be less clear. Q. Right. In fact, so much less clear that she stops short of even assessing it, right? A. That's correct. Q. And then further on in the paragraph she suggests the framework of another study that she recommends would be helpful. She says that this alternative study design would include a prospective design with the focus on the process of social control both before and after the transmission into or out of marital parenting role; is that correct? A. That's correct. Q. And she goes on, this design would reveal whether an actual process of social control occurs and whether there are sex differences in the receipt of social control, right? A. That's correct. Q. So she regards it as remaining an open question of whether the actual process of social control actually even occurs, right? A. I mean, she's proposing a way in which you could better test whether that's true.
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Q. Marital status is associated with negative health behaviors? A. That's what this says in here. Q. What she means by that is marriage has the lowest rate of negative health behaviors, right? A. Yes. Q. Divorced people she finds had the highest rate of negative health behaviors, correct? A. Yes. Q. So divorced people had even higher rates of negative health outcomes than single people, right? A. That's correct. Q. Now, in the second full paragraph on page 316 of Umberson she says the study provides a theoretical framework (social control) to describe how and why gender roles affect health behaviors but stop short of assessing the process suggested by that framework, right? A. Yes. Q. So basically when what Umberson is saying is I'm not going to assess -- part of my study is not to assess the mechanism by which marriage is actually affecting health outcomes if at all, right? A. I think it would be fair she's saying social control
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Q. And the reason she's proposing the alternative is because her current study doesn't get her there, right? A. But this was true of any study. This is why we have a discussion section of every study is to propose the ways in which future research can improve on what we've done. Q. Exactly, and one of the reasons you were proposing future research is because you recognize the shortcomings in your current research, right? I don't mean shortcomings pejoratively. I mean limitations. A. Every study will have limitations. There's no perfect study. Q. One of the limitations Umberson identifies in her own study is it's not possible based on her study to reveal whether an actual process of social control occurs, right? A. It sounds to me like, yeah, the specific process through which social control occurs, that's right. Q. And that's why she said we need this other alternative study I'm proposing, which will reveal whether an actual process of social control occurs, right? A. That's right. Q. And the reason she's proposing that study is because
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the current study, Exhibit 9, doesn't prove that, right? A. Again, there's the limitation that she doesn't have this ideal study. I mean, the data set for that ideal study doesn't exist so she did the best with what she had and she can come to conclusions that she can improve -- she can include caveats of what future studies might to do improve on what she's done. Q. But one of the limitations she recognized in her own study is it didn't reveal whether an actual process of social control occurs and that's why she suggested a future study that could reveal that, right? A. It's a fair assessment. Q. She also says that in this future study the issue of selection bias would also be addressed by examining change in health behaviors and correspondence with entry into or exit from marriage and parenting, right? A. Yes. Q. So, again, she's identifying a future study that would be able to get at the issue of selection bias because her current study, Exhibit 9, doesn't get at that issue completely, right? A. That's right. Q. So she proposes a future study that could answer the
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Q. Umberson is saying in the final sentence that I just read is she believes a future study is required to better get at the question or whether preexisting factors are responsible for health behaviors. MR. WOOD: Object to form and characterization of the study. A. If I read exactly what she says, she says if pre-existing factors are responsible then -- so like if that were true then it would also be true that family role transitions should not contribute to change in health behavior over time. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. She phrases it in the conditional if, because her current study doesn't answer that question, right? A. I think she's phrasing it in the if because she doesn't know if that's -- she doesn't know if pre-existing factors are responsible for health behaviors. Q. And she's writing that in her currently study. So she's done her current study and in her conclusion she says she still doesn't know whether pre-existing factors are responsible for health behaviors, right? A. I mean, I would view it as a natural hedge that most scholars would put into their research.
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question of whether selection bias accounts for the different outcomes of married versus unmarried people, fair. A. Yeah, that's, again, very common in many papers to, you know, hypothesize some ideal study that may or may not be possible but would get the question possibly better than what you could do with the current data sets. Q. But your answer is yes? A. Yes. Q. Regardless of whether it's common or uncommon as studies? A. Yes. Q. She goes on to say in the final sentence of that paragraph, page 316, if pre-existing factors are responsible for health behaviors, family role transitions should not contribute to change in health behavior over time, right? A. Yes. Q. Again, that sentence indicates that Umberson at least believes that additional study is required to determine whether preexisting factors are responsible for health behaviors, right? A. If you could restate that that would be helpful.
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Q. I'm not asking about other studies. I'm asking you what this sentence in Umberson communicates to you. MR. WOOD: Asked and answered. A. Again, I have no idea what Umberson was personally trying to communicate but this language she's using is very common in scholarly work to hedge against the possibility that there's just things we don't know. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Now, you haven't re-analyzed Umberson's data in any way, have you? A. No. Q. Umberson doesn't provide empirical support for the proposition that moving couples from cohabitation to marriage will improve their health, does it? A. I don't know. Q. You don't know? A. No, I don't. Q. Do you know whether Umberson provides empirical support for the proposition that marriage versus cohabitation has any health premium? A. I don't know. Q. Is it something that you looked at when you were reviewing Umberson to try to determine whether Umberson provided empirical support for those
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propositions? A. I don't know. Q. It's not something you discuss in your report? A. It's not something I discuss in the report. Q. In the context of the opinions you're prepared to offer in this case you don't have any opinion on whether Umberson provides empirical support for the proposition that marriage causes positive health outcomes versus cohabitation; is that right? A. That's correct. Q. Did Umberson even study cohabitation; do you know? A. I don't know. Q. Is that something you ever concerned yourself with as you were preparing your report? A. Again, the perspective I'm taking is what are the effects of marriage versus other kinds of structured arrangements. Q. Now I'd like you to answer my question. A. Sure. Q. Is that something you considered as you were preparing your reports? A. Not in this specific paragraph. Q. Did you consider whether Umberson evaluated cohabitation as part of preparing your report?
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Q. And you're just not sure whether people who had previously been married but were presently cohabited were part of the study? A. I don't know. Q. Again, that's just not something you concerned yourself with as part of preparing your opinions in this case, right? A. For this particular article, yes. Q. Do you know whether the word cohabitation even appears in Umberson? A. I don't know. The article was written in 1987. Research on cohabitation has been a little more recent than that. Q. To be clear, you cite two studies for the proposition that marriage is associated with positive health outcomes, right? A. Yes. Q. Do you cite any empirical basis in your report that marriage provides positive health outcomes versus cohabitation? A. Again, that wasn't the comparison that I considered. So, no, I don't -- in that section I don't compare marriage and cohabitation specifically. Q. But my question is a little broader than that. In
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A. I did not. Q. Now, let me ask you to look at page 310 of Umberson, please. If you look at the heading data, hypotheses, and analysis, do you see that? A. Yes. Q. The first paragraph under that heading begins the subsequent analyses, right? A. Yes. Q. If you look at the third sentence in that paragraph, it's about six or seven lines down and begins never married. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. The never married are excluded from the analyses of this study because parenting information was not collected from them in the original study. Do you see that? A. I see that. Q. Does that provide any insight to you whether cohabitation was compared in this study versus marriage? A. It doesn't. Q. People who cohabit but never married would not be part of this study, right? A. That's true.
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your report do you cite any empirical basis for the proposition that marriage creates positive health outcomes versus cohabitation? A. No. Q. Let me ask you to look at Exhibit 6 again, please. Let me know when you have that. A. Okay. Q. Do you have it? A. Yes. Q. Let me refer you to page ten, please, of Exhibit 6. In the last paragraph before the heading conclusion on page ten it says one of the primary difficulties that can arise in these second-stage analyses is interpreting the results in light of the fact that these estimates only capture the causal impact of marriage on the individuals whose decision to marry is influenced by the particular instrument? A. That's right. Q. And then you go on to cite Stevenson's study in 2007, which notes that it's important to differentiate between the average marriage, which is likely to be a happy one, and the marginal marriage that may be created or spared by government policy, which may be quite different. Do you see that?
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A. Yes, I do. Q. First of all, Stevenson's study, and you here in Exhibit 6 use the term marginal marriages to indicate marriages that wouldn't have occurred but for some government policy, right? A. That's correct. Q. So if we use the term marginal marriage as we go forward you'll understand that that's what I'm referring to; is that right? A. Yes. Q. In fact, in the preceding sentence, the first sentence of that paragraph you say -- you refer to individuals whose decision to marry is influenced by a particular instrument, right? A. That's right. Q. Again, what you're getting at is this concept of marginal marriages, right? A. Yeah. The key distinction is the marginal marriage will differ based on which policy you're looking at. For example, if your instrument is incarceration rates then the marginal marriage is a woman who otherwise would have been married to a man who is now in prison. If your instrument is something like health insurance benefits then the marginal marriage is the
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the Benefit Restriction Act as marriages that would not have occurred but for the Act? A. Yeah. I wouldn't actually be able to identify which marriages are the marginal ones. All I would see is the change in the marriage rate and I could attribute that change to the change in the policy. Q. Regardless of whether you can actually identify the specific individuals conceptually the marginal marriages represent the increase in the marriage rate that you believe would happen as a result of the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. That's correct. Q. So in the context of the Benefit Restriction Act if I say the marginal marriages you'll understand that I'm referring to your conception of marriages that would occur because of the Benefit Restriction Act that wouldn't have otherwise occurred, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you'll understand that as we go forward, right? A. Right. Q. If you're ever confused about what I'm referring to let me know right away, okay? A. That's fine. Q. Do you want to take a break?
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couple who chose to marry because of those benefits. Q. Understanding that marginal marriages -- the exact sort of population that fits the category of marginal marriages will differ depending on the policy in question -A. That's correct. Q. -- that's generating the margin, basically? A. That's correct. Q. But the concept will remain the same, which is that marginal marriages refer to marriages that would not have occurred but for the policy, fair? A. Yep. Q. So with regard to the Benefit Restriction Act marginal marriages would refer to couples who would not have gotten married but for the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. Yeah. They might not realize that's the reason they married but as an empiricist looking at it these are the marriages that occurred that otherwise wouldn't have. Q. They wouldn't say as part of their vows, thank you, Benefit Restriction Act. But as an empiricist when you're evaluating the population you would characterize the marginal marriages in the context of
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A. No. Q. Again returning to the second sentence in that final paragraph before the heading conclusion where you're quoting Stevenson and Wolfers, you quote them as saying it's important to differentiate between the average marriage and the marginal marriage, right? A. That's right. Q. Do you agree with Stevenson in that regard? A. If you're trying to estimate the causal effect of marriage that's true. Q. And Stevenson goes on to say that the marginal marriage may be quite different from the average marriage, right? A. That's possible. I mean, again, it depends on the policy underlying the marginal marriage. I think in the case of the prisons it's pretty clear it's going to create these negative marginal marriages for other policies. It's not clear if the marginal marriage would have a bigger impact than the average marriage. Q. But the whole point is that marginal marriages are qualitatively different in the sense that they're marginal so you don't know whether that marginal aspect creates the same or different outcomes versus average marriages, fair?
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A. That's correct. Q. And that's the whole point of what Stevenson is saying there, right? A. Yes. Q. And then in the final sentence in that same paragraph in Exhibit 6 you go on to say that thus while these particular results will not provide insight needed into the public value created by the institution of marriage, they provide the insight needed to consider the consequences of policies designed to influence marriage decisions; is that right? A. That's correct. Q. So there what you're saying basically is kind of the converse, which is that outcomes that you see in studies of marginal marriages tell you a lot about those marginal marriages, right? A. That's right. Q. But they don't tell you much about the institution of marriage generally? A. That's true. Q. And the converse is also true that studies showing outcomes for average marriages don't tell you about the outcomes you can expect from marginal marriages necessarily, correct?
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Q. It's possible that marginal marriages might have a higher divorce rate than average marriages? A. Yes. Q. It's possible that marginal marriages might exhibit a lower extent of commitment between the two partners than average marriages; is that fair? A. That's true. Q. It's possible that partners in a marginal marriage might invest less in child rearing than average partners in a marriage, fair? A. It's possible. Q. It's possible that marginal marriages might show worse outcome for children than average marriages, right? A. It's possible. Q. It's possible that marginal marriages may differ from non-marginal in any number of ways, right? A. Yes. All of those are actually the wrong comparison, just to make that point clear. Q. What do you mean by that? A. Well, so if you're thinking about the effect of a marginal marriage you actually don't want to compare the outcome of the marginal marriage with the average marriage. You want to compare the outcome of the marginal marriages with the outcome they would have
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A. That's right. Q. So as an empirical matter you need to understand what these marginal marriages are like in order to determine whether average outcomes for marriage will be manifested in those marginal marriages, right? A. That' correct. Q. Let me ask you to take a look at Exhibit 6, please, and in particular the final sentence of the preceding paragraph, so the paragraph on page ten where it begins there have been a few articles. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. Actually before we get into that let me ask you a couple more general questions. First of all, it's possible that marginal marriages might be less stable than non-marginal marriages, right? A. It's possible. Q. It's possible that marginal marriages might be less happy than average marriages; is that fair? A. Yes. Q. It's possible that marginal marriages might involve a greater rate of spousal abuse than average marriages? A. It's possible.
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experienced if they hadn't married. In that case all of the outcomes you just asked me about are likely to be higher if they married than if they don't marry. Q. Well, in order to know that you would need to know about the outcomes in the marginal marriages, right? A. That's true. Q. So if your empirical basis for saying marginal marriage outcomes would be better than not marrying, then you need to know whether marginal marriages exhibit the outcomes that average marriages exhibit, right? A. If you could say that again. Q. If your empirical basis for assuming that marginal marriages will create better outcomes than if those marginal marriages didn't exist, they stayed cohabiting or single or whatever, and your basis for that statement is just those are outcomes you see in average marriages, right? A. Yes. Q. Then before you can make that assumption that marginal marriages will create better outcomes than not you have to know whether those marginal marriages will, in fact, produce the outcomes you observed in average marriages, right?
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A. Again, that comparison between the marginal marriages and average marriages doesn't help you know whether the average -- the marginal marriage, how much better off it is than if they hadn't married. Q. But if you don't know what outcomes you can see for a marginal marriage, in other words, if you can't assume that marginal marriages exhibit the same outcomes as average marriages, then you don't have any empirical basis to say that marginal marriages produce better or worse or the same outcomes as some other condition, fair? A. Again, you have to simplify that a little bit. I just want to make sure that I am agreeing to something that I know is true. Q. If your basis for making a prediction about marginal marriages is based on average marriages you need to know the extent to which those marginal marriages will actually manifest those benefits or those outcomes, right? A. That's true. Q. And if you don't know the extent to which marginal marriages actually demonstrate the outcomes that average marriages do you just don't know anything about those marginal marriage outcomes, right?
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marriage. Marginal marriage we said before is a marriage that is motivated or would not exist but for some change in public policy, right? A. That's right. Q. So I'm getting at that particular type of marriage. That's a distinct characteristic, right, between marginal marriage and average marriage, right? A. Yes. Q. And we discussed a moment ago that's why in Exhibit 6 you specifically differentiate between average marriages and marginal marriage, right? A. Yes, where that's possible with the data that you have. Q. The reason it's important to differentiate is because one cannot assume as an empirical matter that marginal marriages demonstrate the same outcomes as average marriages, right? A. That's true. MR. WOOD: Is this a good time to take a break? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Why don't we finish up with this publication. Let's go off the record. (Discussion off the record at 11:35 a.m.)
