The least among us
The Changing Association Among Marriage, Work, and Child Poverty in the United States, 1974–2010
Regina Baker
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2015, Pages 1166–1178
Abstract:
Marriage and work have long been central to debates regarding poverty and the family. Although ample research has demonstrated their negative association with child poverty, both marriage and work have undergone major transformations over recent decades. Consequently, it is plausible that their association with child poverty may have also changed. Using 10 waves of U.S. Census Current Population Survey data from the Luxembourg Income Study, this study examined the relationships among marriage, work, and relative measures of child poverty from 1974 to 2010. The results indicated that both marriage and work still decrease the odds of child poverty. However, time interactions showed marriage's negative association with child poverty has declined in magnitude, whereas work's negative association with child poverty has increased in magnitude. These findings underscore the historically varying influence of demographic characteristics for poverty. They also suggest the limitations of overemphasizing marriage and the growing importance of work for reducing child poverty in America.
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The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the U.S. Welfare System
Robert Moffitt
Demography, June 2015, Pages 729-749
Abstract:
Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-elderly, nondisabled single-parent families to married-parent families; and from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect long-standing, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not.
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How Does Household Income Affect Child Personality Traits and Behaviors?
Randall Akee et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Existing research has investigated the effect of early childhood educational interventions on the child’s later-life outcomes. These studies have found limited impact of supplementary programs on children’s cognitive skills, but sustained effects on personality traits. We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children’s emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children’s emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for children who are lagging behind their peers in these measures before the intervention. Increasing household incomes reduce differences across adolescents with different levels of initial emotional-behavioral symptoms and personality traits. We also examine potential channels through which the increased household income may contribute to these positive changes. Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment.
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The Effects of Minimum Wages on Food Stamp Enrollment and Expenditures
Michael Reich & Rachel West
Industrial Relations, October 2015, Pages 668–694
Abstract:
We provide the first causal analysis of how minimum wages affects enrollments and expenditures in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Exploiting state- and federal-level variation in minimum-wage policy between 1990 and 2012, and incorporating local controls in our specifications, we find that a 10 percent minimum wage increase reduces SNAP enrollment between 2.4 and 3.2 percent, and reduces program expenditures an estimated 1.9 percent. If the federal minimum wage were increased from $7.25 to $10.10, enrollment would fall between 7.5 and 8.7 percent (3.1 to 3.6 million persons) relative to 2012 levels, and annual expenditures would decrease 6 percent ($4.6 billion).
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The Impact of Social Security Income on Cognitive Function at Older Ages
Padmaja Ayyagari & David Frisvold
NBER Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
Prior literature has documented a positive association between income and cognitive function at older ages, however, the extent to which this association represents causal effects is unknown. In this study, we use an exogenous change in Social Security income due to amendments to the Social Security Act in the 1970s to identify the causal impact of Social Security income on cognitive function of elderly individuals. We find that higher benefits led to significant improvements in cognitive function and that these improvements in cognition were clinically meaningful. Our results suggest that interventions even at advanced ages can slow the rate of decline in cognitive function.
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From Need to Hope: The American Family and Poverty in Partisan Discourse, 1900–2012
Gwendoline Alphonso
Journal of Policy History, October 2015, Pages 592 - 635
"The Republican and Democratic Parties in the last three decades have increasingly directed their policy discourse away from issues of material need and poverty. Whereas Republicans in the late 1970s and 1980s previously committed 7 to 8 percent of their platforms to discuss issues of poverty, by the 2000s that percentage had fallen to under 2 percent; similarly, in the heyday of their Great Society agenda, Democrats addressed poverty issues in 8 to 9 percent of their platforms, but by 2012 that percentage too fell to 2.5 percent. Since 2004 the levels at which both parties now discuss poverty in their platforms are thus at historic lows, similar only to the period before the Great Depression. What explains the diminishing salience of poverty within the parties’ policy agendas? To account for this, this article highlights a concurrent development: the parties’ references to family within poverty planks increased dramatically just as partisan attention to poverty ebbed."
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Did the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act affect Dietary Intake of Low-Income Individuals?
