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.
Rajeev Darolia, UKCPR associate director, was recently appointed as a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Education. Darolia is a professor of public policy in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration. His research focuses on the impact of education policy on economic mobility and financial stability. Read the story.
UKCPR Director James Ziliak chaired a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that recommends updating the methodology used by the Census Bureau to calculate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The new report suggests use of a more comprehensive measure than the Official Poverty Measure to reflect more accurately a household's basic needs and resources. Read more.
UKCPR Director James Ziliak and colleague Maggie Jones, principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, were recently selected to receive the 2022 Richard A. Musgrave Prize for a paper published in the National Tax Journal. Their research analyzed the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit as an anti-poverty measure. Read More.
UKCPR Director James Ziliak is quoted in a new CNN article that examines food insecurity trends in the U.S. The CNN report notes that food insecurity among families with children declined in 2021 following a spike in 2020 during the pandemic. Read more.
UKCPR Director James Ziliak is quoted in an Aug. 15 New York Times article about an historic increase in benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which will see average benefits for needy families rise by 25 percent. Read full story.
A Web conference on Tax Policy for Low-Income Americans will be co-hosted by UKCPR Director James Ziliak and Bradley Hardy, associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, on Aug. 27. The conference is sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. Read full story.
UKCPR Director James Ziliak was quoted in an April 4 article in the New York Times about federal expansion of feeding programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the summer feeding program for school-aged children. The multi-billion-dollar expansion of food assistance is in response to growing rates of food insecurity caused by the Covid19 pandemic, as well as an attempt to address shortfalls that fragile families have faced since the Great Recession. The expansion, initiated through executive order directed to the US Department of Agriculture, represents the largest food assistance increase since the founding of the modern food stamp program, according to Ziliak. Read the NYT article.