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A. That's true. Q. So you can't compare those marginal marriages to any state of being if you don't know anything about the outcomes, right? A. Again, this is a rather technical empirical issue that one of the ways that we try to get at a causal estimate of marriage is by using an instrument of variable. One of the limitations of that approach is that it only estimates the effect of marginal marriage. There's other empirical approaches that try to answer the same question. One of the studies I cite is Korenman and Neumark. They use a fixed effect approach which is you're comparing people before and after they get married. That's an alternative approach to doing that. Another way is maybe to control for the section effect into marriage and try to adjust for those section factors and see if there's a causal effect that's left over. Your questions are related to one empirical method. Q. Well, no. Actually my questions are restricted to a particular type of marriage, which is to say marginal
(Back on the record at 11:37 a.m.) BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. In paragraph 31 of your report if you could look at that, please. Do you have that? A. Yep. Q. You mentioned a moment ago instrument studies, right? A. Yes, instrument variability. Q. So an instrumental variability study that you cite and discuss in your report in paragraph 31 is the Bjorklund study, right? A. Yes. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 10 11:37 a.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you what I've marked as Exhibit 10. Tell me if you recognize that as a copy of the Bjorklund study you cite in your report. A. Yes. Q. Now, Bjorklund studied the effects of a change in the Swedish pension policy, right? A. Yes. Q. Correct me in I'm wrong, but basically the change involved the extent to which widows would receive
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lifetime pensions versus limited time pensions; is that right? A. That's correct. Q. Before the change if you were married before this cutoff date and if you were then later widowed you would receive lifetime pension benefits? A. That's correct. Q. And then if you were married after this cutoff date and the change of policy you would receive benefits for a certain while if you had young children and then only for about a year after, right? A. That's correct. Q. So it was a much more limited benefit after the change than before, fair? A. Yes. Q. Bjorklund used that pension benefit change as an instrumental variable to study the effects of marriage on outcome for children, right? A. That's correct. Q. And specifically educational outcomes, right? A. Grade point average. Q. First of all, you cite Bjorklund for the proposition that people respond to economic incentive in deciding whether or not to marry?
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occurred but for this pension policy change, correct? Correct. That's how you interpret Bjorklund? Yes. Bjorklund concluded in the study that marriages in general is positively correlated with children's GPA, right? A. That's correct. Q. So Bjorklund, at least for the study populations she was looking at, saw a positive correlation between marriage and that particular educational outcome for children, right? A. That's right. Q. Bjorklund doesn't say that's a causal relationship, does she? A. No, she refers to it as a cross-sectional relationship. Q. Bjorklund doesn't take a position on whether that's an artifact of selection into marriage versus actual causation attributable to marriage itself, correct? A. I imagine that's correct. Q. You don't contend that Bjorklund shows a causal relationship between marriage and educational outcomes, do you? A. Q. A. Q.
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A. That's correct. Q. And Bjorklund found in her study that she observed a significant increase in the rate of marriage in the month leading up to the cutoff date in the policy? A. That's correct. Q. And you interpret that as showing the Swedish people responded to the economic incentive of this pension policy change to get married at a greater rate than they would have before? A. That's correct. Q. And you go on to say in your report there was not an observed sort of trough in the marriage rate after the cutoff date, right? A. That's correct. Q. You say that indicates to you that the policy change actually created marginal marriages, right? A. That's correct. Q. Basically it increased the number of people who married versus had the policy never gone into effect, right? A. That's correct. Q. So in terms of Bjorklund the marginal marriages we're talking about are the marriages that represent this increase; they're the marriages that would not have
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A. Q. A. Q.
In table three or -Anywhere in her report. What do you mean? It's not your position that the Bjorklund study demonstrates a causal relationship between marriage on the one hand and positive educational outcomes on the other, right? A. Just to be clear what you mean by -- say your question again to be clear what you mean by provides evidence. Q. Well, Bjorklund refers to a correlation with children's GPA between marriage in general and positive outcomes via children's GPA? A. Correct. Q. She calls it a correlation, not causal relationship? A. That's correct. Q. And you haven't re-analyzed Bjorklund data to try to determine whether you think it's a causal versus correlative relationship? A. Yeah, I wouldn't have the access to do that. Q. So you just take Bjorklund's characterizations and conclusions at face value, right? A. Again, I mean, the paper hasn't been published but I can look at her table right here and I can see the correlation you're discussing. Again, I have to take
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her at face value that these are correct. Q. And you don't take it a step further because you haven't done any analysis to try to say that relationship is causal, right? A. That's correct. Q. But Bjorklund actually found that for the marginal marriages in her study the study found those marriages had no effect or no correlation with increased GPA for children, right? A. I don't know if I would characterize it quite in that same way. Q. How would you characterize it? A. Well, I'm looking at her results in table six. You can see those coefficients across the top and I think what she's referring to is that she doesn't have statistically significant effects across there but that's different than saying that there's no effect of marriage on child outcomes. Q. Bjorklund says on page three of his study we find no difference between the GPAs of childrens whose parents who were attracted into marriage by reform and those children whose parents remained unmarried, right? A. I would disagree. Q. The point is she studied this effects and couldn't
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1 Q. Well, I just want to be clear about that. You don't 2 disagree with his conclusion that we find no 3 difference between the GPA of the children whose 4 parents were attracted into marriage by the reform and 5 those children whose parents remained unmarried? 6 A. No, I think they're misstating the sentence. They 7 would have to put the caveat we find no statistically 8 significant difference between the GPAs of children 9 whose parents were attracted to marriage by the 10 reform. 11 In order for you to make a no difference 12 claim you'd want to have a coefficient that's really 13 close to zero and you'd want to have really tight 14 confidence intervals and they just simply don't have 15 that in their results. Their confidence intervals 16 aren't very tight. That actually makes it really hard 17 to make a no difference claim. That's why in my 18 original report I'm going to use the first stage 19 because they actually show statistically significant 20 effects on marriage, but their confidence intervals 21 are rather broad for the child outcomes. My statement 22 would be they can't make the claim there's no 23 difference. They can only make the claim that they 24 failed to find a statistically significant difference
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observe any effect or correlation between the marginal marriages and improved outcomes for children, right? A. She couldn't obtain a statistically significant difference. Q. She could obtain a statistically significant difference for marriages on average, right? A. Yes. Q. So she saw a difference in her outcome at least within the data set she used between average marriages and marginal marriages, right? A. No, she didn't. I mean, that's probably a reason why this paper hasn't been published is because if you look at the standard errors on her ID estimates they're rather large and that's one of the challenges in statistical inference. This is a challenge with using instrumental variables is that you can only estimate your -- your coefficients are only coming off the marginal marriages. So as I read across table six all I would say is, you know, the effects are positive a lot of times, the standards are really large. One way to say that is that there's no effect, but actually I don't think that's a fair reading of what those confidence intervals tell you.
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and that's actually a world of difference. Q. But you agree with me Bjorklund did not find a statistically significant difference between the GPA of children whose parents were attracted into marriage by the reform and those children whose parents were unmarried? A. I agree they did not find a statistically significant difference but that's a very different outcome than finding no difference. Q. Well, my question wasn't talking about differences between statements so let's focus on my question. A. Okay. Q. Do you agree with me that Bjorklund did not find a statistically significant difference between the GPA of children whose parents were attracted into marriage by the reform and those children whose parents remained unmarried? MR. WOOD: Object, asked and answered, but you can answer again. A. I feel my answer would be misinterpreted if I didn't include the caveat that there's a really big difference between a statistically significant difference and a real difference. In this case the confidence intervals are broad enough that you can't
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find a statistically significant difference but you can't rule out the fact that there is no difference. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. But with that caveat you agree there was no statistically significant difference observed then by Bjorklund? A. Their estimates using an instrumental variable approach were not statistically significant. Q. Before today sitting here looking at the table and Bjorklund had you ever previously analyzed Bjorklund's data to determine whether you thought the confidence intervals were tight or narrow or appropriate or inappropriate? A. Again, I can't use their data. Q. Answer my question. A. I've seen them present the data. I haven't seen their data. Q. So before today you never sat down and evaluated the data behind the statement on page three about finding no difference; is that fair? A. Yes. Q. So the sort of analysis you just offered is based on your review of a data table while we've been talking across this table, right?
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right? A. Can you point out where that is? Q. Same paragraph we've been looking at. A. That's what they say. I'd have to look at the table to assess that statement myself. Q. But you haven't done that as you sit here today, right? A. No, I haven't done that. Q. Hold that thought for a moment. MR. WOOD: I assume because of the pause you want him to look at the table. Is that why we're pausing? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: No, I was just reading this. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. As you sit here today do you have any basis to dispute BJorklund's conclusion that the supplementary sibling analysis led to the same conclusion that the observed differentials in average marriages in child outcomes are due to selection rather than be caused by marriage per se? A. Just repeat that and simplify it a little bit. Q. Let me break it down for you. If you look at the third sentence in the same paragraph on page three the
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A. No. I sat in when they presented results and I would have had the same concerns at that time as well. Q. But you just said you didn't see their data before. A. Again, I don't have to see their data. I can look at their paper and see their confidence intervals. That's what I need to make my assessment. Q. And at the time you sat in on that paper do you remember if you had that same concern or not? A. I imagine that I would have. Q. I'm not asking you to imagine. Do you remember or don't you remember about what you thought about the Bjorklund paper when you saw it at a conference? A. The presentation was in 2005, 2006 so I don't remember what I was thinking at the time. Q. So the sort of analysis you just offered about the confidence intervals in Bjorklund are based on your review of Bjorklund while you've been sitting at this table, right? A. Yeah, I can see the confidence intervals. Q. Bjorklund on page three also says that he and his coauthors conducted a supplementary sibling analysis which exploits the variation between siblings and the proportion of childhood lived with married and cohabiting parents leads to the same conclusion,
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sentence reads an instrumental variable analysis with the marriage boom as an instrument for marriage also leads us to conclude that the observed differentials are due to selection rather than being caused by marriage per se. A. Again, so if you wanted me to answer the question I would look at table nine. Q. It's more limited than that. First of all, you agree with me that's what Bjorklund concluded based on their own assessment of their own data? A. That is what Bjorklund concluded from their assessment of their data. Q. Before today you never did any analysis in connection with your work in this case or otherwise to reassess Bjorklund's data and consider whether that conclusion in your view is valid? A. Again, I haven't looked at all the data. All the information I would need to make my own assessment is contained in the information in table nine. Q. And you've had a chance to look at table nine, right? A. I'm looking at table nine. Q. Bjorklund goes on to say a supplementary sibling analysis which exploits the variation between siblings and the proportion of childhood lived with married and
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cohabiting parents leads to the same conclusion? A. That's what they conclude. Q. Do you have an empirical basis as you sit here to dispute table nine? A. Again, if I look at table nine I can see their point estimates, I can see the confidence intervals, and I can see that like looking at model two you have a positive coefficient and rather large standard error so they would have a hard time ruling out a GPA difference of, you know, some positive number. Q. Let me just press on that for a second. You say they would have a hard time ruling out a causal effect, right? A. That's correct. Q. In other words, you would say that based on your reading of table nine it would be difficult for them to rule out the presence of some positive educational outcome among the marginal marriages? A. That's right. Q. But their point is that they are persuaded that the data show the opposite, that they show that the differences are because of selection into marriage, right? A. Yeah, and, again, I would disagree with their
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A. I don't, but I would say -Q. So as you sit here today you don't know what other economists would say about Bjorklund? MR. WOOD: You're cutting him off and not letting him answer. I object. A. I'm answering this question as one who gets asked to review lots of papers and this would be my opinion of the paper. I imagine that it would be a concern that other economists would have but I don't clearly know what other economists think. I would say that would be a general characterization of other empirical economists that work in my area. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. But to be clear you haven't talked to any other empirical economists about their opinion of BJorklund, fair? A. That's right. Q. As you sit here today you're not aware of any other study or data set or analysis of Bjorklund suggesting that Bjorklund's conclusions are inappropriate based on their data, right? A. If you could rephrase? I don't want you to mischaracterize what I'm saying. Q. You're not aware of any study published or otherwise
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conclusion. The way I read the table is I would say that their statement is a little too strong. The paper wasn't published. I don't know if there were other weaknesses, but that would be one that I would say that their statement is a little too strong with regards to ruling out the causal effects on marriage on child outcomes. Q. But certainly the Bjorklund paper doesn't stand for the opposite proposition. It certainly doesn't prove that marginal marriages exhibit the same outcomes as average marriages, right? A. That's true. Q. It's not evidence for that proposition at all, is it? A. No. Q. Apart from whether Bjorklund is published or not you cited and relied on it in your report, didn't you? A. I did because actually the first stage of their analysis is really convincing and I'm sure that most economists wouldn't have a quibble with the first stage. It's with the second stage analysis that's a little more tricky and this is true for lots of papers. Q. Have you asked other economists their opinion about Bjorklund?
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suggesting that Bjorklund overstated their conclusion with regard to the connection between marginal marriages and child outcomes? A. Again, there wouldn't be a forum for that particular study. The study wouldn't exist in the first place. You wouldn't go and criticize a working paper in that way. I'm not aware of any paper that has gone out of their way to particularly highlight that particular error of the Bjorklund paper. Q. And you're not aware of any economists who specifically articulated the same criticism or critique of Bjorklund that you are today, right? A. All I'm saying is I wouldn't expect it to exist because as academics we would criticize a published paper. We wouldn't criticize a working paper that might change and the results might evolve over time. Q. Now can you answer my question? A. Sure. Go ahead. Q. You don't remember the question? MR. WOOD: I believe it was asked and answered. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Will you read the question back? (The following record was read by the
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reporter at 11:57 a.m.) "Question: And you're not aware of any economists who specifically articulated the same criticism or critique of Bjorklund that you are today, right? A. I am not aware and the reason I'm not aware is because there isn't a natural forum for those papers to exist. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Do you want to take a break? MR. WOOD: Yes. (Recess taken at 11:57 a.m.) MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 11 12:07 p.m. (Back on the record at 12:07 p.m.) BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you what I marked has Exhibit 11. Exhibit 11 is a paper that you coauthored with Kasey Buckles, right? A. That's correct. Q. And it's entitled selection on the marriage premium for infant health, right? A. That's right. Q. In this paper, Exhibit 11, you studied whether there's
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Q. A. Q. A. Q.
Some of those differences are observable, right? Yes. Some are unobservable? Yes. On page 1336 of your article here in Exhibit 11, this is the discussion section of your paper, right? A. Yes. Q. You studied two sets of the data in connection with this paper, right? Let me help you out. If you look at table 7? A. Yes. Q. You lay out the data from 1980 to 1988, right? A. Yes. Q. And then you can see in the text under the heading discussion that you I think primarily focused on data from 1989 to 2004, right? A. Yes. My confusion was about two data sets. They're just time periods of the same data set. Q. But the focus of this paper was primarily on the more recent and presumably more relevant data set, right? A. There were some things we could do with the older data that we couldn't do with the newer data. Q. But even in the discussion section you say using birth certificate data from the 1989 to 2004 natality detail
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a causal connection between marriage and infant health, right? A. That's correct. Q. And in the paper you say the previous research has shown correlation between marriage and infant health, right? A. That's correct. Q. But you wanted to further study whether that correlation is an actual causal relationship? A. That's right. Q. And that was the point of the paper that you published here in Exhibit 11? A. That's correct. Q. Now, one of the reasons that the relationship between marriage and infant health may not be causal is because people select into marriage, right? A. That's correct. Q. And the type of person who selects into marriage may also be the type of person who has healthier infants, right? A. That's correct. Q. In your paper you say that married and unmarried mothers differ in many ways? A. That's correct.
