Research

This study examines whether regional variations in health status measures are consistent across the income gradient, or whether they are more pronounced at the lowest income levels. We use data from the Community Tracking Survey, a large randomized telephone survey of residents in 60 U.S. communities. Controlling for individual risk factors and county level income inequality, lowest income individuals have poorer scores on counts of chronic diseases, global health ratings, and the physical and mental components of the SF-12. Residents of the South have poorer scores on chronic disease counts, global health and physical health than residents of the Northeast, and poorer scores on physical and mental health than residents of the Midwest. Regional variations in the first three measures persist across the income gradient, and are more pronounced in the population group just above the poverty level. However, the lowest income group of residents of the South had poorer mental health scores than residents of all other regions, while the highest income group had better mental health scores than residents of all other regions. These findings suggest that a wide variety of community-level factors influence health status across the income gradient, while a separate set of community level factors may interact with income in communities to increase particularly mental health risks for a subset of the population.

We study the factors affecting the employment probability of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients using recent quarterly panel data from Atlanta, Georgia. A central focus of our study is to determine whether the TANF recipient’s proximity to job opportunity and the availability of childcare affect her probability of full-time employment. Both static and dynamic models of employment choice are estimated that control for unobserved individual effects. We estimate models separately for a sub-sample of TANF recipients living in public housing, whose residential locations can be considered exogenously determined. We find substantial evidence that individual and family characteristics (such as, the education of the recipient and the number of children and adults in her family) are important determinants of the employment probability of welfare recipients. On the other hand, spacerelated variables are found to be relatively unimportant.
 

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. In this paper we examine whether similar protective effects of SNAP against food insecurity are obtained whether using the 30-day or 12-month food insecurity scale using the December Supplement of the Current Population Survey for 2002-2019. Results indicate comparable average treatment effects of SNAP in mitigating food insecurity across both 30-day and 12-month reference periods.

Even before the advent of welfare reform, studies of low income working and welfare dependent groups showed that low wage working women are worse off than those who combine welfare with other income sources and that most used a wide variety of livelihood strategies. This is especially the case in poor rural settings where work is scarce and additional obstacles to employment such as lack of transportation and childcare are endemic. Data from a selfadministered survey of users of human service agency programs in four counties in a distressed region of Appalachian Ohio in 1999, 2001, and 2005, provide a comprehensive picture of livelihood strategies, including labor force participation, informal and self-provisioning practices, and use of government and private transfers early and late in the welfare reform process. We compare working and nonworking human service clients at all three time periods and across communities with different levels of capacity to implement welfare to work policies to determine how labor force participants differ from other recipients and whether they are better or worse off. The data demonstrate the problems in making ends meet for all respondents, regardless of employment status and county capacity in all three time periods. While county differences are minimal, workers are better off than nonworkers and more so by the third survey year. They employ a wide variety of livelihood strategies be

Despite evidence that skilled labor is increasingly concentrated in cities, whether regional wage inequality is predominantly due to differences in skill levels or returns is unknown. We compare Appalachia, with its wide mix of urban and rural areas, to other parts of the U.S., and find that gaps in both skill levels and returns account for the lack of high wage male workers. For women, skill shortages are important across the distribution. Because rural wage gaps are insignificant, our results suggest that widening wage inequality between Appalachia and the rest of the U.S. owes to a shortage of skilled cities.

We offer new evidence on earnings volatility of men and women in the United States over the past four decades by using matched data from the March Current Population Survey. We construct a measure of total volatility that encompasses both permanent and transitory instability, and that admits employment transitions and losses from self employment. We also present a detailed decomposition of earnings volatility to account for changing shares in employment probabilities, conditional variances of continuous workers, and conditional mean variances from labor-force entry and exit. Our results show that earnings volatility among men increased by 15 percent from the early 1970s to mid 1980s, while women’s volatility fell, and each stabilized thereafter. However, this pooled series masks important heterogeneity in volatility levels and trends across education groups and marital status. We find that men’s earnings volatility is increasingly accounted for by employment transitions, especially exits, while the share of women’s volatility accounted for by continuous workers rose, each of which highlights the importance of allowing for periods of non-work in volatility studies.

This aim of this paper is to assess the economic status of rural people five decades after publication of President Johnson's National Commission on Rural Poverty report The People Left Behind. Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the CPS, along with county data from the Regional Economic Information System, I focus on how changes in employment, wages, and the social safety net have influenced the evolution of poverty and inequality in rural and urban places. The evidence shows that large numbers of rural Americans are disengaged from the labor market, gains in human capital attainment have stagnated, and the retreat from marriage continues for the medium- and less-skilled individuals. However, the social safety net has been more effective in redistributing income within rural areas than in urban centers. Work, education, and marriage are the three main pathways out of poverty for most Americans, whether residing in urban or rural locales, and thus making progress against poverty and inequality faces major economic and demographic headwinds.

