Research

I provide a descriptive portrait of the trends in participation and composition of households receiving assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey for the calendar years 1979-2024. I first present estimates of participation overall and by socioeconomic characteristics of the householder. The share of households receiving SNAP increased from 8% to 10% over the sample period, with the most notable increases in participation rates among householders with some college education or less, those with a disability, those without children or living alone, and those households with gross family incomes placing them in near poverty. I then focus on the composition of households receiving SNAP in comparison to the overall population of households, including the share of householders by age, race/ethnicity, education attainment, nativity, disability, employment, and income. The heads of households receiving SNAP have become more educated over time with those with at least some college education tripling to 40%, and they have become older as the share of heads age 60 and older has doubled since the Great Recession to become the largest share by age. Households with SNAP are smaller today than in the past, with growth in 1-person households coming at the expense of those with 4 or more people. There has been a secular decline in the share of households with SNAP with family incomes in poverty, meaning a growing share are those with incomes two to three times the federal poverty level. This is consistent with rising participation rates of those with disabilities and those age 60 and older, each of whom is exempt from the gross-income test for eligibility. Despite the aging of householders with SNAP, the share of households with labor-market earnings has held steady at about 60%, and earnings comprises the largest and growing share of household disposable incomes.

The share of tax units headed by single women is twice as large for Black units than White units, and this gender differential in tax unit structure significantly contributes to Black-White income inequality. I decompose the Black-White disposable income gap by tax unit structure categories to estimate single women’s contribution to racial income inequality and examine the extent to which this is influenced by taxes and transfers at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles. The portion of the gap explained by single women without children has grown consistently since the 1980s while the share attributable to low-income single mothers has declined in recent years. At the median, single mothers account for an average of 26 percent of the gap from 1980-2022, and single women without children account for an average of 11 percent. The declining importance of single mothers is in large part due to redistribution of the tax and transfer systems and declining inequality between Black and White single mothers. For single women without children, their share of the gap is exacerbated by the tax code despite declining within-group racial inequality. Singles, particularly single women, represent an under-investigated group in research on tax policy and racial inequality. I provide evidence that single mothers and single women without children are important to understanding Black-White income inequality relative to single men as well as demographic and economic factors.

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. 

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we provide the first evidence on the causal transmission of food security from childhood to young adulthood. A causal assessment is complicated by unobserved factors that jointly influence food security status as a child and subsequently as a young adult. Using nonparametric partial identification methods, we find that growing up in a food secure household increases the chances of being food secure as a young adult by between 5.7 and 10.5 percentage points, or at least 7.9%. Among nonwhites, we bound this effect to lie within the narrow range of 5.9 and 6.7 percentage points, or at least 8.6%. 

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. Childhood food insecurity is associated with at least 10 percentage points higher probability of food insecurity as an adult, with estimates varying by severity of childhood exposure, life-course timing, and accounting for endogeneity and underreporting. We explore potential mechanisms behind this persistence related to perceptions, behaviors, and human capital. 

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. These findings indicate that the adverse effects of shocks can accumulate over time, leaving certain regions differentially vulnerable to new challenges.

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. Unlike worker-level analyses of labor demand shocks in more spatially diffuse industries, we find that non-employment is an important margin of adjustment. Workers receive substantially lower earnings when employed. Moving between sectors or regions does little to mitigate these losses. Instead, we observe significant increases in SSDI receipt. Our findings suggest that transitional costs are higher in regionally concentrated industries when skills do not easily transfer across sectors.

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. Exposed CZs experienced significant increases in government transfer payments per capita. In contrast, coal’s decline produced no statistically detectable change in postsecondary degree completions, enrollment, or institutional finances. This null training response contrasts with documented effects in other settings. Given the importance of human capital in regional recovery from economic shocks, these findings suggest that distressed regions affected by the transition away from legacy energy sectors may struggle to adapt without more targeted support for postsecondary training.

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. The causal estimates indicate that additional childhood welfare exposure leads to more adulthood years on the broader safety net for both daughters and sons, yet this positive relationship only applies below moderate levels of adult welfare participation and reverses at greater levels of dependence. Increasing childhood welfare exposure implies lower earnings in adulthood for daughters, however we find no evidence that it depresses adult sons’ earnings. Both daughters and sons exhibit some wage penalty from childhood welfare exposure, yet only daughters are penalized through hours worked in the labor market.

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.