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files we find a large health disparity between babies who were born to married and unmarried parents, right? A. That's correct. Q. And then when you looked at those data and tried to test for causal relationship you concluded that marriage premium in more years could be due entirely to selection if there is even a moderate amount of selection or unobservables, right? A. Yeah. I mean, that particular sentence would have to be revised slightly. There's been some new research that calls into question the natality et al approach. I could state it as a possibility, yeah. Q. Right. My question was about what you say in your study here. A. That's right. Q. And so the conclusion in this paper is that taken together our results find little scope for a large causal effect of marriage on infant health particularly for recent years, right? A. Yes. Q. And then you go on to say this finding is relevant to a number of important public policy reforms and have been viewed as opportunities for increasing marriage rates, including welfare reform, reducing requirements
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for a marriage license, or changing the way the taxes penalize marriage, right? A. Yes. Q. The Benefit Restriction Act would be another type of policy that you might lump into that group of policies that might be an opportunity for increasing marriage rates, right? A. That's right. Q. And then you go on to say our results suggest efforts to improve child outcomes by increasing the marriage rate may have limited impact, right? A. Yes, specifically about child outcomes and limited impact we mean limited relative to cross sectional estimates. Q. Right. So the whole point of this is that you're calling into question the efficacy or impact that marriage -- that policy is intended to increase marriage rates will have on child outcomes, right? A. That's right. Q. So here again you might say that that conclusion is based indirectly on your findings that the marginal marriages that would be created by policies to increase marriage rates may not exhibit favorable outcomes that you see correlated in the larger
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in the observed effect from 1989 to 2004 because there were two factors at work. One is the 40 percent decrease during that time and then the other is reduction that occurs when you account for selection, right? A. That's correct. Again, you don't want -- you shouldn't be adding those two numbers. These are kind of separate questions, changes over time versus difference in point of time. Q. But both those analyses reduce sort of the raw observed difference, correct? A. That's correct. Q. Do you quantify in Exhibit 11 sort of the proportion of the observed effect of marriage that you believe is attributable to causation versus cause or selection? A. I don't know if we give that a specific number. Q. As you sit here today do you have any sense of what proportion in your view based on the data you analyzed in Exhibit 11, what proportion of the observed outcome differences you attribute to causation versus other factors? A. Again, I'd have to go off the last sentence of the abstract, accounting for selection reduces ordinary least squares estimates of the marriage premiums for
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population of marriages, right? A. I don't know if this would speak specifically to the marginal marriages. It would just say that, you know, some of the effects we observe between married and unmarried is due to selection into marriage. Q. In fact, you say that the extent of the observation of the effect that you observe in marriage generally mostly is due to selection and other factors other than causation, right? A. I think we'll use phrases like a half. Q. Can you point me to where in this study you say half of the outcome is causal? A. If you go to the abstract in the front of the paper, accounting for selection reduces ordinary least squares estimates of the marriage premium for birth weight, prematurity, and infant mortality by at least one-half. Q. Right, but it also fell by more than 40 percent between 1989 and 2004, right? A. Yeah. That's a different -- that's what's happening to the marriage premium over time and then the other question is what happens to the marriage premium at a point in time if you account for selection. Q. Exactly. So there was more than a 50 percent decrease
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birth weight, prematurity, and infant mortality by at least one-half. Q. But for the later data set you couldn't show that any of the effect was causal, right? That's what you conclude in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the discussion, right? That's on page 1336. A. Let's see where you are. Q. Our results implementing the Altonji method suggests that the marriage premium in more recent years could be due entirely to selection if there is even a moderate amount of selection on unobservables. A. So I'd have to re-evaluate what we said based on recent research about the Altonji method. There are some concerns I didn't know about at the time I published this paper that have come to light. Q. But at the time you published this paper at least your conclusion was that for the data set you couldn't exclude the possibility that the entire marriage premium was due to selection? A. That's right. It would be hard to rule that out, but again, in light of the new research I don't know if I could be totally certain what I said at that point in time. Q. But even as you sit here today you haven't done any
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analysis suggesting that you can rule out the possibility that the marriage premium you discuss in this paper is due to selection? A. I haven't done any additional analysis. Q. Right. So as you sit here today you can't rule that possibility out, right? A. I can't rule out that possibility. Q. Let me ask you to look again at Exhibit 6, please, which is your economic -A. Yeah. Q. On page ten of Exhibit 6 you cite the Finlay study, right? A. That's correct. Q. The Finlay study was another instrumental study, wasn't it? A. Yes. Q. Instrumental variable study? A. Yes. Q. That one used incarceration of the father as an instrument for marriage, right? A. That's correct. Q. Finlay essentially concluded that the association between a mother's never married status and bad educational outcome for children was not causal,
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concluded that the marginal marriage is there were not causally related to better educational outcomes in children in that study, right? A. Yeah, and I'm saying it's largely an artifact that he's looking at incarceration as an instrument. Q. You say it's largely an artifact. Have you done any analysis independent of Finlay to look at his data? A. I haven't. Q. Have you ever gone back to Finlay's data and looked at air bands or any other qualities of the data that he was an analyzing? A. No. Q. And have you ever published any papers explaining sort of the limitations that you see in Finlay's conclusions? A. No. Q. Now, another study you cite in Exhibit 6 is the Dahl study, right? A. Yes. Q. And that was another instrumental variable study, wasn't it? A. Yes. Q. The Dahl study used minimum marriage law as an instrument for marriage, right?
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right? A. Well, again, his statements are all about this particular instrument, which is incarceration rates for men. Q. Right, and based on that analysis he concluded that the observed educational outcome difference was not causal, right? A. Well, again, he can only really speak specifically to children whose -- the marital status of their parents was affected by whether or not their father was in prison. Q. He's studying a particular segment of the population, right? A. It's a rather specific part of the population. It's basically asking the question are kids better off if their mother marries someone who otherwise would a have been in jail. That's taking a marginal marriage and making it quite different than what we would normally think of as the marginal marriage of other policies that change incentives to marry. Q. I understand there are differences between the instrument at issue and Finlay and other instrumental studies. The core point is that Finlay's study
A. Yes. Q. And this study in a sense was kind of the reverse of the Bjorklund study in that it used an obstacle to marriage versus an incentive to marry, right? A. That's correct. Q. And the outcome there showed that marginal marriages, those that would not have been allowed in the state with a higher marriage age, were substantially worse off than those that married, correct? A. Again, this is an artifact of the instrument they're using, which is you're creating teenage marriages. This tells you the effect of a teenage marriage. It's very different than what we think of as the typical effect of a marriage. Q. Now, can you answer my question? A. Sure. They do find that for teenage marriages they are marriages associated with higher rates of poverty later on. Q. So the record is clear, the outcome in the Dahl study showed that marginal marriages in that study were substantially worse off than the folks who did not marry, right? A. Yes, for marginal teenage marriages. Q. Dahl actually found that the negative outcome was a
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causal relationship? A. For teenage marriages, yes. Q. Meaning early marriage amongst those women caused them to be 31 percent more likely to live in poverty, right? A. Yes, though this is very early marriage. Q. In your report do you cite any study showing that marriage promotion policies caused positive outcomes among the marginal marriages? A. Could you clarify what you mean by marriage promotion policies? Q. Any of the policies you discussed in your paper on infant health. You talked about welfare reform, reducing requirements for a marriage license, changing the way taxes penalize marriage. A. So those are what you mean by marriage promotions? Q. Anything like that. You were using those as example and we also agreed that the Benefit Restriction Act is also an example of a policy that you would expect would influence marriage decisions, right? A. I was confused with you thinking of the policies that are designed to promote the quality of marriage, so we're talking about policies that promote getting married or staying married.
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Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q.
With regard to public housing? No. With regard to criminal behavior? I don't know. With regard to household income? I'm not sure on that one. Just to be clear, can you identify any study? I cannot. Can you identify any study anywhere in the literature that shows marginal marriages induced by incentive to marry policies caused better outcomes than cohabitation with regard to household income? A. No. Q. What about with regard to employment? A. No. Q. What about with regard to health outcomes? A. Again, all of these I don't have anything coming to mind but I don't know any offhand. Q. And you don't identify any in your report, right? A. That's correct. Q. Have you yourself ever conducted a study showing that marginal marriages result in better outcomes than cohabitation? A. I've conducted research on this topic but I don't have
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Q. Fair clarification. I'm focusing on policies that -regardless of whether they're intended to marry, policies that you believe have the effect of incentivizing people to marry. A. Incentivizing people to marry. That's a great way to put it. Q. So to ask the question again, in your report do you cite any study showing that a policy that creates an incentive to marry caused positive outcomes among the marginal marriages? A. I don't. Q. Can you identify a study anywhere in the literature that shows marginal marriages induced by policies and incentivized marriage caused better outcomes than cohabitation? A. No. Q. Can you identify any study anywhere in the literature that shows that marginal marriage induced by marriage incentive policies caused better outcome than cohabitation with regard to receiving public assistance? A. No. Q. With regard to Medicaid use? A. Not aware of any.
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any published or working papers on that topic. Q. What research have you done that you haven't published or -A. The paper with Kasey Buckles and Melanie Goaly about blood test laws, we attempted to use that as a potential instrument for marriage. It turns out it has an effect on marriage but it's not a strong enough first stage relationship to use as a second stage paper. Q. To the extent you've done any research on the topic of whether marginal marriages show better outcome than cohabitation your results have been inconclusive? A. Again, it didn't have the power to make definitive statements. Q. Didn't have the power to say yes or no whether marginal marriages show better outcomes than cohabitation, right? A. Yes. Q. Can you point to any studies anywhere showing that marginal marriages induced by marriage incentive policies produced outcomes comparable to non-marginal marriage, average marriages? A. I don't know of any. Q. And you don't cite any in your report?
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A. I don't cite any in my report. Q. Let me ask you to look again at your report, please, paragraph 14. Do you see that? A. Yes. Q. In paragraph 14 you're citing a study by Thomas and Sawhill, correct? A. Yes. Q. Thomas and Sawhill studied the way in which poverty rates among children may vary by marital status of their parents? A. Yes. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION: DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 12 12:27 p.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Sir, I'm handing you what I'm marking as Exhibit 12. Do you recognize Exhibit 12 as the study that you cite in paragraph 14 of your report? A. Yes. Q. You cite Thomas and Sawhill for the proposition that only 7.6 percent of married parent families with children are below the federal poverty line compared with 34 percent for single parent families with children and 21.5 percent for cohabiting couples with
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Q. In fact, on page 66 of Exhibit 12, the final partial paragraph says discussing Lerman's simulation and their initial analysis -- by their I mean Thomas and Sawhill, right? A. Uh-huh. Q. They say that neither of those two things dealt with the issue of cohabitation, right? A. Sorry, you're going to have to point out where you are. Q. Are you on page 66? A. I am. Q. Look at the right-hand column of 66. A. Yes. Q. It says neither Lerman's simulation nor our initial analysis dealt with the issue of cohabitation, correct? A. Yes. Q. So what they say is neither Lerman's simulation nor our initial analysis dealt with the issue of cohabitation, correct? A. That's correct. Q. And they conducted a sensitivity analysis that assumes that income and poverty rates of all cohabiting families participating in the simulation would remain
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children, right? A. Yes. Q. First of all, Thomas and Sawhill don't conclude that the observed difference in poverty rates between married and cohabiting families are causally connected to marriage, right? A. I don't think so. Q. They just say that it's a correlation they can observe, right? A. Yes. Q. And you haven't done any re-analysis of Thomas and Sawhill's data to try to suss out whether the relationship is causal or not, right? A. Correct. Q. So you take Thomas and Sawhill's conclusion at face value, right? A. That's correct. Q. In fact, Thomas and Sawhill don't conclude a marriage causes lower poverty rates versus cohabiting families, do they? A. They don't. Q. And they don't conclude that cohabiting family income would increase if they married, do they? A. They don't.
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unchanged after marrying, right? A. I can see where they write that. Q. To the extent that Thomas and Sawhill considered cohabitation at all they simply assume in their analysis that the income of cohabiting partners would not change if they married, right? A. Yes, with the assumption that those cohabiting couples stay together. Q. Right. A. I'm saying that might not be the best assumption. Q. But that aside, what Thomas and Sawhill do is assume that cohabiting couples if they move from cohabitation to marriage their income will remain the same, right? A. What they're saying is they're simulating the incomes of people who move into cohabitation or move into marriage. So, again, they're making the assumption that once you move into cohabitation your stability rates are the same as marriage. They're saying then the poverty rates would drop by similar amounts if you move single couples into either cohabiting or married. All I'm saying is when you move single people into cohabitation they're not going to stay in those unions as long as if they get moved into marriage. Q. Well, my question is just about Thomas and Sawhill.
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A. That's right. Q. So I'm asking what analysis they conducted and the analysis they conducted assumes that moving from cohabitation to marriage would not affect income or poverty rates, right? A. And I'm just saying that's based on an assumption that the cohabiting couple stayed together as long as married couples. Q. But you agree that's an assumption Thomas and Sawhill make? A. That's correct. Q. Let's look back at your report for a moment if we could. In paragraph 14 do you cite any source or data other than Thomas and Sawhill? A. In paragraph 14? Q. Yes. A. In that particular paragraph just Thomas and Sawhill. Q. But what you say in paragraph 14 is you say that there's a difference that you can observe in the poverty rates between single parent families and cohabiting families, right? A. Yes. Q. And then you can observe another difference between cohabiting families and married couple families,
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so this provides for a really nice baseline from which to start right. Q. But to be clear in your report you don't quantify the extent to which Thomas and Sawhill observe differences are causal versus not, right? A. Yes, that's not possible with the way their data is set up. Q. Did you ever try to do that? A. Well, since you would need to have an instrument fixed effects, decomposition, they're using the 2004 current population survey which is not longitudinal, doesn't have an natural instrument, so, yeah, it wouldn't have been possible to use the conventional methods to get a causal effect. Q. Right. So you never attempted it? A. I did not. Q. Do you know whether single parents are more sensitive to economic incentive that might motivate them to cohabit versus cohabiting couples moving to marriage? A. I don't know. Q. Can you point to any study showing the effectiveness of economic incentives to motivate cohabitation decisions among single parents is different or the same as moving single parents to marry?
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right? A. That's correct. Q. Again those numbers are all based on Thomas and Sawhill? A. That's correct. Q. Now, is it your opinion that that observed difference that Thomas and Sawhill note is a causal relationship? A. Again, I interpret that as a causal relationship. Q. So you're not offering opinion here that the difference Thomas and Sawhill note between cohabiting and married couples is causally related to marriage, right? A. No, this is a comparison adjusting for some of the characteristics that differ between the groups. Q. Thomas and Sawhill don't opine on whether it's a causal relationship, right? A. That's right. Q. And you're not here to opine whether those number reflect a causal relationship, right? A. No, I think what we generally do is use this as a starting point for the differences and then we acknowledge that past estimates that try to separate selection from causal have found that some fraction of the overall effect is causal and some fraction is not
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A. I don't know. Q. You believe that economic incentives motivate people to select into marriage to some extent? A. Yes, I believe economics motivates us to do a lot of things and marriage is one of those things. Q. Is it also your believe as you sit here today that economic incentives would motivate people to move from single status to cohabiting status? A. Yes, given that people respond to economic incentives that's a reasonable statement. Q. You have no reason to doubt that? A. I have no reason to doubt that. Q. Looking back at paragraph 14 of your report, the observed difference in rate between single parent families and cohabiting families was roughly 12 percent, right? A. Yeah, between 13 and 14. Q. Between single parent families and cohabiting families? A. Yes, you're taking the difference so it's about 13 percent. Q. What about the difference between cohabiting families and married families? A. About 12 to 13.
