Research

We examine trends in employment, earnings, and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The U.S. safety net is a patchwork of different programs providing in-kind as well as cash benefits and had many holes prior to the Pandemic. In addition, few of the programs are designed explicitly as automatic stabilizers. We show that the safety net response to employment losses in the Covid-19 Pandemic largely consists only of increased support from unemployment insurance and food assistance programs, an inadequate response compared to the magnitude of the downturn. We discuss options to reform social assistance in America to provide more robust income floors in times of economic downturns.

We document trends in earnings volatility separately by gender in combination with other characteristics such as race, educational attainment, and employment status using unique linked survey and administrative data for the tax years spanning 1995-2015. We also decompose the variance of trend volatility into within- and between-group contributions, as well as transitory and permanent shocks. Our results for continuously working men suggest that trend earnings volatility was stable over our period in both survey and tax data, though with a substantial countercyclical business-cycle component. Trend earnings volatility among women declined over the period in both survey and administrative data, but unlike for men, there was no change over the Great Recession. The variance decompositions indicate that nonresponders, low-educated, racial minorities, and part-year workers have the greatest group specific earnings volatility, but with the exception of part-year workers, they contribute least to the level and trend of volatility owing to their small share of the population. There is evidence of stable transitory volatility, but rising permanent volatility over the past two decades in male and female earnings.

Food insecurity, defined as a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food, is a substantial threat to public health in the United States. In 2017, nearly 12% of households reported being food insecure, affecting over 40 million persons.  Numerous studies have documented that food insecurity is associated with substantive negative health outcomes among children and families, and leads to excessive health care expenditures.  In this paper we compare the levels, trends, and determinants of food insecurity in the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to those from the official source of food security statistics in the U.S.—the Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey—from 1999-2017. The PSID, which was begun in 1968, is the leading longitudinal household survey on work, welfare, family structure, consumption, health, and wealth. The survey added measures of food security in the 1999-2003 waves, and again in the 2015-2017 waves. This offers the first opportunity to answer key pressing scientific and policy issues such as the persistence of food insecurity within and across generations, and how changes in food security affect and are affected by the level and change in consumption, wealth, and broader measures of health. This paper aims to describe how well levels and trends in food insecurity in the PSID align with the CPS, and the sources of why they might differ. In addition, we examine the robustness of key model predictors of food insecurity—income, race, education, disability status, marital status—across the surveys. We find that, although the estimated food insecurity rates in the PSID are lower than those in the CPS, the trends over time in the two datasets are similar. Food insecurity rates in the PSID and CPS converge from the 1998-2002 period to the 2014-16 period when food insecurity rates closely match those in the CPS. Our findings, taken as a whole, lend credence to the use of the PSID for food insecurity research.

This article examines the major changes to the face of poverty in Britain over the past few decades, assessing the role of policy, and compares and contrasts this with the patterns seen in the United States, using harmonized household survey data. There are various commonalities between the countries, including a shift in the composition of those in poverty toward working-age households without children, who have not been the focus of policy attention. There are also big differences, with a steadily increasing share of poverty in Britain – but a stable share in the US - found in households with an adult in paid work. This perhaps explains why the anti-poverty focus in Britain is now squarely on the plight of working households, while in the US it is focused on labor force participation among the low skilled – even though, as we show, the US has for decades been used to in-work poverty comprising a significantly higher proportion of overall poverty than in Britain.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act waived work requirements nationally in 2010 and broadened waiver eligibility in subsequent years for Able-Bodied Adults without Dependents (ABAWDs) receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) bene ts. From 2011 to 2017, many states voluntarily imposed work requirements, while other areas became ineligible for waivers because of improved economic conditions. Using data from the American Community Survey from 2010 to 2017, I analyze the influence of work requirements on employment and SNAP participation for able bodied adults without disabilities (ABAWDs). I find that work requirements increased employment for ABAWDs and also significantly decreased SNAPparticipation.

Exposure to stressful life experiences during childhood, such as food insecurity, can have negative consequences for attainment later in life. The developmental timing of stressful events and how they influence outcomes over the life course is a critical area of research. Indeed, a more comprehensive understanding of the latter life consequences of childhood food insecurity could guide policy-makers in designing more effective social policies to reduce the severity of the poor life outcomes. This project uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the young adult impacts (as late as age 25) of food insecurity experienced in discrete childhood stages – middle childhood (ages 5-10), early adolescence (ages 11-14), and middle adolescence (ages 15-18). It aims to identify which childhood stage-specific effects of food insecurity are most important to five young adult outcomes in two main areas – risky sexual behaviors and criminal justice involvement. Results provide consistent evidence that the mean food security scores in middle childhood are associated with the criminal justice involvement outcome. The results are less consistent with the sexual risk taking outcomes. Middle childhood food insecurity is associated with the number of sexual partners in young adulthood, while early adolescent food insecurity is associated with the number of children in young adulthood. Results indicate that male respondents appear to be more sensitive to food insecurity than females.

