Research

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.

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.

Poverty programs in recent decades has been transformed by the convergence of paternalistic and neoliberal approaches to administration. This has resulted in a devolution of program control to local jurisdictions. we seek to bridge this divide. Drawing on intensive field research and administrative data from the Florida Welfare Transition (WT) program, we present an empirically-grounded analysis of how organizations carry out the work of discipline in a decentralized, performancedriven policy system.

English Learners, students who are not proficient in English and speak a non-English language at home, make up more than 10 percent of the nation’s K-12 student body. Achieving proficiency in English for these students is a major goal of both state and federal education policy, motivating the provision of bilingual education policies. Using data for nearly 500,000 English Learners from California, I show that students in bilingual education have substantially lower English proficiency than other English Learners in first and second grades. In contrast, there is little difference between bilingual education and other programs for students in grades three through five. These results hold across fixed effects, propensity score, and instrumental variables models.

We document the demographic and economic forces underlying changes in income inequality among single mother families over the past three decades in the United States. Using decomposable measures of after-tax income-to-needs inequality, we examine within- and between-group inequality based on education attainment, age, past marital status, race, and employment status. We also conduct income factor decompositions to quantify the relative contributions of earnings, transfers, other income, and taxes to inequality. Our results from the March Current Population Survey show that income-to-needs inequality rose nearly 30 percent between 1979 and 2005. The demographic decompositions indicate that most of the change in inequality is occurring within groups, in part because of large, offsetting between-group changes in population shares and relative mean incomes. The most prominent economic factor underlying the rise in income inequality among single mother families is labor-market earnings, the latter of which was induced by rising variance of hourly wages.

Numerous studies have confirmed that race plays an important role in shaping public preferences toward both redistribution and punishment. Likewise, studies suggest that punitive policy tools tend to be adopted by state governments in a pattern that tracks with the racial composition of state populations. Such evidence testifies to the enduring power of race in American politics, yet it has limited value for understanding how disciplinary policies get applied to individuals in implementation settings. To illuminate the relationship between race and the application of punitive policy tools, we analyze sanction patterns in the TANF program. Drawing on a model of racial classification and policy choice, we test four hypotheses regarding client race and sanctioning. Our study does not support a simple story in which racial minorities are always more likely to be targeted for discipline. Rather, we find the impact of race to be contingent on local politics, administrative decentralization, and other client characteristics.

The goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of Medicaid/SCHIP eligibility and programmatic features on transitions from private insurance coverage among samples of American low-income children using monthly data from the 2001 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative data set. The estimation approach combines multilevel modeling and event history analysis, including a robust array of variables measuring programmatic features, individual child, family, and state attributes. Logistic regression results do not indicate an adverse effect of expanded Medicaid/SCHIP eligibility on private insurance coverage. Results also suggest that states which established stand-alone SCHIP programs can potentially limit crowd-out better than states which simply expanded their existing Medicaid programs and that waiting periods of less than six months might have a negative impact on private insurance coverage. Future studies should examine, in greater detail, how program features and other social policies can reduce crowd-out, while increasing public insurance take-up rates among the neediest populations.

Welfare reform’s success encouraging employment may be affected by the federal Food Stamp program because many households receive welfare and Food Stamps. Food Stamp benefits could discourage employment because benefits are reduced proportionally with income; alternatively, it could encourage employment by increasing stability and allowing more resources to be allocated toward employment-related expenses. I examine the effects of Food Stamps on exiting welfare and becoming employed for welfare recipients. Results suggest, if anything, that Food Stamps discourage employment, and such benefits may discourage transitions off welfare, too. If so, then it may be necessary to study the determinants of welfare participation (welfare reform and economic growth) in conjunction with other government-assistance programs.

Social policy, such as the legalization of abortion and the federal bans on lead in the 1970s, has been shown to significantly impact crime rates. With recent increases in juvenile arrests and violent crime rates, we explore whether further social policy—namely the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) welfare reform—has had an impact on crime. Our results suggest that stricter work requirements experienced by 13 to 15 year-olds increase their violent crime activity 2 to 4 years later. An increase of one standard deviation in the severity of the work requirement policy results in 5.5 more annual violent crime arrests per capita, an 14.5 percent increase. These results indicate that states should consider options for mitigating these effects, such as support services targeted at teenagers, when implementing the stricter federal work requirements outlined in the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005. Conversely, we find no effect of welfare work requirements on juvenile property crime arrests, consistent with the literature on crime and delinquency among juveniles of low-socioeconomic status.

For parents of young children the decision to work strongly depends on the availability of affordable child care. Child care costs can take up a large portion of a family budget and may serve as an obstacle to work. In 2008 the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) estimated that Kentucky families recently faced annual infant child care costs of $6,240 for full-time center care and $4,956 for school age children during non-school hours.2 These costs represent 20 to 25 percent of an average single mother’s annual income and rival the tuition costs of attending a 4-year college or university. In this policy brief, we describe the federal and state programs that address child care and discuss recent economic research on the links between parental employment and child care. In addition, we forecast the employment effects and costs of a child care subsidy in Kentucky.