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Q. So there's actually a larger difference observed by Thomas and Sawhill between single and cohabiting families versus cohabiting and married families in terms of poverty rates? A. Slightly similar. I mean, they're about the same. Q. They are roughly the same? A. Roughly the same. Q. But based on these numbers the difference between single and cohabiting is a little bit greater than the difference between cohabiting and married, right? A. Yeah, slightly more. Q. Do you agree it's possible that the Benefit Restriction Act would remove the incentive for some single parent families to cohabit? A. If by cohabiting they could obtain health insurance benefits then it might increase their incentive to cohabit. Q. So in other words, before the Benefit Restriction Act came along single parent families had an incentive, an economic incentive, to cohabit, right, in the possibility of other qualifying adult benefits? A. Yeah possible. Q. And that's the same incentive that's being manipulated by the Benefit Restriction Act, right?
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Act might opt to remain single parent families as opposed to married parent families? A. No, I did not look at that. Q. So you didn't consider as part of forming your opinions in this case the extent to which families may remain single parent families rather than cohabiting families as a consequence of the Benefit Restriction Act? A. I did not look at that. Q. Now, do you agree with me that there are at least observable differences in outcomes for cohabiting families versus single parent families? A. Yes. Q. So to the extent the Benefit Restriction Act removes an incentive to move from single parent family to cohabiting family the difference in the outcomes between those two states has to be considered like an opportunity cost of the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. Do you want clarify that? Q. Well, in other words you're removing an incentive that would have otherwise moved some people you believe from single parent status to cohabiting status, right? You agree that's possible?
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A. That's correct. Q. And so you would expect the Benefit Restriction Act removed an incentive for single parent families to move into the cohabitation state? A. Yeah, it's quite possible. Q. You know, sort of just as a matter of fact, the incentive there is identical to the additional incentive you identified to marry versus cohabit created by the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. Be more clear. Are you referring to the difference in poverty rates? Q. No. It's the exact time incentive, right? You're taking it away from one group and giving it to another group. A. Taking away the incentive to cohabit and giving incentive to marry? Q. Right. A. Yeah. Q. My only point is it's the exact same incentive because it's the same benefit that's in question. It's either available to cohabit or it's not. A. That's right. Q. Now, did you attempt to quantify at all the extent to which employees affected by the Benefit Restriction
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A. It's possible, I mean, unless they choose to marry instead of cohabit. Q. But you don't know? A. I don't know. Q. Do you agree it's possible some people would have been motivated by the domestic partner benefits to move from single to cohabiting, right? That may not be enough to move them into further step into marriage? A. That's possible. Q. And you haven't attempted to quantify how many people fall into that first category of they might have been incentivized not to marry, right? A. That's right. Q. But even aside from quantifying the number of people in that condition would you agree with me at least that by taking that incentive to cohabit away you're increasing the likelihood that some subset will remain single parent families instead of cohabiting families, right? A. Again, it depends on whether they choose to stay single or whether they choose to marry. Q. You acknowledge the possibility that some might choose to stay single, right? A. Relative to marriage, yes.
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Q. And relative to cohabit, right? A. That's right. Q. So to the extent you've removed that incentive to cohabit the difference in the observed outcome between single parent families and cohabiting families for that subset of the population is a loss associated with the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. That's true to the extent that those transitions occur. Q. So whatever the magnitude of that loss would be needs to be factored in against the expected benefits of the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. That's correct, with the caveat that -- yeah, that's right. Q. And so that's one of the sort of costs or losses or however you want to characterize it that you need to take into account or you would have to take into account in order to determine whether the Benefit Restriction Act is expected to have a net economic benefit or a net economic loss or cost, right? A. That's correct. Q. Just to be clear, you haven't attempted to quantify sort of the gross economic benefits you would expect from the Benefit Restriction Act, right?
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Q. But you don't know how many employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act are single parent families, right? A. That's right. Q. Or single generally, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you don't know how many employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act are cohabiting, right? A. That's right. Q. And you don't know how many are married, right? A. That's right. Q. And you don't know and can't say as you sit here today how many of the single employees affected by the Benefit Restriction Act could be motivated to cohabit as a result of what was previously available to domestic partner benefits, right? A. That's right. Q. And you don't have any empirical basis to estimate the number that would be motivated to marry as a consequence of the Benefit Reduction Act, right? A. That's correct. Q. So you have no empirical basis to even compare those two numbers, right? A. That's correct.
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A. That's correct. Q. And you haven't attempted to quantify sort of the gross economic costs to the Benefit Restriction Act? A. That's correct. Q. So you don't have an opinion specifically about whether the Benefit Restriction Act creates a net economic benefit or net economic loss, right? A. I wouldn't be able to pin down a specific. Q. But even qualitatively do you have an empirical basis to say that it creates a net economic benefit versus a loss? A. I think what we could say is that -Q. Sorry, who is we? A. What I would have to claim as an expert is that I believe that incentives change -- incentives change the number of people who would marry and that marriage has broad economic benefits for the State of Michigan. I would be hard pressed to find counteracting benefits that could outweigh that potential benefit. So for example, the hypothetical that you provided recently, I would be hard pressed to think that it could generate enough benefits to offset the losses the State of Michigan would incur by, you know, removing an incentive for people to marry.
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Q. Let me refer you to paragraph 40 of your report, please. In paragraph 40 you're addressing plaintiff's argument that the costs of providing domestic partner benefits to same sex couples is small, right? A. That's correct. Q. Then you say this is a faulty because the policy also applies to opposite sex couples, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you point out that opposite sex couples are about 11 times greater in number than same sex couples according to your calculations, right? A. Unmarried same sex couples. Q. That's a good qualification. You don't have any data showing how many opposite sex or same sex couples actually received domestic partner benefits before the Benefit Restriction Act, right? A. No. Q. So as an empirical matter you can't say what the cost of providing the benefit to opposite sex or same sex couples was, right? A. That's correct. Q. So you don't know whether, in fact, there were more same sex couples receiving domestic partner benefits before this act than same sex couples, fair?
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A. No. This statement is based on a more general principle that when you open the door to heterosexual couples you need to take into account they're a much larger fraction than the married couple population than same sex couples. Q. My question was more basic. You don't have any empirical basis to say before the Benefit Restriction Act there were more opposite sex couples receiving domestic partner benefits than same sex couples, right? A. That's correct. Q. You just don't know a number either? A. I don't know the number either. Q. From an economic perspective can you identify any reason that the legislature couldn't have limited the Benefit Restriction Act to opposite sex couples? A. Say that again. MR. WOOD: Go ahead and repeat it, but before you do to the extent it calls for a legal conclusion I want to object, but I think you prefaced it limited to an economic impact. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Do you want to hear it again? A. Go ahead.
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1 from an economic perspective, is there any reason to 2 believe it wouldn't capture all the same benefits you 3 identify in your report? 4 A. The benefits that I identify in my report would 5 certainly be -- that would address the issue about -6 so in my report I'm saying that -- so your 7 hypothetical would actually preserve the incentive for 8 heterosexual couples to marry. However, it would come 9 with it additional economic costs that I don't discuss 10 in the report, but it would deal with what does it 11 mean to be a same sex couple. I don't know how -- you 12 know, as an economist you have to think about the 13 money you would need to spend on preventing fraud or 14 establishing whether a couple is really same sex 15 couples or just roommates or friends. So again as an 16 economist I can see that the cost in trying to verify 17 that situation would bring its own set of costs to the 18 State of Michigan. 19 Q. That's not something you study as part -20 A. That's not something I study but you're asking me for 21 my opinion as an economist and I could say that's a 22 reasonable set of economic costs that would occur if 23 you were to try to restrict the law to adjust it so 24 that these QA benefits could only go to same sex
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Q. From an economic perspective is there any reason that the legislature couldn't have limited the Benefit Restriction Act to apply only to opposite sex couples and still capture the same benefits? A. Again that sounds like a legal question. Q. It's an economic question. A. From an economic perspective -- so to be clear, what would the legislature have done? Q. The Benefit Restriction Act would have applied only to opposite sex couples. It would have said you can't provide domestic partner benefits to any opposite sex couple with the same condition as it says now. A. Again, speaking an as economist I thought that was legally impossible to do, but if that was a legal possibility then, you know, that would affect my conclusion about the effect it would have on heterosexuals. Q. Assume with me for a moment that it's legally possible for the legislature to distinguish in the Benefits Restriction Act between opposite sex and same sex couples, okay? A. Okay. Q. If they made that distinction, if the Benefit Restriction Act applied only to opposite sex couples
couples. Q. But my question was about benefits. My question was from an economic perspective is there any reason why the legislature could not have restricted the effect of the Benefit Restriction Act to only same sex couples and still capture all the benefits you use in your report? A. They could legally do that. From an economic perspective you could gain the benefits of marriage through that approach. Q. The same benefits you discuss in your report, right? A. That's right. Q. Now, in your report in paragraph 40 you reference the unintended consequences of undermining marriage and increasing the relative incentive of opposite sex couples to cohabit instead of marriage, correct? A. That's right. Q. Let me ask you. The first part talks about the unintended consequences of undermining marriage. Are you talking about just increasing the incentive to cohabit instead of marry or are there other unintended consequences you're referring to in that sentence? A. I'm just referring generally to policies that lower the value and the attractiveness of marriage and
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relegate it to a lower status than it currently holds. Q. Than it currently holds before the Benefit Restriction Acts or after? A. After the Benefit Restriction Act basically you've afforded it some of the incentives that you would want to provide people to marry. By removing that you would be taking away some of the benefits -- some of the incentives to marry. Q. I understand what you're saying there, but my question was a little more specific. In the sentence the first part refers to unintended consequences of undermining marriage? A. That's correct. Q. The second part refers to increasing the relative incentive of opposite sex couples to cohabit instead of marry, okay? A. Yeah. Q. That's one of the consequences you just discussed, right? A. That's right. Q. My question to you is are you referring to any other unintended consequences of undermining marriage other than the incentive you discuss in the sentence? A. I mean the only other one would just be kind of the
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might actually decide to cohabit to fall in with the kind of normative behavior of other people. Q. But you say you're not making that claim empirically? A. I'm not providing any data to support that claim. I am making that just as a general statement when behavior changes for some people it affects the behavior of others. Q. As you said you don't offer any data to support that point, right? A. Not in this specific case. Q. And that's the case we're talking about. A. That's right. Q. You're talking about your expert report in this case? A. Yes. Q. Are you prepared to offer as an expert in tis case that the public perception of marriage is somehow degraded or diminished by providing domestic partner benefits to cohabiting couples? A. So you're characterizing what I said. I'm just saying as marriage rates go down cohabitation becomes a more accepted form of family structure and that could affect the behavior of future people's decisions. I actually think that's a reasonable claim for an economist to make.
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public perception of the privileges afforded to marriage. Q. As an empirical economist what study have you made in the public perception in Michigan or otherwise of marriage? A. I haven't done any studies on public perception of marriage. Q. Do you have any data that you're referring to to give an opinion about the public perception of marriage? A. No specific data. Q. As part of your opinion in this case are you prepared to offer an opinion as an expert witness about how providing domestic partner benefits would affect public perception of marriage? A. What I'm saying is that there is the possibility of multiplier effects that as individuals make decisions about whether to marry this lowers the marriage rate and the lowering of the marriage rate might actually itself affect the marriage decisions of other people. I'm not making that as an empirical claim. I'm just saying that's a possibility. Any time a behavior becomes -- if it becomes more normative to cohabit then people who are making a decision about whether to cohabit or marry
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Q. But you don't have any empirical basis to say what outcomes that might generate if cohabitation became more acceptable, right? A. That's correct. Q. Also in that same paragraph in your report you say the social and economic costs of undermining marriage among opposite sex couples constitute a much larger economic consideration than the law's effect on same sex couples, right? A. That's correct. Q. What are the social costs of undermining marriage that you're referring to in that sentence? A. I view that more broadly in terms of outcomes such as crime, education, health, so there would be the economic consensus of those things changing, but then we also just think of the social consequence, which would be effects on our way of life and things that might be hard to quantify. Q. At the outset of your report in paragraph one you say that your project is to assess the economic impact of restricting public employee health benefits, right? A. Yes. Q. So you didn't perform any analysis to assess the social impact of restricting domestic partner benefits
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right? A. That's right. I focused on economic. Q. Nowhere in your report is there any empirical analysis or data or anything else that allows you to opine on the social costs of restricting domestic partner benefits, right? A. That's correct. Q. Referring again to your report on paragraph 13, please, here again you're discussing marriage and welfare benefits, correct? A. That's correct. Q. And in paragraph 13 you cite the Lichter study? A. That's correct. Q. You cite the Lichter study says that women who are married have a 68 percent lower odds of being below the poverty line and 79 percent chance of receiving food stamps? A. Yes. Q. Those numbers that you discuss in paragraph 13 are comparing married women to single women? A. Right, I believe so. I don't know how they handle cohabiting couples in that. Q. But you know that the comparison is not between cohabiting couples and married couples, right?
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earlier, right? A. That's right. Q. Lichter in his study says we have virtually no information about whether marriage per se lifts single mothers out of poverty, right? A. That's correct. Q. And so Lichter concludes that his analysis can't demonstrate single mothers to be less poor or to reduce their reliance on welfare, right? A. That's correct. Q. So based on that Lichter doesn't provide any support for the proposition that incentivizing people to move from a single state to a marriage state would lower poverty rates, right? A. I don't think he would speak to that. Q. And you don't have any empirical basis to extrapolate Lichter's results to show a causal relationship, right? A. The way we would approach it we can use Lichter's results as a baseline of how big the differences are to begin with and then we might make inference about how much of that is selection. Q. Lichter didn't try to quantify or articulate what proportion is causal versus selection.
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A. That's right. It's between married and unmarried. Q. Just to be clear, the numbers that you quote in paragraph 13 is coming from Lichter comparing married to unmarried, right? A. That's what I believe to be true. Q. As part of support for your opinions in this case you don't draw any data from Lichter that would allow you to compare cohabiting couples to married couples, right? A. I don't use their data. Q. And you don't have any other empirical basis to support the concept or the proposition that you state in paragraph 13 as between married and cohabiting couples, right? A. I don't. Q. You do not? A. I do not. Q. And Lichter also doesn't provided any comparison data showing outcomes for cohabiting couples who are induced to marry by government benefit or incentive, right? A. That's right. Q. So in other words, Lichter doesn't show any outcome for marginal marriages as we defined that term
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A. Q. A. Q.
His data wouldn't have allowed him to do it. And it doesn't allow you to do that? That's correct. You can't say one way or the other incentivizing single women to marry would have any effect on the poverty rate, fair? A. I'd have to be really careful on how to answer that because the differences are so large to begin with. It's not all causal. Some of it is selection, some of it is causal. I mean, what you would do is say this is a really important place to start from, huge differences in poverty rates. As an economist I probably wouldn't discount it all as selection. I'd say that some part is going to be selection and some part is going to be causal but I wouldn't be able to assess what fraction is going to be causal and what fraction is going to be selection. Q. You told me a moment ago Lichter wouldn't allow him to differentiate between causal and non-causal? A. That's right. Q. Lichter is not able based on his data to say one way or the other whether there's any causal effect, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you're not able based on Lichter's data to say
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whether any aspect that the difference that Lichter observed is causal, right? A. That's right. But that's very different from saying that there is no causal effect. It's going to be somewhere in that range. Q. Well, you don't know it's going to be somewhere in that range because based on Lichter it might not be anywhere in that range. There may be no causal effect, right? That's a possibility? A. That's a possibility. Q. And based on Lichter you're not able to quantify or assess the likelihood that any aspect or any portion of the observed effect is causal versus not, right? A. That's correct. Q. Now, in paragraph 13 and 14 of your report you discuss the Lichter study and Thomas and Sawhill study, correct? A. Yes. Q. And those are two paragraphs in your report where you are sort of reporting on the findings of people who conduct studies in this area, right? A. That's correct. Q. And you didn't do any analysis of your own of the Lichter study, correct?
