Research

Hunger is a serious threat facing millions of seniors in the United States. Despite this important public health threat, we know very little about the face of hunger among seniors, the causes of senior hunger, its consequences for the well-being of seniors, or what will happen in the next twenty years with respect to hunger among senior Americans. Although federally-funded programs including the Elderly Nutrition Program (ENP) and the Food Stamp Program are designed to address food security and nutritional needs among senior Americans, studies demonstrate high levels of need still exist among seniors. Thus, it is important to expand our understanding of hunger among seniors in order to help develop strategies to reduce it.

The purpose of this report is to provide a selective survey of the literature on the economic consequences of child care for recipient families, and to relate the results to families residing in Kentucky using data from the Annual Social and Economic Study in the Current Population Survey. The survey is selective both because of its exclusive focus on child care research by economists and because the literature is vast even within economics such that only articles deemed to be important contributions to the labor supply and child care literature are included. There are extensive literatures on child care in the fields of social work and sociology, but in a bid to narrow the focus on the types of questions and methodologies employed this survey excludes this research.

Natural disasters can conceivably have significant impacts on the “neighborhood sorting” of different racial or economic groups across intrametropolitan space. Using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data we examine mortgage-financed homebuying activity within the New Orleans MSA before and after Hurricane Katrina. We find that, while the total amount of homebuying in the 7-parish New Orleans MSA was relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2006, homebuying in the city declined significantly, and declined most in places experiencing severe storm damage. We also find that after Hurricane Katrina, the proportion of homebuyers in the region and the city who were African-American or low-income declined. Finally, we find that segregation levels of African-American and lower-income homebuyers declined in the year following Katrina. However, some of this effect is likely due to smaller overall numbers of lower-income and African-American buyers in the region.

This paper uses administrative data from the University of Texas-Austin to examine whether high school peer networks at college entry influence college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003 we calculate the number and ethnic makeup of college freshmen from each Texas high school, which we use as a proxy for freshmen “peer network.” Empirical specifications include high school fixed effects to control for unobservable differences across schools that influence both college enrollment behavior and academic performance. Using an IV/fixed effects strategy that exploits the introduction and expansion of the Longhorn Scholars Program, which targeted low income schools with low college traditions we also evaluate whether “marginal” increases in peer networks influence college achievement. Results show that students with larger peer network upon entering college perform better than their counterparts with smaller networks at the beginning of their freshman year. Average effects of network size on college achievement are small, but a marginal increase in the size of same-race peer networks raises GPA by 0.1 point. We also find some suggestive evidence that minority students with large high school peer networks reap larger academic benefits than their white counterparts.

In May of 1998, the Relocation Assistance Program (RAP) was introduced in Kentucky as a means of aiding welfare recipients to achieve self-sufficiency by offering lump-sum payments to those who wished to relocate to seek or accept employment. Unlike other relocation assistance programs, this program provides moving assistance to welfare clients rather than to unemployed persons or dislocated workers. We relate this program to other relocation programs as well as to the UI bonus experiments. We also survey the theoretical literature to give some intuition for the effects of the program on earnings and employment for welfare clients. Using program participation to measure the treatment effect is a contentious issue due to program requirements linking employment to participation. Given that advertising would certainly influence participation, we construct an advertising proxy that differs from program uptake/utilization to identify the program’s effects. Working with a relatively short, panel administrative dataset, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the RAP proxy is associated with a 20.4 percent increase in employment and a 18.3 percent increase in quarterly unconditional earnings, which is robust to various specification checks.

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

An extensive literature debates the causes and consequences of the desegregation of American schools in the twentieth century. Despite the social importance of desegregation and the magnitude of the literature, we have lacked a comprehensive accounting of the basic facts of school desegregation. This paper uses newly assembled data to document when and how Southern school districts desegregated, as well as the extent of court involvement in the desegregation process over the two full decades after Brown vs. Board of Education. We also examine heterogeneity in the path to desegregation by district characteristics. The results suggest that the existing quantitative literature, which generally either begins in 1968 and focuses on the role of federal courts in larger urban districts or relies on highly aggregated data, often tells an incomplete story of desegregation.

The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has proven to be the most effective anti-poverty program for working low-income families in the United States. Established in 1975 to offset payroll taxes and to provide a modest supplement to low wages, the EITC is now a $40 billion program serving over 20 million Americans. Over the past decade, 22 states and the District of Columbia have reformed their tax codes to include a state EITC to offset state income tax liability, provide an additional financial boost to low-income working families, and lift families out of poverty while also offering an incentive to work. In this policy brief we discuss some of the issues and options of a state EITC for Kentucky.

Despite the health benefits of participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), many eligible households do not participate in WIC during pregnancy and others exit WIC after a child turns one year old. This research uses the first two waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) to advance our understanding of these transitions into and out of WIC. Findings suggest that those who exhibit better economic health across a variety of dimensions are more likely to delay entry into the program or exit after a child turns one year of age.

While most economic development research views poverty as a sign of need for development or poverty reduction as an outcome of successful development, this study treats poverty as an independent variable alongside contemporary measures of innovation capacity that reflect state potential for economic development, examining the combined impact of poverty and innovation capacity on economic development outcomes. The study examines the effect poverty has on economic development outcomes given levels of innovation capacity, and the effect poverty has on formation of state innovation capacity. The methodology consists of pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis with panel corrected standard errors with lags. The findings show mixed support for the effect of poverty on innovation capacity formation, weak support for the negative direct effects of poverty on economic growth, and strong support confirming important differences between the south and the rest of the nation. Poverty appears to impact economic growth only indirectly through its effect on the components of capacity that lead to economic growth.