This paper examines the role of educaitonal investment as a mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of food insecurity. Specifically, we examine how food insecurity during childhood may reduce post-secondary educational infestments, which, in turn, may increase food insecurity during adulthood. Recent work on families and teenagers suggests that teenage employment may contribute to increased food security of children in a household. Teenagers who choose work over educational engagement during high school may not be poised to make the educational ivnestments needed to achieve food security as adults.

In this report we present results from our study of the effect of SNAP and WIC participation during childhood on food insecurity risk in young adulthood. We also examined the effect of parental nutritional knowledge and childhood food involvement on food insecurity in young adulthood. We used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Original Childhood Development Supplement. Our balanced panel (n=1,305) was comprised of individuals who were 0-12 years old in 1997, had data on SNAP and income from their year of birth through 2015, food insecurity data in 2015/2017, and had moved out of their parents’ home and started their own household prior to 2015. We estimated logistic models using sample, cluster and strata weights to generate nationally representative results. We find a small, but non-statistically significant effect of SNAP and WIC participation during childhood on odds of being food insecure during young adulthood. When examining change in food security from 1999-2015, we find that participation in SNAP during ages 0-5 years (OR 2.36, 95% CI: 0.99, 5.61), and during ages 12-18 years (OR 2.68, 95% CI: 1.09, 6.57) is associated with a higher odds of being more secure in 2015 than in 1999 compared to low income children who were eligible for, but did not participate in SNAP. Participation in both SNAP and WIC during ages 0-5 predicts higher odds (OR: 4.47, 95% CI: 2.04, 9.78) of being more secure in young adulthood than in childhood compared to low income children who were eligible for, but did not participate in SNAP or WIC.  Finally, we saw a statistically significant protective effect of high parental nutritional knowledge (in 1999) and child time spent preparing food (during ages 5-12) on food insecurity risk in 2015-2017. SNAP and WIC, as well as parental nutritional knowledge and childhood food involvement appear to have some protective effect on food insecurity in young adulthood. Future research should further investigate the effects of nutrition education, nutrition assistance program participation, and involvement in food preparation on food insecurity over the short- and long-term.

This study examined the long-term consequences of frequency, timing, and severity of food insecurity exposure in childhood on health and health care utilization in adulthood using nearly 20 years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.  The findings provide evidence of the long-lasting health effects of childhood food insecurity.  Young adults who experienced food insecurity as children have higher psychological distress, even when adjusting for childhood socioeconomic status, parent’s health, health during childhood, and food insecurity during adulthood.  More severe and more frequent episodes of childhood food insecurity are related to worse psychological distress during adulthood, but even marginal food security and single episodes of food insecurity appear to be related to worse psychological distress during adulthood.  Very low food security during childhood also appears to be related to worse physical health during adulthood.  Using instrumental variables to adjust for selection into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), this study also finds some evidence that receipt of SNAP during childhood appears to reduce the effects of childhood food insecurity on health during adulthood.

This version of DP2019-01 is a June 2020 update. Evaluations of the EITC, including its antipoverty effectiveness, are based on simulated EITC benefits using either the Census Bureau’s tax module or from external tax simulators such as the National Bureau of Economic Research’s TAXSIM or Jon Bakija’s model. Each simulator utilizes model-based assumptions on who is and who is not eligible for the EITC, and conditional on eligibility, assumes that participation is 100 percent. However, recent evidence suggests that take-up of the EITC is considerably less than 100 percent, and thus claims regarding the impact of the program on measures of poverty may be overstated. We use data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) linked to IRS tax data on the EITC to compare the distribution of EITC benefits from three tax simulation modules to administrative tax records. We find that significantly more actual EITC payments flow to childless tax units than predicted by the tax simulators, and to those whose family income places then well above official poverty thresholds. However, actual EITC payments appear to be target efficient at the individual tax unit level, whether correctly paid or not. We then compare the antipoverty impact of the EITC across the survey and administrative tax measures of EITC benefits. In 2016, about 3.1 million persons were lifted out of poverty by the EITC, substantially less than prior estimates. Further analysis reveals that the efficacy of the survey tax simulators holds across the entire low-income distribution, and not just at the threshold delineating poverty status. Because these results are contingent on dropping CPS ASEC observations with imputed earnings and incomes, our recommendation is that users of the CPS ASEC drop observations with imputed earnings and at a minimum reweight the sample when conducting distributional research.