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run or parameters that you put in the software? A. That's correct. Q. And that's the same software that you typically used to manipulate data for purposes of your research? A. That's correct. Q. So it's capable of generating tables of data, right, and outcome? A. Yes. Q. You don't present any of the sort of outcome data from your analysis other than in the text of your report, right? A. That's correct. Q. But in the course of running your analysis that underlies paragraphs 15 through 17 of your report did you actually generate any data tables or other sort of output from your software? A. I created a log file. It just spits out the results and then from the log file I put those directly into the text. Q. What does the log file look like? A. A log file is a text file shows you everything that goes across the screen as you run your code. Q. And that's the same log file you provided in response to the plaintiff's subpoena?
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A. That's correct. Q. And you didn't do any analysis on your own of the Thomas Sawhill study, right? A. That's right. Q. But then in paragraphs 15 through 18 basically you discuss some analysis that you did of some other data set, right? A. American Community. Q. And that was an analysis that you personally did? A. I personally did that. Q. First of all let me ask you, in what form did you perform that analysis. Did you use a computer to analyze the data? A. Yes. Q. Did you use Excel or some other sort of spreadsheet software? A. I used Stata. Q. How does that work? Do you import the work into Stata? A. That's correct. Q. And then you can manipulate it using the software; is that right? A. That's right. Q. Does it generate reports based on queries you want to
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A. I can't remember if I provided a log file. If I provided a log file that would have been the log file that created these results. Q. But you don't remember whether you did or not? A. I don't remember if I created a log file. I mean I don't know if I provided a log file. My guess is I would have. Q. But you don't remember? A. Right. Q. Could I just ask you after this deposition to go back and double check that you produced the log file and any other related output from this software? If you didn't produce it before I'd ask that you produce it right away? A. Okay. Q. Again, going back to paragraph 15 of your report. You looked at the ACS data and you found a 5.8 percent of married adults received food stamps compared with 20.3 percent of non-married adults, right? A. That's right. Q. And then you say when you applied demographic controls that gap reduced to 10.7percent, right? A. That's correct. Q. Are the demographic controls that you used the same
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controls that we used earlier? A. Yes. Q. As part of the analysis you didn't compare cohabiting partners to married couples? A. I did not. Q. Do you know whether it would be possible based on ACS data to do that? A. Yes. Q. And you chose not to? A. Yeah. I was making a comparison between married and unmarried. Q. So as you sit here you don't have any idea what results you would have seen had you compared cohabiting to married couples, right? A. I don't know offhand. Q. You don't know at all because you didn't run an analysis? A. If I had to make a guess no, but you don't want me to make a guess. Q. No, because I'm interested in your expert opinion and the analysis you ran to support your expert opinion. A. The analysis I ran was married versus unmarried. Q. The same question with regard to the analysis that you discuss in paragraph 16 and 17. There as well you're
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Q. So all you can say is you observed a difference but you don't know whether marriage causes the difference, right? A. Yes. Q. The same is true for all the other outcomes you discuss in paragraphs 15 through 17, right? A. That's correct. Q. You can show that there's an associated difference but you can't show whether marriage caused the difference, fair? A. That's fair. Q. In the analysis that you did of the ACS data did you study whether the associated differences that you observed between married and unmarried people for the different outcomes was consistent across income levels? A. I did not do that. Q. And did you for purposes of preparing your report study whether the association between marriage and Medicaid enrollment varied across income levels? A. I did not. Q. For any of the outcome that you discuss in paragraphs 15 through 17 of your report did you study whether the association was consistent across education levels?
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comparing single to married, right? A. That's correct. Q. And at no point in the work that you've done on this case did you run an analysis of ACS data comparing cohabiting couples to married couples? A. Yeah. Let's be clear, it's comparing married individuals to unmarried individuals, so the unmarried would include be single and cohabiting people. I did not compare cohabiting and married. Q. For any purpose in your report, right? A. That's correct. Q. And so all of the analyses that you ran of the ACS data compared non-married to married, correct? A. Correct. Q. And you uniformly ignored cohabiting versus married as a comparison? A. Yes. Q. Now, your analysis of the ACS number showed that marriage was positively associated with reduced food stamp use, right? A. Yes. Q. But your analysis didn't attempt to demonstrate causation? A. No, that would not be possible.
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A. I did not. Q. Did you study whether the association was consistent across race? A. I did not. Q. Employment status? A. I chose not to do that. I mean, that would -- so in that case actually you wouldn't want to separate your analysis by employment because marriage will actually affect whether or not you're employed so that would be like including an endogenous regressor in that. That's not something I would do. Q. So you did not do that? A. I did not do that. Q. In paragraph 16 of your report you say that the regression adjusted difference in Medicaid use by married versus unmarried is 9.8 percent, correct? A. 9.8 percentage points. Q. So is it fair to characterize that as meaning unmarried adults are 9.8 percent more likely to be on Medicaid than married adults? A. It's 9.8 percentage points. That's very different than percent. If you look at those two numbers you have 5.19 percent versus 19.2 percent so that would be a difference of about 13 percentage points. All I'm
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saying is that the regression adjusted difference would be 9.8 percentage points. Q. Maybe you haven't done this analysis but how does that translate into saying married adults are X times less likely to be on Medicaid than unmarried adults? A. You'd have to have an adjusted basis but you could actually -- if you used the married adult rate as your base, it's six percent, then you'd say that unmarried adults are more than 100 percent more likely to be on Medicaid. That's why the distinction between percentage point and percentage. Q. But you didn't present your data that way anyway, right? A. No, I put them in percentage points. Q. And you never performed the analysis that would have been required to translate it into the terms I just described? A. I do it on a piece of paper but I did not report it in percent terms. Q. In paragraph 20 of your report you write that marriage also has a direct impact on individual wages which in turn increases tax revenues for the state, right? A. That's correct. MARKED FOR IDENTIFICATION:
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Q. But showing that it survives that particular fixed effect estimation is not the same as saying that the difference is causally related to marriage; is it? A. It's pretty close. I think we generally think of the gap being part selection, part causal. The way I read their sentences, even after you account for the selection part of it, over 80 percent of the estimated impact of marriage survives the fixed effects assets estimates. Q. Korenman goes on in the next paragraph to say that although the fixed effects estimates suggest that the selectivity hypothesis alone does not account for a major share of the marriage premium, at least not in the simple fixed observable form of the hypothesis, it is possible that a more complex selection process underlies the marriage premium? A. Yes. So he's providing a possibility. That's what he says. Q. Korenman is saying it's possible that the marriage premium that they are observing is non-causal, right? A. Yes. Q. You haven't done any independent analysis of Korenman's data, have you? A. I have not.
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DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 13 1:14 p.m. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. I'm handing you what's been marked as Exhibit 13. This is the article that you cite in paragraph 20 of report, correct? A. That's correct. Q. The title of it is does marriage really make men more productive, correct? A. That's correct. Q. Now on page 296 of Exhibit 13, if you would turn to that page, please, Korenman says that the findings from the NLS data in summary show that there appears to be a significant increase in wages associated with marriage for white males even correcting for selectively into marriage based on fixed unobservables, right? A. That's correct. Q. Korenman doesn't say that the data show that increase was caused by marriage, right? A. I mean in the next sentence they said even correcting for selectivity into marriage based on fixed observables over 80 percent of the estimated impact of marriage survives the fixed effects.
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Q. Korenman goes on in the same paragraph to say that the possibility also exists that causation could run from wages to marital status, right? A. That's right. Q. What he's saying there is it's possible that increased wages actually influences selection into marriage, right? A. That's correct. Q. So he's acknowledging the possibility that that phenomenon actually explains the marriage premium as well, right? A. Yeah, that's possible. If you go down further he cites his own research and found no evidence of such an effect controlling for other characteristics. Q. But despite his past research and despite the study and research he did in this particular published study that's Exhibit 13 he continues to acknowledge the possibility that causation could run from wages to marital status, right? A. I have the caveat before I answer is this is the natural hedging language that every journal is going to require be put in a paper. Yes, that's the statement he makes, but I actually think it's in line with what most scholars do in an article is provide
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some hedging language at the end to account for future research. Q. Regardless of your characterizations of it what Korenman says is that even accounting for his past research and the research that he's published in this report the possibility remains that causation could run from wages to martial status, right? A. That's correct. Q. Korenman doesn't study the wage outcomes from marginal marriages that result from a government benefit policy, right? A. That's correct. Q. So Korenman doesn't provide any empirical basis for the proposition that marginal marriages would exhibit the same wage premiums as average marriages, right? A. That's correct. Q. Korenman's study also didn't study cohabiting men and married men, right? A. That's right. Q. Korenman doesn't provide any empirical basis for the proposition that moving couples from cohabiting to marriage would result in increased wages, right? A. Say that again. Q. Korenman doesn't provide any empirical basis that
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marriage would cause their household income to increase, would you? A. Not in the stuff I reported in the report. The report was all about married and unmarried. Q. But you never did any analysis of cohabiting versus married couples? A. I didn't do that analysis. Q. So the point remains that you have no empirical basis as you sit here today to say that moving cohabiting couples to marriage would cause their household income to increase, fair? A. I wouldn't be able to make a statement based upon ACS data that I used. Q. Do you cite other data in your report that you believe support the proposition that moving cohabiting couples to marry would cause their household income to increase? A. I imagine there's studies that exist but I haven't cited any of those in my report. My report focused primarily on married versus unmarried. Q. Aside from what might be out in the literature I'm focused on what you said in your report and what you reviewed in the process of forming your opinions. As you sit here you don't have an empirical basis to say
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moving couples from cohabiting to marriage would increase their wages? A. That's correct. Let me answer that with a slight caveat. He is comparing people who are moving from something that's not married into something that is married, and so part of the group that's not married are going to be cohabiting or single people. Even though he didn't distinguish between those two it wouldn't be inconsistent with the fact that married have higher wage groups than the other two groups combined. Q. Well, you can't rule that out is what you're saying? A. That's right. Q. But aside from saying that you can't rule that possibility out my question was a little different. My question was whether Korenman's study provided an empirical basis to say that moving couples from cohabitation to marriage will increase wages. A. Not that specific transition. Q. When you say that specific transition you mean transition from cohabiting to marriage, right? A. That's correct. Q. You don't have any empirical basis from your ACS analysis to say that moving cohabiting couples to
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that moving cohabiting couples to marriage would increase their household income, fair? A. What do you mean by empirical basis? Q. Data or publishing study or any other empirical basis. A. None that I've cited in my report. Q. And you can't identify one as you sit here, can you? A. I can't identify one as I sit here. Q. You cannot? A. Not right in this moment. Q. Same question with regard to your analysis in paragraph 22. You don't compare tax revenue from cohabiting couples to potential tax revenue from married couples, correct? A. That's correct. Q. So you don't have an empirical basis to say that cohabiting couples to married would cause an increase in tax revenue for the State of Michigan; is that fair? A. That's fair. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Why don't we take a short break. (Recess taken at 1:3 p.m.) (Back on the record at 1:35 p.m.) BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER:
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Q. Referring you again to Exhibit 13, please, which is the Korenman study? A. Yes. Q. Look at page 304, please. Do you have that? A. Yes. Q. At the top of page 304 Korenman says while it may be fair to interpret our findings as providing support for the hypothesis that marriage enhances men's labor market productivity a definitive judgment more requires direct evidence about the processes or causal mechanisms linking marriage to men's productivity, right? A. Yes. Q. So you haven't done any additional analysis to obtain more direct evidence about the processes or causal mechanism linking men to men's productivity? A. No. Q. And you haven't cited any studies that contain such direct evidence, either, right? A. That's correct. Q. So as you sit here today you can't say any more than Korenman says, which is it may be fair to interpret their findings as showing support for increased productivity, right?
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hedging that any scholar who has done their best to come to some conclusions and then just leave the caveat at the end that opens the door for future research. Q. Well, regardless of you characterizing it as normal hedging language the fact remains Korenman leaves open the possibility that the findings didn't support the hypotheses that marriage doesn't enhance men's labor market productivity, fair? A. As would any scientist about their findings. We always leave the possibility that there's another explanation. Q. Right. So Korenman doesn't purport to have proof as a fact that marriage causes labor market productivity enhancement, right? A. I think as an economist we shy away from the word proven, but, again, if I went back to the start of the sentence it may be fair to interpret -- I think he's just saying, hey, this is the way you should interpret our results but there's always the possibility it's something else. Q. In fact, he doesn't say this is how you should interpret our results. He says it may be fair to interpret them that way, right?
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A. That's correct. Q. And you can't sort of quantify or discern how likely it is that that's an accurate assessment of the data, right? A. No. It kind of flipped there. Yeah. Q. You're not in a position to assess the extent to which it's fair to interpret Korenman's findings as providing support for the hypothesis that marriage enhances men's labor market productivity, fair? A. What I could assess is that they're using really nice methodology, the ability to compare wages before and after marriage. I view this as hedging language that we all put at the end of an article. While it's true that not all of this difference is likely to be causal I think their language that it may be fair to interpret our findings providing support for the hypothesis that marriage enhances men's labor market productivity, I think these are all in line saying that marriage has a causal effect. I think of the relationship between smoking and lung cancer went through a similar evolution, a large correlational study. Difficult to pin down causal effects at first but -- so, yeah, all I'm saying is as I read this I read this as the normal
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A. That's right. Q. So there's a big difference between saying it may be fair to interpret our results as finding a causal link between marriage and productivity versus saying that's how you should interpret them; is that fair? A. That's fair. I find the distinction to be small. Q. Are you a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? A. Yes, I am. Q. If I refer to it as the LDS church is that a fair and respectful way? A. That's fair. Q. Are you familiar with the LDS church's position regarding same sex marriage? A. Yes. Q. It is your understanding that the church has a single undeviating standard of sexual morality, intimate relations of a proper home between a husband and a wife united in the bonds of matrimony? A. That's correct. Q. Is that your personal belief? A. That's my personal belief. Q. Fair to say that you've held that personal belief the entire time you've been an adult?
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A. Yes. Q. You held that belief before you became an economist, fair? A. Yes. Q. Is it your personal belief that marriage between a man and a woman is central to the plan of salvation? A. Yes. Q. And that was your personal belief long before you became an economist? A. That's true. Q. Is it your personal belief that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurturing of children? A. Now, again, let's be clear. I'm speaking about personal beliefs. I'm not speaking as an economist or an expert witness. Q. My question is is your personal belief that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurturing of the children. A. Yes. Q. Is it your personal belief that by divine design fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families? A. Yes.
