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.
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 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.
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 review the literature surrounding the expansion of the Child Tax Credit and its effects on food and financial hardship experienced by households with children. The literature consistently finds receipt of the expanded credit is associated with an increase in food purchases and declines in food insufficiency and food insecurity. The effects of the credit expansion also vary by socioeconomic characteristics.
SNAP is the cornerstone food assistance program in the United States and has been shown to reduce the risk of food insecurity. Most research on the causal effect of SNAP on food insecurity relies on the 12-month food insecurity scale along with usage of SNAP at any point during the year. However, recent social surveys ask about experiences with food insecurity in the 30 days prior to the survey.
We examine the relationship between the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Black-White after-tax income inequality from 1980-2020. The EITC lowers overall inequality by 5-10 percent in a typical year, improving the incomes of Black households relative to White households in the bottom half of the distribution. Gains in relative economic status emerged after the 1993 EITC expansion, concentrated among working class Black households, and not extending to those at the very bottom.
I examine trends in the material well-being of working-class households using data from the Current Population Survey in the two decades surrounding the Great Recession. Average earnings, homeownership, and insurance coverage all fell, while absolute poverty and food insecurity accelerated leading up to the Great Recession. After-tax incomes were stagnant for much of the distribution across and within skill groups.