Research

The Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) is considered a crucial component of the social safety net in the United States, yet there is limited supporting evidence on the effects of WIC on the nutritional well-being and food security of infants and young children. Two key identification problems have been especially difficult to address. First, the decision to take up WIC is endogenous as households are not randomly assigned to the program; recipients are likely to differ from nonrecipients in unobserved ways (e.g., prior health) that are related to associated outcomes. Second, survey respondents often fail to report receiving public assistance, and the existing literature has uncovered substantial degrees of systematic misclassification of WIC participation. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), we apply recently developed partial identification methodologies to jointly account for these two identification problems in a single framework. Under relatively weak assumptions, we find that WIC reduces the prevalence of child food insecurity by at least 5.5 percentage points and very low food security by at least 1.5 percentage points.

This study seeks to determine the role that parental incarceration plays on the probability of food insecurity among families with children and very low food security of children using micro-level data from the Fragile Families and Child Well Being Study (FFCWS). The data set contains the 18-question food security module which allows us to explore the link between incarceration and food insecurity and very low food security among children, families, and adults. The incidence of very low food security in our data is somewhat higher than the national average, but the incidence of other levels of food security is similar to national aggregates.

The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) provides cash reimbursement to family day care, child care centers, homeless shelters, and after-school programs for meals and snacks served to children. While adults and school-aged children are eligible, the large majority of funding through this program is directed towards younger children. In 2009, 3.2 million children participated (versus 112,000 adults). In this research, we estimate the direct effect of provider participation in CACFP on household and child food insecurity of all income levels. We also explore the role of state institutional arrangements of CACFP on food security. We find that attending a child care setting that participates in CACFP has no effect on the risk of being food insecure. However, we do find that children in family care settings have a higher risk of experiencing childhood food insecurity if the provider participates in CACFP relative to similar children whose family care provider does not participate in CACFP. Given the growing body of evidence on the detrimental effects of nutritional deficiencies in early childhood, our study suggests that family day-care providers and child care centers that participate in CACFP may provide efficient intervention points for nutrition focused interventions.

To measure poverty, incomes must be made equivalent across households with different structures. In this paper, we use a very flexible ordered response model to analyze the relationship between income, demographic structure, and subjective assessments of financial wellbeing drawn from the 1991-2008 British Household Panel Survey. Our results suggest the existence of large-scale economies within marital/cohabiting couples, but substantial diseconomies from the addition of children or further adults. This pattern contrasts sharply with commonly-used equivalence scales and is consistent with explanations in terms of the capital requirements associated with additions to the core couple.

Leading up to the passage of the 1996 welfare reform, there was much speculation and debate over the possibility that states would \race to the bottom" in setting welfare generosity if given more control over their individual programs. In the fteen years after welfare reform, did such a race to the bottom ensue? Using a spatial dynamic econometric approach, I investigate welfare competition across multiple policy instruments and across three distinct welfare periods -- the AFDC regime, the experimental waiver period leading up to the reform, and the TANF era. Results suggest strategic policy setting occurs over multiple dimensions of welfare including the effective benefit level and the effective tax rate applied to recipient's earned income. Furthermore, strategic behavior appears to have increased over time, consistent with a race to the bottom after welfare reform. However, once controlling for own past policies, little evidence of cross-state strategic policy setting is found for the maximum benefit level.

In 2007, about 3.3 million households in the U.S. (8.3 percent of households with children) had fchildren who lacked consistent access to an adequate food supply, implying less than complete coverage of children by the food-assistance safety net. We use the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate the effect of food stamp participation on child food security. Our results indicate that food stamps play an important role in protecting the well-being of needy children by improving food security among children in low-income households who are faced with economic shocks.

Earnings nonresponse in the Current Population Survey is roughly 30% in the monthly surveys and 20% in the March survey. If nonresponse is ignorable, unbiased estimates can be achieved by omitting nonrespondents. Little is known about whether CPS nonresponse is ignorable. Using sample frame measures to identify selection, we find clear-cut evidence among men but limited evidence among women for negative selection into response. Wage equation slope coefficients are affected little by selection but because of intercept shifts, wages for men and to a lesser extent women are understated, as are gender gaps. Selection is least severe among household heads.

Rates of food insecurity in households with children have significantly increased over the past decade. The majority of children, including those at risk for food insecurity, participate in some form of non-parental child care during the preschool years. To evaluate the relationship between the two phenomenon, this study investigates the effects of child care arrangements on food insecurity in households with children. To address the selection bias problem that arises from the fact that enrollment in different types of child care is not a random process, this study uses propensity scores techniques. The authors compare outcomes across five child care arrangement patterns: no non-parental care (i.e., exclusive parent care), relative care, non-relative care, center care, and Head Start. Our results demonstrate that for low income preschoolers, compared to no non-parental care, attending a child care center reduces the probability of both food insecurity and very low food security, relative care reduces the probability of food insecurity, and non-relative care increases the probability of very low food security.

Using data linked across generations in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I estimate the relationship between exposure to volatile income during childhood and a set of socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. The empirical framework is an augmented intergenerational income mobility model that includes controls for income volatility. I measure income volatility at the family level in two ways. First, instability as measured by squared deviations around a family-specific mean, and then as percent changes of 25 percent or more. Volatility enters the model both separately and interacted with income level. I find that family income instability during childhood has a small, positive association with high school dropout–one which appears driven by volatility among children from lower income households. Evidence suggests that volatility exposure generally has a minimal impact on intergenerational outcomes relative to permanent income.

We provide a detailed accounting of the trend increase in family income volatility in recent decades by quantifying the contributions of household head earnings, spouse earnings, non-transfer non-labor income, transfer income, and tax payments (inclusive of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit), along with covariances among the income components. Using twoyear matched panels in the Current Population Survey from 1980 to 2009, we find that the volatility of family income, as measured by the variance of the arc percent change, doubled over the past three decades. The increase in volatility was most pronounced among the top 1% of the income distribution; however, in any given year the level of volatility among the bottom 10% exceeds that of the top. The variance decompositions indicate that increased family income volatility comes directly from the higher volatility of head and spouse earnings, and other non-labor income, as well as from substantially reduced covariance between these three income sources with the tax system. This suggests that the current tax code is less effective in mitigating income shocks than in previous decades. Among lower income households, a larger share of volatility is driven by transfer income. In the absence of the increased negative covariance between the volatility of head earnings with non-transfer other income, overall volatility would be much higher.