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Q. Now, are you aware that the LDS church has stated in an official proclamation that the church calls upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote the measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as a fundamental unit of society? A. Yes. Q. And the family in that sense refers to opposite sex family, right? A. Traditional family, yes. Q. Is it your understanding that the LDS church doctrine states that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets? A. Yes. MR. WOOD: I will raise an objection to this entire line of questioning to the form of the question and the propriety of it. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Is it your personal belief as well? A. Yes. I mean, I just want to clarify my answer to all of these questions related to proclamation of family. I'm speaking based on my personal religious beliefs, you know. These are sacred things. I'm not speaking
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1 MR. WOOD: I would object to this line of 2 questions as improper and would reserve all 3 substantive objections. I believe in the last 4 transcript with Amanda we reserved substantive 5 objections for the parties to raise later. We were 6 only raising objections to form; is that agreeable to 7 you. 8 MR. WEIDENHAMMER: I don't know what you 9 mean by substantive objections but I agree the federal 10 rules apply which state that what you do in a 11 deposition is preserve form objections and privilege 12 objections. 13 MR. WOOD: Fair enough so the other ones 14 such as relevance, whatnot -15 MR. WEIDENHAMMER: The standard federal 16 rules apply however you interpret them. I don't know 17 what you're saying is substantive but there it is. 18 MR. WOOD: I think you're saying the same 19 thing as me if you're saying I'm going to have to 20 raise objections to form and privilege. 21 MR. WEIDENHAMMER: I'm saying you have to 22 raise them to the extent you raise them. Otherwise 23 you don't. 24 BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER:
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as an economist. I'm not speaking as a scientist or scholar. Those endeavors I follow the data but if you're curious about my personal beliefs I'm more than willing to answer those questions. Q. So, again, your personal belief is that the disintegration that the traditional family maintains opposite sex marriage will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations, the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets? A. That's correct. Q. What are the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets? A. Actually I wouldn't know the answer to that question. I mean, I would assume that -- yeah, I'm not a scholar. I wouldn't be able to clarify that any better than what the statement says. Q. As you sit here you don't have any understanding what calamities would be? A. Yeah, I'm not sure specifically. Q. What is your understanding or your belief as to exactly how the disintegration of the family would bring those calamities upon individuals? MR. WOOD: Object to the form and asked and answer.
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A. Again, I don't -- I don't know how to speak specifically to that. BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Q. Returning your attention to Exhibit 13, please. In your report you cite Exhibit 13 for the proposition that marriage makes men more productive, right? A. That's correct. Q. Did you conduct a survey of the literature to determine what other studies are out there examining the question of whether marriage makes men more productive? A. I don't know actually. Q. As you sit here today you just can't say whether or not you ever conducted such a survey? A. What do you mean by survey. I didn't do a thorough review of the literature as I would for a survey article. Q. Did you make an effort to go out and research other articles that might examine the relationship between marriage and men's productivity? A. I don't remember that either. MR. WEIDENHAMMER: That's all I have. MR. WOOD: I have a few questions but I want to reserve the right of the witness consistent
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1 relationship and correlation and I want to explore 2 that for a minute. I know you said you try to be 3 careful not to claim specific causal relationships as 4 an economist, but when you look at economic data and 5 you see a correlation between certain points of data 6 or certain findings does that suggest to you that 7 there could be a causal relationship? 8 MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading and 9 misstates prior testimony. 10 A. I think as I mentioned earlier we often use the 11 correlation as a starting point. When we see really 12 large correlational differences between two groups it 13 makes us wonder as scientists what might be causing 14 those differences and it's clear that one explanation 15 would be selection into those two groups. The other 16 explanation would be that the characteristic that 17 distinguishes those two groups as having a causal 18 effect on their behavior. The ability to separate out 19 how much of the raw gap is causal and how much is 20 selection is a challenging thing for scientists to do. 21 Again, I think as a starting point the 22 correlations generally point to, you know, something 23 important that's going on. 24 BY MR. WOOD:
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with the federal court rules to review the transcript and have a chance to review it prior to the time that it's finalized consistent with rule 30 of the federal rules. EXAMINATION BY MR. WOOD: Q. Let me pick up with that last line of questions upon your personal religious beliefs. When you say you relied on data would it be fair to say in that case regardless of your personal belief you relied upon the data and academic information that was available to you in reaching your opinions? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading. A. As I stated earlier I'm an empirical economist. I'm convinced by data. I use data myself for my own research. Given my religious background I recognize the concern people might have about the bias and so I make my analysis code my results as transparent as possible. BY MR. WOOD Q. Did you rely on data and academic information in reaching your opinions in this case? A. Yes. Q. There were a lot of questions about the terms causal
Q. When you are dealing with social factors or individuals where you cannot personally interview each individual, does that make it difficult as an economist to precisely identify the percent of causal relationships between two findings or two points of data? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, compound, leading and vague. BY MR. WOOD Q. Do you understand the question? A. Rephrase it slightly. Q. When you're dealing with people, for example, as a pool of data, which you're dealing with in this type of situation, you can't interview each person, maybe you don't know who they are, maybe they don't identify themselves, or maybe they don't give you personal information or maybe there's so many people you can't identify them all and interview them all personally. The first part of the question -- the first question is do you then have to make some determination that may not be 100 percent accurate because you haven't had the opportunity to interview each individual in the data pool? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, compound,
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leading, vague. A. So I think if I understand the question right I think one of the issues that you're getting at is that we don't often have complete information about all the characteristics that we would want to include in a study. Compounded with that is the fact that we don't get to randomly assign people to their martial status. A combination of these two means there's never going to be a perfect study. You make the best inference with the best available data that you have. Q. Would that be typical for studies in the field of economics? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading. A. These limitations of not having perfect data or not having random assignments is common to some of the most important questions in economics. It doesn't stop us from trying to do our best to get an answer within the constraints that we have already. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Would it be common in the field of economics to only be able to identify a correlation between two points of information as opposed to being able to identify a specific causal relationship? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading, and
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perfect -- we never have the perfect result but we can make substantive contributions to the field of economics, doing the best with what we have with the data available. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Now, during the day today Mr. Weidenhammer had asked you a series of questions about whether you went to each of the public bodies and gathered data, whether you knew how many individual couples acted in a certain way or how many couples were claiming or holding themselves out as having certain characteristics. I'd like to follow up on those questions generally about having that finite or complete pool of data. The first question I have is is it common for an economist to conduct a study without having perfect data? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, vague. A. Yes. I mean, there's plenty of studies that wish their data was better in some way and they do the best with what they have available. As economists we recognize there's costs and benefits. The ideal data set is often prohibitively expensive to collect. BY MR. WOOD:
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1 vague. 2 A. So some of the most important questions in economics 3 have this characteristic that you can't randomly 4 assign the behavior. I do research on the effect of 5 pornography. That's a case where you can't randomly 6 assign people to pornography and the ability to 7 identify instruments is rather limited, so in that 8 situation actually the correlational evidence is 9 rather strong that pornography use contributes 10 negatively to marital outcome, so you might use that 11 as a starting point to indicate that there's something 12 really going on. 13 Q. Does a flaw or an imperfect economic study, for 14 example, the fact that the person or group doing the 15 study did not know precisely the complete field of 16 opinions or data or effects for each individual that 17 might have been a part of the pool of the study, does 18 that make the study such that you couldn't use it or 19 rely on it in any way? 20 MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading, 21 vague and compound. 22 A. What each study does is try and contribute parts. 23 That's why every study is going to have limiting 24 language at the end. We don't -- we never have
Q. For example, when Mr. Weidenhammer asked you today whether you had communicated with or surveyed all of the public employers in the state of Michigan in order to arrive at your conclusions would that be the type of study or analysis that could take many months or be very difficult as you just mentioned? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, foundation. A. Those kind of studies are conducted by organizations like Mathematica. If you look at cost and time that goes into collecting that type of data it would be quite prohibitive for an individual scholar like me to collect data for a project like this. BY MR. WOOD: Q. What would be some of the difficulties and costs associated with trying to collect all of the data from all the different public employers in Michigan? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, foundation. A. So a couple challenges. One approach is I could send a survey to all of them. I wouldn't have any way to compel them to respond so I would have natural non-response bias so I'd have to have kind of a selected sample. If instead I went to each of the establishments and tried to get data directly from
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them, either or from their personnel file, I would have to handle the facts that these records might be stored in lots of different ways. They might be unwilling to share those records with me. Again, I can think of a number of hurdles that would make collecting that data quite a challenge. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Could it be that some of them would have different computer systems or collect data in certain way such that they might not all have the same types of data? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, calls for speculation. A. Again, as I said -- I mentioned data is stored in a lot of different ways. Interacting with different data systems is always a challenge. Again, it's often challenging to interact with the person that has control over the data. There's a number of measures that make it really challenging to collect personal data from various employers. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Early on in the deposition you were asked about public employees versus employees in other groups and I want to follow up on that line of questions. The first question I have is this, would you expect public
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cited in your expert report -- did you read all of those before you used them in your report? A. So many of these articles that I was familiar with that I had read either as part of writing this handbook chapter or that I encountered in grad school or in what I had seen presented at a conference. Q. So you read them or saw them in some form? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, leading. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Let me rephrase it. Had you encountered or read them in some form prior to your expert report? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, vague as to encounter and asked and answered. A. So, again, I wasn't given an enormous amount of time to prepare the expert witness report and, you know, if you supply that level of detail that the deposition required me to understood about each of these papers, as a result I relied largely on papers that I was fairly familiar with for which I could summarize within the time constraints I had. I mean, again there's always a cost benefit. If I had infinite time I could have done an exhaustive literature review of each topic. Given my work schedule that just -- there was natural constraints to what I could do.
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employees to be similar in their socioeconomic data and data related to marriage as the general population? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, foundation. A. I have no reason to believe otherwise. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Is the approach that you took in this case in approaching the work that you did and relying upon or reciting various types of articles and studies in the field of economics typical for what someone would do as an economist in approaching such a question? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Objection, foundation and vague. A. I'm not sure. I mean, writing an expert witness report is quite a bit different than writing an academic article. I focus on one specific topic. BY MR. WOOD: Q. Let me ask it this way. Would it be common for an economists when doing a study to cite works of other economists? A. Yes. That would be integral to almost everything we do is to cite the work of other scholars. Q. I wasn't sure on this one question but I think you answered it earlier. These various articles that you
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MR. WOOD: I think that's all I have at this point. COURT REPORTER: Would you like to order the transcript?? MR. WEIDENHAMMER: Yes, and I'll take a rough. MR. WOOD: I'll take a copy. (Deposition concluded at 2:00 p.m. Signature of the witness was requested.)
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1 CERTIFICATE OF NOTARY 2 STATE OF MICHIGAN ) 3 ) SS 4 COUNTY OF INGHAM ) 5 6 I, DEANA M. RYAN, certify that this 7 deposition was taken before me on the date 8 hereinbefore set forth; that the foregoing questions 9 and answers were recorded by me stenographically and 10 reduced to computer transcription; that this is a 11 true, full and correct transcript of my stenographic 12 notes so taken; and that I am not related to, nor of 13 counsel to either party nor interested in the event of 14 this cause. 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 DEANA M. RYAN, CSR-3715 22 Notary Public, 23 Ingham County, Michigan 24 My commission expires: February 27, 2017
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DEPOSITION REVIEW CERTIFICATION OF WITNESS ASSIGNMENT NO: 1807070 CASE NAME: Bassett, Theresa, et al. v. Snyder, Richard DATE OF DEPOSITION: 2/3/2014 WITNESS' NAME: Joseph Price, Ph.D. In accordance with the Rules of Civil Procedure, I have read the entire transcript of my testimony or it has been read to me. I have listed my changes on the attached Errata Sheet, listing page and line numbers as well as the reason(s) for the change(s). I request that these changes be entered as part of the record of my testimony. I have executed the Errata Sheet, as well as this Certificate, and request and authorize that both be appended to the transcript of my testimony and be incorporated therein. _______________ ________________________ Date Joseph Price, Ph.D. Sworn to and subscribed before me, a Notary Public in and for the State and County, the referenced witness did personally appear and acknowledge that: They have read the transcript; They have listed all of their corrections in the appended Errata Sheet; They signed the foregoing Sworn Statement; and Their execution of this Statement is of their free act and deed. I have affixed my name and official seal this ______ day of_____________________, 20____. ___________________________________ Notary Public ___________________________________ Commission Expiration Date
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DEPOSITION REVIEW CERTIFICATION OF WITNESS ASSIGNMENT NO: 1807070 CASE NAME: Bassett, Theresa, et al. v. Snyder, Richard DATE OF DEPOSITION: 2/3/2014 WITNESS' NAME: Joseph Price, Ph.D. In accordance with the Rules of Civil Procedure, I have read the entire transcript of my testimony or it has been read to me. I have made no changes to the testimony as transcribed by the court reporter. _______________ ________________________ Date Joseph Price, Ph.D. Sworn to and subscribed before me, a Notary Public in and for the State and County, the referenced witness did personally appear and acknowledge that: They have read the transcript; They signed the foregoing Sworn Statement; and Their execution of this Statement is of their free act and deed. I have affixed my name and official seal
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ERRATA SHEET VERITEXT LEGAL SOLUTIONS MIDWEST ASSIGNMENT NO: 1807070 PAGE/LINE(S) / CHANGE /REASON ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ _______________ ________________________ Date Joseph Price, Ph.D. SUBSCRIBED AND SWORN TO BEFORE ME THIS ________ DAY OF ________________________, 20______ . ___________________________________ Notary Public ___________________________________ Commission Expiration Date
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this ______ day of_____________________, 20____.

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EXHIBIT B
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ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF MICHIGANS PUBLIC EMPLOYEE DOMESTIC PARTNER BENEFIT RESTRICTION ACT OF 2011
Expert report submitted on behalf of Defense in Bassett v. Snyder, Case No. 2:12-cv-10038 U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan
Submitted December 16, 2013 by Joseph Price, Ph.D.
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I. Assignment 1. The purpose of this report is to assess the economic impact of restricting public employee health benefits to couples who are married. I will first discuss ways in which marriage reduces expenditures and increases revenues for the state government of Michigan. Then I will discuss how changes in the economic incentives for marriage (such as restricting certain benefits to married couples) affect whether people marry. II. Qualifications 2. I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, where I have worked since 2007. I received by Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University in 2007 and my emphasis of study was labor economics, health economics, and the economics of the family. 3. I have published 23 articles in peer-reviewed journals with another 7 that are accepted and will be published in the next year or so. My publications include articles in some of the top academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Demography and Management Science. My research has also received considerable media attention including coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Today Show, and many other news outlets. I am regularly invited to present my research at different academic departments and at various academic conferences.
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4. I am an empirical economist that has conducted research on the impact of marriage on infant health outcomes, factors that influence the decision to marry, parental investments in children, and the outcomes of children raised by samesex couples. Although the specific topics that I have studied vary, the common theme in my research has been the use of large datasets, rigorous empirical methods, and complete transparency in all of my empirical methods. I make my data and analysis code available to other scholars and often provide additional analysis based on inquiries from the media. 5. Over the last several years, I have also been asked to review the academic work of other scholars by over 40 different scholarly journals. This experience of evaluating the work of others in a variety of fields gives me a strong background in discerning between research that is likely to result in correct inference and research where there is likely to be some source of estimation bias that will affect the interpretation of the results. This request by editors to have me assist in evaluating the research of other scholars is also a signal of the trust that other scholars place in my assessment of good research. 6. I have received several academic awards, grants, and honors. These include the Wells and Myrle Cloward Teaching and Learning Faculty Fellowship, the Emmaline B. Wells Scholarly and Creative Work Grant, and an Education and Social Opportunity Grant from the Spencer Foundation. My CV is attached as Exhibit A.