Recent expansions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) have generated interest in how the credit affects parental labor supply and child poverty. However, there is limited empirical evidence of the labor supply effects of the CTC outside of the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We address this knowledge gap using 1997-2019 data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to provide updated estimates of how low and middle-income parents’ employment responds to changes in incentives for three groups of parents: unmarried mothers, married mothers, and married fathers. We find the most elastic employment response for unmarried and married mothers, with estimated elasticities of 0.39 and 0.38, respectively, in response to changes in the return to work. Married fathers are least sensitive, with an estimated elasticity of 0.07. We then estimate small but statistically significant income elasticities of -0.025 and -0.132 for unmarried and married mothers, respectively. We also examine how parameter estimates differ based on children’s age and the parent’s education or race-ethnicity, as well as test the possibility that individuals respond differently to a change in cash wages than they do to economically equivalent changes in tax and transfer program incentives. We use these estimated parameters to simulate the employment effects of eight CTC policy options. We estimate that restoring the fully refundable CTC benefit schedule in place during 2021 would reduce overall employment by about one percentage point, while a fully refundable CTC only for children under age two would reduce overall employment by about 0.1 percentage points. Other reforms to make the CTC more valuable for lower-income workers would modestly increase employment. Our results show that policymakers could expand access to the CTC - including for low-income workers and parents of very young children – while having little effect on parental employment. These are timely considerations as policymakers consider whether to renew the current law CTC provisions – which are set to expire after 2025 – or expand eligibility. 

Theory suggests that adverse life events—such as unemployment or health shocks—can result in food insecurity, which has increased substantially in the U.S. over the past decade alongside the obesity epidemic. We test this proposition by estimating the effects of a specific and salient mental health event—maternal depression during the postpartum year—on child and family food insecurity. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort, we estimate the effects of maternal depression on food insecurity using both single- and two-stage models, and explore potential buffering effects of relevant public assistance programs and supports. We find that moderate to severe maternal depression increases the likelihood that children and households experience any food insecurity—by between 50 and 80%, depending on the measure of food insecurity. We also find that maternal depression increases the likelihood of reliance on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; Medicaid; and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, suggesting that these programs play a buffering role.

This study estimated the effects of welfare reform in the 1990s, which permanently restructured and contracted the cash assistance system in the U.S., on food insecurity—a fundamental form of hardship—of the next generation of young adults. An implicit goal underlying welfare reform was the disruption of an assumed intergenerational transmission of disadvantage; however, little is known about the effects of welfare reform on the well-being of the next generation. Using intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a variation on a difference in differences framework, this study exploits 3 key sources of variation in childhood exposure to welfare reform: (1) Risk of exposure across birth cohorts. (2) Variation of exposure within cohorts because different states implemented welfare reform in different years. (3) Variation between individuals with the same exposure who were more likely and less likely to rely on welfare. We found that longer exposure to welfare reform led to decreases in food insecurity of the next generation of households, by about 10% for a 5-year increase in exposure, with stronger effects for women, individuals exposed at least 13 years, individuals exposed at relatively young ages (0-5 years), and individuals whose mothers were not high school dropouts. We found no evidence that Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits explained any of the observed effects.

We use longitudinal administrative tax data from Washington DC (DC) to study how EITC expansions undertaken by Washington DC affect income and inequality in the city. We find that DC EITC credit expansions between 2001 and 2009 are associated with recipient pre-tax earnings growth of roughly 3-4 percent, primarily among single mothers. Together these credits reduce post-tax inequality for the 10th percentile relative to median households. However, composition changes in the city and growing overall inequality mitigates this inequality reduction toward the end of the period. Overall, these results complement existing research showing that the EITC has a positive effect on labor market outcomes and household well-being.

Administrative data are considered the “gold standard” when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on the potential problems with administrative records or their implications for econometric estimates. We explore issues with administrative data using the FoodAPS, a unique dataset that contains two different administrative measures of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation as well as a survey-based measure. We first document substantial ambiguity in the two administrative participation variables and show that they disagree with each other almost as often as they disagree with self-reported participation. Estimated participation and misreporting rates can be meaningfully sensitive to choices made to resolve this ambiguity and disagreement. We then explore sensitivity in regression estimates of the associations between SNAP and food insecurity, obesity, and the Healthy Eating Index. The signs remain the same regardless of the SNAP participation measure used, and the coefficient estimates are in most cases not statistically different from each other. However, there are some meaningful differences in the magnitudes of the estimates and their levels of statistical significance. 

In two recent cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court examined whether race should be allowed to play an explicit role in the admission decisions of schools. The primary argument in these court cases and others has been that racial diversity strengthens the quality of education offered to all students. Underlying this argument is the notion that educational benefits arise if interactions between students of different races improve preparation for life after college by, among other things, fostering mutual understanding and correcting misperceptions. Then, a fundamental condition necessary for the primary legal argument to be compelling is that the types of students who choose to enter college actually have incorrect beliefs about individuals from different races at the time of college entrance. In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct evidence about this condition by taking advantage of unique new data that was collected specifically for this purpose.