Geetha Waehrer, Partha Deb & Sandra Decker
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between increased Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits following the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the diet quality of individuals from SNAP-eligible compared to ineligible (those with somewhat higher income) households using data from the 2007-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The ARRA increased SNAP monthly benefits by 13.6% of the maximum allotment for a given household size, equivalent to an increase of $24 to $144 for one-to-eight person households respectively. In the full sample, we find that these increases in SNAP benefits are not associated with changes in nutrient intake and diet quality. However, among those with no more than a high school education, higher SNAP benefits are associated with a 46% increase in the mean caloric share from sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and a decrease in overall diet quality especially for those at the lower end of the diet quality distribution, amounting to a 9 percent decline at the 25th percentile.
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Hilary Hoynes & Ankur Patel
NBER Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
In this paper, we examine the effect of the EITC on the employment and income of single mothers with children. We provide the first comprehensive estimates of this central safety net policy on the full distribution of after-tax and transfer income. We use a quasi-experiment approach, using variation in generosity due to policy expansions across tax years and family sizes. Our results show that a policy-induced $1000 increase in the EITC leads to a 7.3 percentage point increase in employment and a 9.4 percentage point reduction in the share of families with after-tax and transfer income below 100% poverty. Event study estimates show no evidence of differential pre-trends, providing strong evidence in support of our research design. We find that the income increasing effects of the EITC are concentrated between 75% and 150% of income-to-poverty with little effect at the lowest income levels (50% poverty and below) and at levels of 250% of poverty and higher. By capturing the indirect effects of the credit on earnings, our results show that static calculations of the anti-poverty effects of the EITC (such as those released based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Short 2014) may be underestimated by as much as 50 percent.
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Estimating Neighborhood Choice Models: Lessons from a Housing Assistance Experiment
Sebastian Galiani, Alvin Murphy & Juan Pantano
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use data from a housing assistance experiment to estimate a model of neighborhood choice. The experimental variation, which effectively randomizes the rents that households face, helps us to identify a key structural parameter of the model. Access to two randomly-selected treatment groups, in addition to a control group, allows for the out-of-sample validation of the model using a group of households who were not used in estimation and who faced a separate set of incentives. We use our estimated model to simulate the effects of changing the subsidy-use constraints implemented in the actual experiment and find that restricting subsidies to even lower poverty neighborhoods substantially reduces take-up. As a result, average exposure to poverty actually increases under these more restrictive subsidies. We also simulate the effect of adding additional subsidy restrictions based on neighborhood racial composition and find that this policy does not change the average household exposure to either neighborhood racial composition or poverty.
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Assisted Housing and Income Segregation among Neighborhoods in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
Ann Owens
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 2015, Pages 98-116
Abstract:
Over the past 40 years, assisted housing in the United States has undergone a dramatic geographic deconcentration, with at least one unit of assisted housing now located in most metropolitan neighborhoods. The location of assisted housing shapes where low-income assisted renters live, and it may also affect the residential choices of nonassisted residents. This article examines whether the deconcentration of assisted housing has reduced the segregation of families by income among neighborhoods in metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2005–9. I find that the deconcentration of assisted housing resulted in modest economic residential integration for very low-income families. However, high-income families became even more segregated, as assisted housing was deconcentrated, potentially offsetting the economic integration gains and ensuring that very low-income families are living in neighborhoods with only slightly higher-income neighbors. I conclude by discussing features of housing policies that might promote greater income integration among neighborhoods.
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Inter-generational effects of disability benefits: Evidence from Canadian social assistance programs
Kelly Chen, Lars Osberg & Shelley Phipps
Journal of Population Economics, October 2015, Pages 873-910
Abstract:
Individuals with disabilities face greater challenges in the labor market than able-bodied individuals, and a growing body of research is finding that their children also tend to have more developmental problems than the children of able-bodied parents. Can transfer payments help reduce this gap? In this paper, we present the first evidence on how parental disability benefits affect the well-being of children. Using changes in real benefits under ten disability benefit programs in Canada as an identification strategy and Statistics Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) as the data source on child outcomes, we find strong evidence that higher benefits lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, as measured by math scores in standardized tests, hyperactive symptoms, and emotional anxiety behavior. The effect is larger on children with a disabled mother than on those with a disabled father.