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7. My opinions in this report are based on the sources cited in the footnotes as well as my own calculations using government collected data that is publicly available. I reserve the right to supplement or modify this report based on any documents or other discovery that becomes available during the case or any witness testimony that has not yet been given. 8. I am being compensated $300 per hour for my time to prepare this expert witness report. III. Summary of findings 9. Marriage provides economic benefits to the state of Michigan by reducing welfare payments, increasing tax revenue, and reducing costs incurred by the state related to criminal justice and health care. A couples decision to marry is affected by changes in the costs or benefits of marriage. Restricting partner health benefits to married couples creates an additional incentive for couples to marry and this decision to marry produces economic benefits for the state of Michigan. Allowing partner health benefits to extend to cohabiting couples increases the relative incentive to cohabit instead of marry. This shift away from marriage among heterosexual couples will result in higher costs borne by the state of Michigan (since 99.3% of couples in Michigan are opposite-sex couples). IV. Economic benefits of marriage 10. There are at least three ways that marriage provides economic benefits to the state of Michigan. First, it dramatically reduces the probability that a household
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will receive public assistance. Second, it increases the earnings of individuals and households, thus directly increasing tax revenues. Third, it promotes positive behaviors in individuals that reduces the costs incurred by the state in providing correctional facilities, health services, and educational interventions. 11. One of the most challenging issues in this area of research is the degree to which associations between marriage and positive outcomes represent a causal effect or merely a correlation. The research that I discuss in this report represent articles published in well-respected academic journals and rigorous efforts to estimate the effect of marriage on these different outcomes. 12. Most of the studies that I describe will be based on nationally representative data and not specifically about Michigan. To provide a more specific view of the economic benefits of marriage to the state of Michigan, I use data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2001-2011 for all adults (ages 25-65) living in Michigan. The ACS data provides direct measures of most of the outcomes discussed in this section. In each case, I provide the raw difference between married and unmarried adults in Michigan as well as a regression adjusted difference that controls for the individuals age, race/ethnicity, education, and citizenship status. I exclude from this analysis anyone living in a group quarters, which includes correctional facilities, residential treatment centers, military barracks, or college residence halls (though together these only constitute 1.5% of the original sample). Also, some of the measures that I discuss
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are only available in certain years of the American Community Survey and so my analysis for those measures will be restricted to a specific set of years. Marriage and welfare benefits 13. The most important impact of marriage on government expenditures is the fact that married couples are much less likely to be below the federal poverty line and as such are much less likely to receive any type of welfare or public assistance. Lichter, Graefe, and Brown use data on 7,665 women (ages 25-44) from the National Survey of Family Growth and find that women who are married are much less likely to be below the poverty line or to be receiving food stamps (one marker of welfare benefits in the survey).1 In their empirical study that accounts for family background, race, age, education, and whether the individual had a teen birth, they find that women who are married have a 68% lower odds of being below the poverty time and 79% lower odds of currently receiving food stamps (see Tables 5 and 6). 14. Thomas and Sawhill analyze data from the 2004 wave of the Current Population Survey to examine how poverty rates among children vary based on the marital status of their parents. Overall, only 7.6% of married parent families with children are below the federal poverty line, compared to 34% for single parent families with children, and 21.5% for cohabitating couples with children.2
Daniel Lichter, Deborah Graefe, and J. Brian Brown. "Is Marriage a Panacea? Union Formation Among Economically Disadvantaged Unwed Mothers." Social Problems 50, 2003, 60-86. 2 Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill. For Love and Money? The Impact of Family Structure on Family Income. The Future of Children, 15, 2005, 57-74.
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15. While the SNAP/Food Stamp program is federally funded (with the state covering half of the administrative costs), it provides a well-defined measure of public assistance that can be easily compared across married and unmarried couples. As such, it serves as a useful proxy for other types of public assistance that are paid directly by the state of Michigan. Data from 2001-2011 ACS indicate that only 5.8% of married adults receive food stamps compared to 20.3% of the non-married adults. The gap for women is larger (5.7% vs. 23.7%) and including demographic controls reduces the overall gap by about a third (with an adjusted difference of 10.7 percentage points). Even including these additional controls, these results indicate that non-married adults are about three times more likely to receive food stamps. There are three years (2005-2007) for which the total amount of food stamps received during the year was included on the survey. If I average the total food stamp payments across all adults (even those not getting food stamps) then the average amount spent per married adult would be $88 compared to $281 for each unmarried adult (the regression adjusted difference is $120). 16. Another large form of public assistance in Michigan is Medicaid. Information on whether the individual is receiving Medicaid is available during the 2008-2011 waves of the ACS. During these years, I find that 5.9% of married adults received health insurance benefits through the Medicaid program compared to 19.2% of unmarried adults (the regression adjusted difference is 9.8 percentage points). Based on estimates by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average
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Medicaid payout per adult Medicaid enrollee in 2010 in the state of Michigan was $2,876 of which about 30% was paid directly by the state of Michigan.3 17. A similar pattern is true for other forms of government welfare assistance including public housing, government rent subsidies, and school food subsidies. Unmarried adults are 6.4 times more likely to be living in public housing (2.8% vs. 0.4%), 8.1 times more likely to be receiving a government rent assistance (3.5% vs. 0.4%), and 1.9 times more likely to have children receiving a subsidized school lunch (9.6% vs. 4.9%). The two housing-related differences decrease by about 20% and the school lunch difference decreases by about 50% once I include controls for the demographic characteristics of the individuals. 18. In each of these comparisons, I have purposefully not controlled for whether the individual has children, even for outcomes that are clearly earmarked for families with children such as the school lunch program. The reason for not including this control is that whether an individual has children is codetermined with their decision to marry, thus including this as a control would bias my estimate of differences by marital status. 19. One program for which children are a major portion of the cost of the program is Medicaid. The cost differences estimated above were all about differences in Medicaid coverage of adults based on their own marital status. In the case of Medicaid, the marital status of the parents of the child can also have a dramatic cost savings by reducing the fraction of children in the state receiving health
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Medicaid Payments per Enrollee, FY2010, http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-payments-per-enrollee/
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insurance through Medicaid. Based on data from the 2008-2011 ACS, I find that 21.8% of children whose parents are married receive Medicaid benefits compared to 61.3% of children whose parents are not married.
Marriage and income 20. Marriage also has a direct impact on individual wages which in turn increases tax revenues for the state. Korenman and Neumark provide one of the most cited studies in this area. They use longitudinal data on men from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men (NLS) and the personnel records of a large US company to document that marriage leads to larger wage increases for men. Using internal data on performance reports from the second dataset, they are able to show that these increases in wages operate through increases in these mens productivity at work after they marry. They also use their results to note that about half of the observed raw correlation between marriage and income is due to selection into marriage and the other half is due to a causal effect of marriage.4 21. Using data from the 2001-2008 ACS data for Michigan, I find that married adults earn about $10,000 more income each year ($40,500 vs. $30,470 in total personal income or $33,800 vs. $24,360 in terms of total wages and salary). In addition, married adults are about half as likely to be unemployed (6.3% vs. 12.6%). The marriage gap for men is much larger in terms of both income
Sanders Korenman and David Neumark. Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive? Journal of Human Resources, 26, 1991, 282-307.
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($56,300 vs. $33,000) and unemployment (6.4% vs. 15.1%) while the marriage gap is slightly negative for women in terms of income ($25,400 vs. $28,200) but still positive in terms of unemployment (6.1% vs. 10.2%). While the personal income of married women is lower than non-married women the family income is much larger ($84,300 vs. $39,600) and this is especially true if I just restrict the sample to women who are part of a couple ($85,500 vs. $27,400). Adjusting these differences by demographic characteristics reduces both the income and unemployment gap in half. 22. To translate these income numbers into state income tax revenues I used the Taxsim program developed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This program takes into account the differential way in which the tax code treats persons filing an individual or joint tax return. I find that the tax revenue for the average income of a single male in the state of Michigan would be $1,265 and the tax revenue average income of a single female would be $1,049. In contrast, a married couple making the average income for this group would jointly be paying a state income tax of $3,331. Marriage and public expenditures on criminal justice and health care 23. Marriage changes the behavior of adults that can produce costs savings to the state of Michigan by reducing the expenditures of various government programs. The most direct impact of marriage is on the costs involved with the criminal justice system. Probably one of the most extensive and rigorous studies on the effects of marriage on criminal behavior was conducted by Sampson, Laub, and
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Wimer. They gather the criminal records of 500 adolescents who were originally part of a study about adolescent delinquency. They combine this with information about each individuals marital history so that they can compare how an individuals likelihood to commit crime changes based on their marital status at the time. They find that marriage reduces the odds of committing a crime by 35%.5 24. The authors discuss four mechanisms through which marriage reduces criminality. First, marriage creates an interdependent system of obligation, mutual support, and restraint. Second, marriage changes the daily structure and routine of individuals and pulls individuals away from deviant peers. Third, married couples monitor each others behaviors and have a vested interest in exerting control over each others actions. Fourth, marriage creates a psychological transformation in individuals that cause them to be more serious about life and take more responsibility. 25. The Vera Institute of Justice reports that the Michigan Department of Corrections spent $1.3 billion on the state prison system in 2012 making the cost to house one inmate for one year $28,117. In terms of the more broad category for which increased criminality affects state expenditures, the state of Michigan budgets $2.8 billion dollars for public safety and corrections.6 None of these
Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer. Does marriage reduce crime? A counterfactual approach to within-individual causal effects. Criminology, 44, 2006, 465-508. 6 Rick Snyder. State Budget Office, (2012). State of Michigan Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. Lansing: State of Michigan.
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numbers include the costs borne directly by taxpayers of the state as the result of criminal activity in terms of theft, harm or lower quality of life.7 26. Marriage also has a direct impact on state expenditures on health care through the Medicaid program. As discussed earlier, individuals who are married are less likely to be on Medicaid in the first place. However, even among married individuals that are eligible for Medicaid benefits the actual expenditures per enrollee are lower since marriage results in higher levels of overall health and lower levels of medical expenditures. 27. Researchers at Mathematica provide a detailed summary of research on the impacts of marriage on health care costs. They report that married individuals experience higher levels of overall health and thus have fewer doctors visits and shorter average hospital stays. This latter effect might operate through the fact that married individuals can rely on their spouse for informal care rather than spending a longer time in the hospital. In addition, marriage increases overall levels of health by reducing smoking, improving ones diet, and increasing the use preventative services.8 Marriage creates a situation in which individuals have a vested interest to invest in each others health and monitor each others behavior. Given the natural self-control issues inherent in most individuals, this
Mark Cohen, Alex Piquero, and Wesley Jennings. Studying the Costs of Crime across Offender Trajectories. Criminology and Public Policy, 2, 2010, 279-305. 8 Robert Wood, Brian Goesling, and Sarah Avellar. The Effects of Marriage and Health: A Synthesis of Recent Research Evidence, Mathematica Policy Research, 2007. Debra Umberson. Family Status and Health Behaviors: Social Control as a Dimension of Social Integration Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 28, 1987, 306-319.
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level of social control from a spouse can have large effects in both the short and long run. V. Costs and benefits affect the decision to marry 28. While marriage is generally believed to be based primarily on love, there are a number of costs and benefits to getting married that influence whether or not a couple decides to marry. Much of the discussion in this section draws on a chapter that I wrote for the Research Handbook of Economics of Family Law about various factors that influence the decision to marry.9 The general point of this section is that individuals respond to economic incentives when deciding to marry just as they do with almost any other decision in life. 29. The specific question in this case is whether a couple would decide to marry in order to receive employer provided health benefits. While this specific question has not been addressed in the academic literature, there has been considerable research on other benefits and costs to getting married that relate directly to this issue. In particular, I will discuss the impact of various government economic incentives (or disincentives) that have been shown to impact marriage including pension benefits, taxes, and direct costs to getting married. Pension benefits 30. Two of the largest benefits that employers provide to the spouse of their employees are health insurance and pensions. Pension benefits for married
Joseph Price. Is it Just about Love?: Factors that Influence Marriage. Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011.
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couples provide a likely comparison to restricting health insurance benefits based on marital status. I will describe the empirical results of three studies, all published in top academic journals that provide results based on policy changes in Sweden, the US, and Canada. 31. The most notable example of how a change in benefits attached to marriage can increase marriage rates comes from the response to a change in rules governing a widows pension that occurred in Sweden in 1989. The policy allowed women who married by the end of the year to have access to a widows pension for the rest of their life (the new policy would provide benefits for only 12 months). Bjrklund, Ginther, and Sundstrm find that the number of marriages that occurred in December 1989 jumped from its historic average of 3,000 up to 64,000 marriages (a 21-fold increase). There was no change in marriage rates in the early 1990s, indicating that the policy change actually increased the stock of married couples rather than simply changing the timing of marriages that would have occurred anyways.10 32. Brien, Dickert-Conlin, and Weaver provide similar evidence in the US regarding eligibility rules for widows to receive Social Security benefits but where the incentives to marry are reversed. Prior to 1979, widows who remarried after age 60 were only eligible for half of their spouses benefits. In 1979, this disincentive
Anders Bjrklund, Donna Ginther, and Marianne Sundstrm. Does Marriage Matter for Children? Assessing the Causal Impact of Legal Marriage. IZA Discussion Paper #3189, 2007.
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to marry was removed. The authors of this study find that the removal of this disincentive increased marriage rates among 60-70 year-olds by 30%.11 33. Baker, Hanna, and Kantarevic examine the effect of a pension policy change in Canada on marriage decisions. Up until the mid-1980s, widows in Canada would lose their pension when they remarried. Reforms in Quebec in 1984 and in the rest of Canada in 1987 eliminated this marriage penalty, and allowed widows that remarried to keep their pensions. The removal of this marriage penalty increased the incentive to remarry, and widows in Canada responded accordingly. They found that there was a statistically significant increase in remarriage rates across age groups with marriage rates increasing by 24%-100%. For example, a 100% increase in rates for females aged 35-44 in Quebec, and a 24% increase for the same age group in the rest of Canada. The policy change was much larger in Quebec (than in the rest of Canada) where the highest penalties had been in place prior to the reform.12 34. All three of these studies illustrate that changes tying employer-provided benefits to marital status creates an incentive to marry and increases individuals decisions to marry (or not marry).
Michael Brien, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, and David Weaver. Widows Waiting to Wed? (Re)Marriage and Economic Incentives in Social Security Widow Benefits. Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 585-623. 12 Michael Baker, Emily Hanna, and Jasmin Kantarevic. The married widow: Marriage penalties matter! Journal of the European Economic Association, 2. 2004, 634-664.
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Tax penalties (or subsidies) 35. The tax code provides another setting in which economic incentives possibly affect the decision to marry. The marriage disincentives for women who work can be particularly large. Alm and Whittington use earnings data from nevermarried individuals in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how the effect of marriage penalties embedded in the tax code influences the decision to marry. They find that women in their sample experience an average marriage tax penalty of $2,620 per year, though this amount ranges from -$5,675 (a marriage subsidy) to $14,233 (a large marriage tax). For men, the marriage provides an average tax benefit of $429 though this amount ranges from a benefit of $3,997 to a penalty of $3,565. All of these estimates are based on empirical predictions of what the individuals earnings and spouses earnings would be if they were married (using an approach developed by Ted Schultz).13 36. Alm and Whittington find that for women the effect of the tax penalty is relatively small when evaluated at the average penalty and has an elasticity of 0.23, which means that a 10% increase in the tax penalty would reduce the probability of marriage by 2.3%. However, when evaluated at the maximum penalty for women in the sample, the elasticity is -1.25 suggesting that for this group, for whom the tax penalty might be particularly salient, a 10% increase in the tax penalty can reduce the probability of the woman marrying by 12.5%. The
James Alm and Leslie Whittington. For Love or Money? The Impact of Income Taxes on Marriage. Economica, 66,1999, 297-316. T. Paul Shultz. Marital Status and fertility in the United States. Journal of Human Resources, 29, 1994, 637-69.