We examine intra- and intergenerational food security dynamics in the United States using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) while accounting for measurement error. To proceed, we apply recently developed methods on the partial identification of transition matrices. We show that accounting for measurement error is crucial as even modest errors can dwarf the information contained in the data. Nonetheless, we find that much can be learned under fairly weak assumptions; the strongest and most informative being that measurement errors are serially uncorrelated. While the evidence of both intragenerational and intergenerational is consistent with significant mobility, we also find food security status to be persistent for at least some households in the tails of the distribution. Finally, we document some heterogeneities in the dynamics across households differentiated by race and education.

This project examines reasons why food insecure older adults in the U.S. are under-enrolled in SNAP and why this pattern varies among older adults of different ages. Conventional wisdom suggests several explanations that discourage participation, ranging from older adults’ preferences to program limitations. We examine the topic with two approaches. First, using an administrative dataset from Oregon (n=95,467) including monthly observations over a five-year period, we analyze SNAP spells for near-old (51 years old in 2014) and older people (60+ in 2014). Second, we interview SNAP outreach workers (n=22) to examine program access barriers and lived experiences of food insecurity among older adults in Oregon. We find that while 43% of near-old and older adults (combined) exit SNAP after a short spell (1-12 months), those with long-term continuous SNAP receipt (>55 months) represent the majority (59%) of the near-old and older adult SNAP population at any given time. Moreover, we find higher proportions of long-term SNAP participation among the older cohort (ages 60-64) compared to the younger cohort (ages 51-55). The probability of exiting SNAP is lower among female and Asian older adults, as well as individuals with a previous SNAP spell. The probability of exiting SNAP is higher among near-old and older adults who are Hispanic, have earnings in the previous quarter, and live in households with more than one person. Preliminary interview results (delayed by COVID) describe program outreach deficits, challenges with web-based enrollment and application delays, gaps in services addressing complex needs, and transportation issues.

This paper investigates how barriers to employment, human capital, and demographic characteristics affect women’s exit routes off welfare. Specifically, I address two questions. First, what are the avenues through which women leave welfare? Second, are mental and physical health problems, domestic violence, and lack of access to transportation, characteristics that have been ignored in other studies of welfare dynamics, associated with different welfare exit routes? Using multinomial logistic regression and data from the Women’s Employment Survey, this project examines the specific exit route chosen in detail and goes beyond general dynamics associated with welfare exit in order to capture the full heterogeneity of outcomes now witnessed in the post-Welfare Reform world. Results indicate that women with physical limitations are less likely to leave welfare either through obtaining a new job or through a non-work exit. Finally, women with transportation problems or with post-traumatic stress disorder are less likely to leave welfare through combining work and welfare.

There is widespread perception that externalities from troubled children are significant, though measuring them is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. We estimate the negative spillovers caused by children from troubled families by exploiting a unique data set in which children’s school records are matched to domestic violence cases. We find that children from troubled families significantly decrease their peers’ reading and math test scores and increase misbehavior in the classroom. The achievement spillovers are robust to within-family differences and when controlling for school-by-year effects, providing strong evidence that neither selection nor common shocks are driving the results.

This paper exploits a source of variation in the eligibility for federal nutrition programs to identify the program effects on food insecurity. Children are eligible for the WIC program until the day before they turn 61 months old. The result is an age discontinuity in program participation at the 61-month cutoff. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth-cohort dataset, we find strong evidence of a sizeable increase in household food insecurity at the 61-month cutoff. Our findings are robust to different model specifications, datasets, and various bandwidth choices using various non-parametric estimations.

The important points from our analyses are two-fold. First, the implications of family change for family poverty appeared to be larger in Appalachia than in non-Appalachian areas, independent of regional differences in employment opportunities, industrial structure, demographic variables, and unobserved state and county variables. Second, family effects, notably those associated with changing female headship, were estimated to be larger than those for conventional economic and human capital variables. Our simulations in fact suggested that family poverty would have been roughly 10 to 15 percent lower than the observed poverty rate if Appalachian families had not changed since 1990.

This study examined whether food insecurity was different for children in cohabiting or repartnered families compared to those in single mother or married (biological) parent families. We compared probabilities of child food insecurity across different family structures in four national datasets the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort ECLS-B); the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study (FFWCS); the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K); and, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement (PSID-CDS). The likelihood of child food insecurity in cohabiting or repartnered families were generally higher than in married biological parent families and often statistically indistinguishable from single mother families.  Children whose biological parents are cohabiting or whose biological mothers have repartnered have comparable risk for food insecurity to those in single mother households. However, family structure is not related to child food insecurity above and beyond the influence of other factors such as household income, family size, and maternal race, ethnicity, education, and age.