Research
2025
The persistence of disadvantage across generations is a central concern for social policy in the United States. While an extensive literature has focused on income mobility, much less is known about the persistence of material hardship. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the intergenerational persistence of food insecurity.
Why do regions decline? This paper explores how adverse shocks in one period affect regional adjustment to subsequent shocks, emphasizing the role of selective migration. I leverage differential exposure to coal’s decline and variation in proximity to historical employment shifts to study this process of regional decline in Appalachia. The consequences of the 2007–2017 coal shock were more acute in counties that experienced larger declines in college-educated adults due to exogenous labor demand shifts in the 1980s.
The outside options available to workers critically determine the transitional costs of labor demand shocks. Using comprehensive administrative data, we examine the worker-level effects of the decline of coal — a regionally concentrated labor demand shock that reduced employment by more than 50% between 2011 and 2021. We show that coal workers experienced large and persistent earnings losses compared to similar workers less connected to coal.
Between 2011 and 2016, coal mining employment declined by over 50 percent in Appalachia, resulting in large earnings and employment losses in coal-dependent communities. Whether these disruptions reflect temporary adjustment costs or signal more persistent decline depends in part on the extent and nature of various investment responses. This paper leverages differential Commuting Zone (CZ-) level exposure to coal’s decline to estimate its impact on government transfers and postsecondary training investments.
We investigate how length of time on welfare during childhood affects economic outcomes in early adulthood. Using intergenerationally linked mother-child pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we adopt a nonlinear difference-in-differences framework using the 1990s welfare reform to estimate average and quantile treatment effects on intensity of welfare use and earnings in adulthood.
2024
Measuring poverty is complex, requiring extensive research and a number of expert judgments on how to define resources and needs, as well as the data infrastructure necessary to operationalize measurement. In this paper, we briefly summarize the evolution of poverty measurement in the United States and discuss the recommended changes to the Supplemental Poverty Measure from a recently concluded National Academies panel. Emphasis is placed on the treatment of medical care, childcare, and housing, as well as the need to incorporate administrative data records with survey data.
We estimate the distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of prime-age men and women in the US. A quantile selection model is used to consistently recover the full distribution of wages accounting for systematic differences in employment, permitting us to construct gender and education-specific age-wage profiles, as well as measures of life cycle gender wage gaps.
We examine trends in household disposable income inequality and potential mechanisms shaping inequality through changes to work, wages, earnings, marriage, and the tax and transfer system in the United States over the nearly five-decade period from 1975 to 2022. Overall after-tax and transfer income inequality increased more than 25 per cent since the mid-1970s, and by as much as 50 per cent when comparing the 90th and 10th percentiles.
We examine the responsiveness of the safety net to the Pandemic Recession and compare it to that in the Great Recession. Using monthly state-level administrative caseload data from five large transfer programs–SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, SSI, and UI–and measuring responsiveness by the state-level caseload response to cross-state variation in measures of the business cycle–we find that the safety net response during the Pandemic Recession was greater than occurred during the Great Recession for the most important recessionary-relief programs–UI and SNAP.
We examine the contribution of the U.S. tax and social safety net to ameliorating racial and geographic household income gaps. Using nearly five decades of data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, we make a comparative assessment of after-tax and transfer Black-White and rural-urban household income gaps in relation to similar gaps based solely on household earnings. Our results paint a mixed portrait of economic progress of Black and rural households relative to their White and urban counterparts over the last 50 years.