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effect of the marriage penalty on the marriage decisions of men was smaller in magnitude and not statistically significant.14 Direct costs of getting married 37. There is also evidence that even small one-time costs to marry can be a disincentive for some couples to marry and this is even true for couples who have already had a child together. Historically states have required a blood test to occur prior to issuing a marriage license. These blood tests cost about $30-200 depending on whether the couple has them done at a clinic or a doctors office. Over time these laws have been repealed, lowering the direct cost of getting married. In a paper I coauthored with Kasey Buckles and Melanie Guldi, we find that the repeal of these blood test laws increased marriage licenses by 5.7%. About half of these marriages end up occurring in adjoining states, suggesting the overall increase in the marriage rate is about 3%.15 Comparison to current case 38. While none of the past research on the incentives to marry has empirically tested the impact of tying employer-provided spousal health insurance to marital status, the evidence based on the closest analog (spousal pension benefits) suggests that removing this particular marriage-connected benefit will change the incentive to marry for many couples. The other studies about the effects of
James Alm and Leslie Whittington. For Love or Money? The Impact of Income Taxes on Marriage. Economica, 66,1999, 297-316. 15 Kasey Buckles, Melanie Guldi, and Joseph Price. Change in the Price of Marriage: Evidence from Blood Test Requirements. Journal of Human Resources, 46, 2011, 539-567.
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incentives embedded in the tax code or the direct costs of getting married provide supporting evidence that economic incentives have real impacts on the decision to marry. 39. The exact size of the economic incentive created by this policy will vary across couples based on the other opportunities that are available to the partner of the public employee. However, for many couples the economic incentives of receiving health insurance benefits through a spouse will be rather large and at least as large as the economic incentives discussed in the prior research on this issue. 40. The plaintiffs note that the costs of domestic-partner benefits to public employers are limited because, among other reasons, the pool of lesbian and gay employees usually is very small, and not all employees in same-sex relationships enroll in such coverage. This explanation is faulty for two reasons. First, it ignores that fact that the law change applies to unmarried opposite-sex couples as well and there are 11 times as many unmarried opposite-sex couples as there are same-sex couples in the state of Michigan. Second, it ignores the unintended consequences of undermining marriage and increasing the relative incentive of opposite-sex couples to cohabit instead of marry. The social and economic costs of undermining marriage among opposite-sex couples constitute a much larger economic consideration since there are 150 times as many opposite-sex couples in the state of Michigan as there are same-sex couples. Thus while the arguments provided by the Plaintiffs focus on the effects of the Public Employee
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Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act has on same-sex couples. They ignore the beneficial social and economic effects the law has for the state of Michigan. VI. Conclusions 41. Restricting public employer provided health care benefits to married couples has the effect of fostering marriage as defined by Michigans Constitution, that is between one man and one woman. Marriage provides economic benefits to the state of Michigan by reducing welfare payments, increasing tax revenue, and reducing costs incurred by the state related to criminal justice and health care. 42. A couples decision to marry is affected by changes in the benefits of marriage and the benefits afforded to alternative arrangements, such as cohabitation. Restricting partner health benefits to married couples creates an additional incentive for couples to marry and this decision to marry produces economic benefits for the state of Michigan. Extending these benefits to cohabiting couples increases the direct costs to public employers to cover these benefits and increases the relative incentive to cohabit instead of marry. While the plantiffs arguments focus on the direct effects on same-sex couples, they ignore the effects overturning the law would have on the 92% of unmarried couples in Michigan that are opposite-sex and any social and economic benefits to the state itself.
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Dated: December 16, 2013
By:
Joseph Price, PhD
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Exhibit A: Curriculum Vitae

Joseph Price Brigham Young University Department of Economics 162 FOB Provo, UT 84602 Office: (801) 422-5296 Email: joe_price@byu.edu
Positions: Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Brigham Young University, 2013 Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Brigham Young University, 2007-2013 Faculty Research Fellow, NBER, 2008 Research Fellow, IZA, 2010Education: Ph.D. Economics, Cornell University, August 2007. B.A. Economics, Brigham Young University, August 2003. Publications: Doran, Kirk and Joseph Price. Pornography and Marriage. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, forthcoming. Buckles, Kasey and Joseph Price. Selection and the Marriage Premium for Infant Health. Demography, forthcoming. Just, David and Joseph Price. Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming. Platt, Brennan; Joseph Price; and Henry Tappen. Pay-to-Bid Auctions Management Science, forthcoming.
Just, David and Joseph Price. Default options and Food Choices Public Health and Nutrition, forthcoming.
Davis, Michael; Craig Palsson, Joseph Price. Taxing the Opposition: Cactus League Attendance and the Efficiency of the Cubs Tax International Journal of Sports Finance, forthcoming. Parkinson, Kristy; Joseph Price, Kosali Simon, and Sharon Tennyson. Consumer Reactions to Drug Information: Response to FDA Warnings on Antidepressants Review of Economics and the Household, forthcoming.
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Allen, Douglas; Catherine Pakaluk, and Joseph Price. Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress through School: A Comment on Rosenfeld. Demography, 50(3): 955-961, 2013. Cotton, Christopher; Frank McIntyre; and Joseph Price. Gender Differences in Reaction to Repeated Competition Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 86, 52-66, 2013. Palsson, Craig; Joseph Price, and Jared Shores, Ratings and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Movie Ratings Contemporary Economic Policy, 31(1), 13-21, 2013. Dahl, Gordon and Joseph Price. The Economists Approach to Studying the Impact of Media on the Family. Family Relations, 61(3), 363-373, 2012. Lefgren, Lars; Joseph Price, and Henry Tappen. Interracial Workplace Cooperation: Evidence from the NBA. Economic Inquiry, 51(1): 1026-1034, 2013. Patterson, Rich and Joseph Price. Pornography, Religion, and the Happiness Gap: Does Pornography Affect the Actively Religious Differently. Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, 51(1): 79-89, 2012. Price, Joseph and Justin Wolfers. Biased Referees?: Reconciling Results with the NBAs Analysis Contemporary Economic Policy, 30(3): 320-328, 2012. Price, Joseph; Marc Remer, and Daniel Stone. Sub-Perfect Game: Profitable Biases of NBA Referees. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 21(1): 271-300, 2012.
Price, Joseph and Jeffrey Swigert. Within-Family Variation in Obesity. Economics & Human Biology, 10(4): 333-339, 2012. Price, Joseph and Jason Riis. Behavioral Economics and the Psychology of Fruit and Vegetable Consumption. Journal of Food Studies, 1(1), 2012.
Just, David; Jesse Lund, and Joseph Price. The role of variety in increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables among children Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, 41(1): 72-81, 2012. Price, Joseph; Joshua Price, and Kosali Simon. Educational Gaps in Medical Care and Health Behavior: Evidence from Natality Data. Economics of Education Review, 30(5): 838849, 2011. Price, Joseph. Is it Just about Love?: Factors that Influence Marriage. Handbook of Family Law & Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, (ed. Lloyd Cohen and Joshua Wright), 2011. Price, Joseph, and Simon, Daniel. High School Sports and Teenage Births. In The Economics of Sport, Health, and Happiness: The Promotion of Well-Being through Sporting Activities Edward Elgar Publishing, (ed. Placido Rodriquez, Stefan Kesenne, and Brad Humphreys), 2011.
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Cao, Zheng; Joseph Price, and Daniel Stone. Performance under Pressure in the NBA Journal of Sports Economics, 12(3): 231-252, 2011. Buckles, Kasey; Melanie Guldi, and Joseph Price. Changing the Price of Marriage Journal of Human Resources, 46(3): 539-567, 2011. Dew, Jeffrey and Joseph Price. Beyond Employment and Income: The Association between Young Adults' Finances and Marital Timing Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 32(2): 424-436, 2011. Price, Joseph and Justin Wolfers. Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(4): 1859-1887, 2010. Price, Joseph; Brian Soebbing; David Berri; and Brad Humphreys. Tournament Incentives, League Policy, and NBA Team Performance Revisited Journal of Sports Economics, 11(2): 117-135, 2010. Price, Joseph and Kosali Simon. Education and the Response to Medical Research (with Kosali Simon), Journal of Health Economics, 28(6): 11661174, 2009. Wight, Suzanne; Suzanne Bianchi, Joseph Price, and Bijou Hunt. Teenage Time Use Social Science Research, 38(4): 792-806, 2009. Price, Joseph. Parent-Child Quality Time: Does Birth Order Matter? Journal of Human Resources 43(1): 240265, 2008. Price, Joseph. Gender Differences in the Response to Competition Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 61 (3), 320-333, 2008. Larsen, Timothy; Joseph Price, and Justin Wolfers. Racial Bias in the NBA: Implications in Betting Markets Journal of the Quantitative Analysis of Sports, 4(2), article 7, 2008. Ehrenberg, Ronald; George Jakubson; Jeffrey Groen, Eric So, and Joseph Price. Inside the Black Box of Doctoral Education Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 29(2): 134-150, 2007. Under Review or Revise-Resubmit: The Number of Children Being Raised by Gay or Lesbian Parents (with Ryan Hill* and Corbin Miller*) Sticking with What (Barely) Worked (with Lars Lefgren and Brennan Platt). What Matters in Movie Ratings? Cross-country Differences in which Content Influence Mature Movie Ratings (with Doug Gentile and Craig Palsson*). How Much More XXX is Generation X Using? (with Rich Patterson* and Mark Regnerus)
Pg ID 4433
Causes of gender differences in competition: theory and evidence (with Chris Cotton and Frank McIntyre) Lunch, Recess, and Nutrition: Responding to Time Incentives in the Cafeteria (with David Just) Technological change, relative worker productivity, and firm-level substitution: Evidence from the NBA (with Grant Gannaway*, Craig Palsson*, and David Sims) Impact of fruit smoothies on adolescent fruit and milk consumption during school breakfast (with Dylan Bates*) The Effect of Teenage Childbearing on Adult Civic Engagement (with Joseph Sabia, Liz Peters, and Reggie Covington) Grants: Benjamin Miller Research Grant, ILR, Cornell ($2,500), 1/2007 Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center Innovative Research Project Grant (w/ Kosali Simon), Cornell ($3,330), 6/2007 Institute for Social Science Seed Grant (w/ Kosali Simon), Cornell ($6,500), 7/2007 Womens Research Institute, BYU ($3,000), 11/2007 Family Studies Center, BYU ($6,000), 11/2007 Mentored Environment Grant, BYU ($13,000), 4/2008 Small Grants Program in Behavioral Economics (w/ David Just), USDA ERS ($30,000), 8/2008 Gerontology Program, BYU ($3,400), 2/2009 Witherspoon Institute ($1,275), 10/2009 Mentored Environment Grant, BYU ($13,090), 12/2009 Family Studies Center, BYU ($3,400), 12/2009 Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program (w/ David Just), USDA ERS ($150,000), 8/2010 Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Program (w/ David Just), ($29,000), 7/2011 Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program (w/ George Lowenstein, Paul Rozin, and Kevin Volpp), USDA ERS ($250,000), 8/2011 Mentored Environment Grant, BYU ($16,200), 12/2011 Family Studies Center (w/ Mike Findley and Dan Nielsen), BYU ($10,000), 1/2012 Education and Social Opportunity Grant (w/ Chris Cotton and Thomas Dee), Spencer Foundation ($28,000), 1/2012 Mentored Environment Grant, BYU ($10,870), 1/2013 Emmaline B. Wells Grant, BYU ($9,300), 1/2013 Professional Activities: Referee for: Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, American Economics Review, American Law and Economics Review, AEJ-Policy; AEJ-Applied; American Journal of Public Health, Biodemography, Demography, Economics and Human Biology, Economic Inquiry, Economica, Economic Journal, Economics Bulletin, Economics of Education Review, Econometrics, Educational Finance and Policy, Evaluation and Program Planning, Health
Pg ID 4434
Economics, Interfaces, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, Labour Economics, Management Science, Oxford Economic Papers, Pediatrics, Political Research Quarterly, Public Health and Nutrition, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Sexualities, Social Science Journal, Social Forces, Social Science and Medicine, Social Science Research, Southern Economic Journal Discussant: SEA (2006-2007, 2009-2010, 2012), APPAM (2006), WEA (2007, 2009, 20112013), AEA (2008, 2010-2011), SWEA (2008), PAA (2008), Social Costs of Pornography (2008), WSSA (2011), ASHEcon (2010, 2012)
Conference Presentations: American Society of Health Economists: 2008, 2010, 2012 APPAM research conference: 2005, 2006, 2012 Population Association of America: 2006-2010, 2013 Society of Labor Economics: 2006 (poster), 2007, 2008 (poster) American Economic Association: 2013 Southern Economic Association: 2006-2007, 2009-2010, 2012-2013 Western Economic Association: 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011-2013 NBER summer institute, Childrens workshop: 2005 USDA ERS conference: 2010 SIEPR Policy Forum, Sports Economics and Policy: 2011 Symposium on Behavioral Economics and Health: 2011-2013 Food Marketing Workgroup Conference: 2011 Western Social Science Association: 2011, 2013 American Public Health Association: 2012 Child Development Conference (Norway): 2009 Intl. Association of Agricultural Economists (China): 2009 Quadrilateral Behavioural Economics Workshop: 2011 IZA Conference on Discrimination (Germany): 2011 Gijon Conference on Sports Economics (Spain): 2010 National Poverty Center Conference on Religion: 2007 American Time Use conference: 2005 (poster), 2009 Mellon Foundation Graduate Education Initiative Conference: 2005 Intl. Assoc. of Sports Economists Conference: 2005 Invited Seminars: U. Illinois-Chicago (Feb. 2014); U. South Florida (Nov. 2013); Chicago- Harris School (Nov. 2013); U. Sydney (Aug. 2013); ANU (Aug. 2013); UT Austin (March 2012); Texas A&M (March 2012); Iowa State (Nov. 2011); LSU (March 2011); U. Pennsylvania (Feb. 2011); U. Miami (Feb. 2011); Michigan (Jan 2011); Notre Dame (Nov. 2011); Case Western (Nov 2010); UC Riverside (Oct 2010); UC Denver (April 2010); Washington University (March 2010); Utah Valley University (March 2010); U. British Columbia (Dec. 2009); U. Victoria (Dec. 2009); U. Utah (Dec. 2009); Virginia Tech (Nov. 2009); Florida State (April 2009); U. Washington (Feb 2009); Oregon State (Nov 2008); Baylor (Oct 2008); U. Miami (Oct 2008);
Pg ID 4435
UT-Arlington (April 2008); RAND (Nov 2007); Wharton (May 2006); Cornell (April 2006); U. of Oregon (August 2005) Brigham Young University: Sociology: (Oct 2007); Statistics (March 2008); Family Studies: (April 2008); Womens Research Institute: (Jan 2009); EIME (March 2010), Nutrition (Oct 2010), Communications (Oct 2013).
Pg ID 4436
EXHIBIT C
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Conclusion and Relief Requested............................................................. 14 Certificate of Service (e-file) ..................................................................... 15

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DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 10 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 11 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 12 DEPOSITION EXHIBIT 13

173 190 206 243

TABLE OF CONTENTS Witness JOSEPH PRICE, Ph.D. PAGE

EXAMINATION BY MR. WEIDENHAMMER: EXAMINATION BY MR. WOOD: EXHIBITS

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