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Does Wal-Mart Cause an Increase in Anti-Poverty Expenditures?
Michael Hicks
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: This article addresses the role of Wal-Mart Store entrance in changing expenditures on federal and state anti-poverty transfers in the United States.
Methods: Using a panel of the conterminous 48 states, correcting for time and spatial autocorrelation and local government mix and policy changes.
Results: I find that the number of Wal-Marts and their employment share in the retail sector have no impact on food stamps or AFDC/TANF expenditures. In models that account for retail employment share a 1 percent increase in the Wal-Mart's share reduced AFDC/TANF expenditures by 3.3 percent.
Conclusions: I find that Wal-Mart does increase Medicaid expenditures by roughly $898 per worker, which is consistent with other studies of the Medicaid costs per low-wage worker across the United States.
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The Impact of Mothers’ Earnings on Health Inputs and Infant Health
Naci Mocan, Christian Raschke & Bulent Unel
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of mothers’ earnings on birth weight and gestational age of infants in the U.S. It also analyzes the impact of earnings on mothers’ consumption of prenatal medical care, and their propensity to smoke and drink during pregnancy. The paper uses census division- year-specific skill-biased technology shocks as an instrument for mothers’ earnings and employs a two-sample instrumental variables strategy. About 14 million records of births between 1989 and 2004 are used from the Natality Detail files along with the CPS Annual Demographic Files from the same period. The results reveal that an increase in weekly earnings prompts an increase in prenatal care of low-skill mothers (those who have at most a high school degree) who are not likely to be on Medicaid, and that earnings have a small positive impact on birth weight and gestational age of the newborns of these mothers. Specifically, if a mother's earnings double, this produces a weight gain of the newborn by about 100 grams and an increase in gestational age by 0.7 weeks. An increase in earnings does not influence the health of newborns of high-skill mothers (those with at least some college education). Variations in earnings have no impact on birth weight for mothers who are likely to be on Medicaid.
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Low-Income Housing Development, Poverty Concentration, and Neighborhood Inequality
Matthew Freedman & Tamara McGavock
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Fall 2015, Pages 805–834
Abstract:
Considerable debate exists about the merits of place-based programs that steer new development, and particularly affordable housing development, into low-income neighborhoods. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in incentives to construct and rehabilitate rental housing across neighborhoods generated by Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program rules, we explore the impacts of subsidized development on local housing construction, poverty concentration, and neighborhood inequality. While a large fraction of rental housing development spurred by the program is offset by a reduction in the number of new unsubsidized units, housing investment under the LIHTC has measurable effects on the distribution of income within and across communities. However, there is little evidence the program contributes meaningfully to poverty concentration or residential segregation.
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Jessica Todd
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, September 2015, Pages 437-458
Abstract:
The monthly cycle of daily food intake among adult participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is examined using data from the 2007–10 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Exogenous variation in interview and benefit receipt dates provides means for identification, and a difference-in-differences specification is used to account for the large boost in benefits that began in April 2009 via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Caloric intake declined as much as 25% at the end of the month prior to ARRA, but not after implementation. Few differences were observed for diet quality measures or among subgroups. Increases in SNAP benefit amounts may help smooth food intake over the benefit month.
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The not-very-rich and the very poor: Poverty persistence and poverty concentration in Sweden
Carina Mood
Journal of European Social Policy, July 2015, Pages 316-330
Abstract:
We question the common description of poverty in Western countries as largely brief and transient and show that the spell-based analyses from which this view stems diverts attention from the bulk of poverty, which is persistent rather than transient. Measures of poverty concentration are suggested. Using Swedish population data spanning 18 years (1990–2007, N (persons*years) = 102,754,809), we can avoid problems that plague poverty research using survey data and can give precise calculations of completed durations without relying on questionable assumptions. The majority of poverty years were experienced by people in long-term poverty: 69 percent of all poverty years over the 18-year period fell on people with 5 years or more in poverty. Half of all poverty years were borne by only 5 percent of the population, meaning that poverty was highly concentrated. This speaks in favour of the social policy efficiency in targeting a small group of long-term poor.