Research

In two recent cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court examined whether race should be allowed to play an explicit role in the admission decisions of schools. The primary argument in these court cases and others has been that racial diversity strengthens the quality of education offered to all students. Underlying this argument is the notion that educational benefits arise if interactions between students of different races improve preparation for life after college by, among other things, fostering mutual understanding and correcting misperceptions. Then, a fundamental condition necessary for the primary legal argument to be compelling is that the types of students who choose to enter college actually have incorrect beliefs about individuals from different races at the time of college entrance. In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct evidence about this condition by taking advantage of unique new data that was collected specifically for this purpose.

The minimum wage is among the more hotly debated public policies in the United States, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky is no exception. Supporters point to the anti-poverty and social justice benefits of the minimum wage, while opponents point to the costs of possible labor-market dislocation and undesirability of government intervention in private markets. As background for the ensuing discussion it is instructive to examine how the poorest Kentuckians and the typical Kentuckian have fared in recent years in terms of economic status. This leads to the following reality check: Poverty is on the rise and incomes are on the decline in Kentucky post 2000.

This study contrasts partial and full family work sanctions by examining their administration in Texas, a state that initially imposed a partial benefit sanction, and then changed to full benefit sanctions. Using administrative fair hearing data, this study uses a qualitative research design to examine how full and partial sanctions may differ, and how front line workers administer both types of sanctions. This study found that recipients’ reasons for not complying with work rules were similar under both regimes and that full family sanctions did not provide an increased incentive to overcome obstacles and barriers to work. Workers responses under both regimes were also very similar, with workers creating the welfare-to-work version of an eligibility-compliance culture. The findings of this study suggest that a better balance between supports and sanctions is needed. 

Beginning in the mid-1960s, many state governments, particularly in the South and West, began to subsidize kindergartens for the first time. These initiatives generated wide variation across states over time in the supply of seats for five year olds in public schools. This paper uses the staggered timing and age-targeting of these preschool expansions to examine how the provision of universal child care through public schools affects maternal labor supply. I find that single women with five year olds but no younger children were more likely to be employed once kindergartens were available. The estimated effect is large, implying that three mothers entered the labor force for every ten children enrolled in public school. By contrast, I detect no significant labor supply response among other single women with eligible children or among married mothers of five year olds. These findings complement other research suggesting that preschools targeted toward at-risk populations, such as children in single-parent families, are more cost effective than universal programs.

I survey key developments in applied and theoretical research on poverty rates and poverty gaps over the past two decades, and provide a detailed analysis of poverty trends across of variety of income measures and poverty indexes. Included is an extensive summary of how poverty thresholds and economic resources are measured and several proposed recommendations for revision. In addition I discuss axiomatically derived alternatives to the standard poverty rate that provide estimates not only of the incidence of poverty, but also the intensity and the inequality of poverty. The empirical analysis shows that while poverty rates fell in the late 1990s, deep poverty held steady and even rose for broad income measures that include the usual private and public income sources along with in-kind transfers such as food stamps and subsidized housing, and tax credits such as the EITC. I conclude with a discussion of a number of new challenges facing poverty measurement, especially issues of data quality in the Current Population Survey, and recommendations for future research and policy on poverty measurement.

At least in Florida, we find that local discretion has increased in importance under TANF. We find significant variation in local practices and strong evidence that these differences are tied to local political values. We also find that social class variables are important in determing sanction outcomes. Individuals with lower levels of human capital are more likely to be sanctioned. Our analysis also underscores the potential importance of using a longitudinal design to study sanctioning outcomes. This conclusion is supported by at least two important aspects of our findings -- the existence of a seasonal pattern to sanctioning, and the relationship between race and sanctioning. Holding other variables constant, the overall rate of sanctioning in Florida is higher during the peak tourist season than it is during the summer monthssuggesting that studies conducted in short time frames may reach conclusions that cannot be reliably generalized to rest of the year. Ethnic differences in sanctioning are also related to the length of time on TANF. Thus, sanctioning disparity may be a more complex phenomenon than we have thus far understood and is therefore best studied using a longitudinal design.

We study the factors affecting the employment probability of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients using recent quarterly panel data from Atlanta, Georgia. A central focus of our study is to determine whether the TANF recipient’s proximity to job opportunity and the availability of childcare affect her probability of full-time employment. Both static and dynamic models of employment choice are estimated that control for unobserved individual effects. We estimate models separately for a sub-sample of TANF recipients living in public housing, whose residential locations can be considered exogenously determined. We find substantial evidence that individual and family characteristics (such as, the education of the recipient and the number of children and adults in her family) are important determinants of the employment probability of welfare recipients. On the other hand, spacerelated variables are found to be relatively unimportant.
 

Although the Food Stamp Program is the largest entitlement program remaining in the social safety net, comparatively little is known about the potential benefits that the program may confer on recipients. In this paper we examine an important dimension of well being, mental health, and the extent to which participation in the Food Stamp Program may attenuate the effect of food insufficiency on levels of emotional distress. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of families in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we model emotional distress as a function of food insufficiency and other known risk factors for poor mental health. We allow participation in the Food Stamp Program to have a direct impact on mental health, and then test whether food stamp participation mediates the effect of food insufficiency on emotional distress. To conduct our tests we use a first-difference instrumental variables estimator to control for unobserved heterogeneity in emotional distress and possible measurement error in Food Stamp Program participation. We find that food insufficiency has a sizable deleterious effect on the level of emotional distress, as does participation in the Food Stamp Program. However, we also find that participation in the Food Stamp Program among food insufficient households nearly eliminates the deleterious effect of food insufficiency on emotional health, suggesting that the program is well targeted to those in need of food assistance and improved mental health. This research provides the first evidence that the Food Stamp Program has an important positive spill-over effect on mental health through its mediation of household food insufficiency.

US states provide both cash and health insurance benefits for the poor, partially financed by fiscal transfers from the Federal government. The 1996 welfare reform drastically reduces Federal support for cash transfers at the margin, lowering the relative price to states of providing benefits to the poor through Medicaid. This paper analyzes the comparative-statics response of state governments to such changes in intergovernmental transfers, showing (in central cases) that they can contribute not only to reductions in state expenditures on cash benefits but to increases in expenditures on Medicaid, whether or not beneficiary populations are mobile among states.

This paper examines the introduction of premiums into the SCHIP program in Kentucky. Kentucky introduced a $20 monthly premium for SCHIP coverage for children with family incomes between 151% and 200% of the federal poverty level in December 2003. Administrative data between 2001 and 2004 is used to estimate a Cox proportional hazard model that predicts enrollment duration in this premium-paying category. The results suggest that a premium reduces the length of enrollment and that the effect is much stronger in the first two months after the introduction of the premium. Similar results are not found for the non-premium category.