Jennifer Romich
Biographic Data
| ID | 1592119 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Romich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Romich |
| SIGNATURE | ROMICH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5096-3567 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Minimum wage increases and SNAP participation
A large and contested body of research examines how minimum wage laws affect employment and earnings for different groups of workers and industries. Far less studied are the important but ambiguous expectations about minimum wage effects on participation in safety net programs. Different scenarios of minimum wage effects on employment and earnings could produce positive, negative, or null effects on participation in means-tested programs. This st…
Perinatal Wage Equity, Parental Leave Access, and Reproductive Justice Among American Indian and Alaska Native Working Mothers in Washington State
Researchers and policy makers who focus on paid family leave have devoted little attention to American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people. To address this gap, the authors investigate earnings stability, parental leave access, and associated outcomes among AIAN mothers in Washington state. Using mixed methods and grounded in an Indigenous theoretical framework, we explore factors that alternately facilitate and impede these mothers’ leave acc…
Advancing Administrative Data Justice Through Indigenous Representation and Co-Governance Methodologies
Constructing monthly residential locations of adults using merged state administrative data
In any month, administrative data collected by government agencies contain a fraction of the polity's adults, namely those who have interacted with government agencies in that month. For researchers and policymakers who want to evaluate questions that require a spatial location of the whole population of adults at a given time (e.g. job-residence spatial mismatch, impacts of local policies), these fragmentary records are insufficient. Combining a…
The Long Recovery from the Great Recession
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by the Great Recession (GR), which was followed by the longest recovery in U.S. history, here termed the Long Recovery (LR). The LR lasted more than 10 years and ended with a pandemic bang in March 2020. This article introduces the eighteen articles that make up our review of the effects of the LR on the working class. What did more than a decade of economic expansion following th…
Major Means-Tested and Income Support Programs for the Working Class, 2009–2019
This article examines policy changes to and trends in five cash or near-cash income support programs for low-income workers and their families from 2009 to 2019. Our analyses show that the safety net expanded during the recession and then contracted via the tightening of eligibility rules and expiration of most temporary expansions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance (UI), and Temporary Assistance to N…
There and Back Again
Previous articleNext article FreeThere and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020Jennifer Romich and Maria Y. RodriguezJennifer RomichUniversity of Washington Search for more articles by this author and Maria Y. RodriguezUniversity at Buffalo (SUNY) Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Co…
The U.S. Safety Net since the Great Recession
The negative impacts of the Great Recession (GR) (2007 to 2009) on the lives of families with low incomes warrant social work concerns about how well antipoverty policy responded to meet economic needs over this period and since. Given America's long-standing tension between welfare state adequacy and market-oriented policies, how well did the safety net respond to the economic downturn? Did GR-era changes reverse or accelerate trends in public a…
The Initial Nonprofit Exposure and Response to Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance
Nearly 40 local governments adopted minimum wage rates higher than the federal minimum in the last decade. Research on such laws focuses on employment and price adjustments of for-profit firms. Higher minimum wage rates, however, may pose unique challenges to community-based nonprofit organizations, many of which serve vulnerable communities and have limited ability to modify business practices. We use survey and in-depth interview data with more…
The Policy Roundtable Model
Robust exchange between those who make and carry out social policy and those who study social conditions can improve both policy and research. This article presents a programing model, Policy Roundtables, which promotes interchange and creates greater capacity for collaboration between two disparate communities, academic researchers and local policy practitioners. Data come from a formative evaluation of the host center’s programing. We asked aca…
Coupling a Federal Minimum Wage Hike with Public Investments to Make Work Pay and Reduce Poverty
For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen the policy's effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty-reducing effects of th…
Employer Responses to a City-Level Minimum Wage Mandate
A growing number of cities and counties have recently raised their minimum wages. How employers respond to these mandates provides insight into the impact such policies might have on workers and local labor market. Drawing on two survey waves tracking initial responses to Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Ordinance by 439 employers with low-wage workers, we show how employers adjusted to higher wages. Most commonly, firms raised prices (56% reported thi…
Local mandate improves equity of paid sick leave coverage
Absent a federal policy, local paid sick time mandates can increase paid sick leave coverage, an important social determinant of health
The impact of income on reunification among families with children in out-of-home care
Is Raising the Minimum Wage a Good Idea? Evidence and Implications for Social Work
When considering policy options to reduce poverty and income inequality, social work scholars and practitioners endorse the seemingly obvious solution of raising the minimum wage. In coalition with other progressive advocates, social workers campaign for higher wage floors (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2014), a call echoed by scholars writing in this journal and others (for example, Goldberg, 2012; Lim et al., 2014; Siegel & Abb…
An Introduction to Household Economic Instability and Social Policy
This special issue of Social Service Review presents original research on the determinants and consequences of economic instability, with a focus on the interplay between instability and social policy. To frame that discussion, we define economic instability as repeated changes in employment, income, or financial well-being over time, particularly changes that are not intentional, predictable, or part of upward mobility. We also present a concept…
Dual-System Families
Dual-system families, those involved with the child welfare system and receiving public cash assistance, may be more vulnerable than families only connected to either of the two systems. This study advances our understanding of the heterogeneous and dynamic cash assistance histories of dual-system families in the post-welfare reform era. With merged administrative data from [state name removed] over the period 1998 to 2009, we use cluster analysi…
Trajectories of Economic Disconnection among Families in the Child Welfare System
This study examined economic disconnection, an extreme case of economic exclusion in which families lack both employment and cash assistance, among families in the child welfare system. We hypothesized that child welfare intervention has the potential to be a mechanism of economic inclusion or exclusion for vulnerable families, with implications for family reunification. We utilized a novel administrative dataset containing data from three state …
Paid Leave Mandates May Fail to Reach Part-Time Workers
A Geography-Specific Approach to Estimating the Distributional Impact of Highway Tolls
This study contributes to the debate about tolls' equity impacts by examining the potential economic costs of tolling for low-income and non-low-income households. Using data from the Puget Sound metropolitan region in Washington State and GIS methods to map driving routes from home to work, we examine car ownership and transportation patterns among low-income and non-low-income households. We follow standard practice of estimating tolls' potenti…
Independence Giving or Autonomy Taking? Childhood Predictors of Decision‐Sharing Patterns Between Young Adolescents and Parents
This article reports on a study of whether young adolescents make decisions autonomously, share decisions with their parents, or have decisions made for them by parents. Using a sample of 2,632 12-and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child Survey we examine how childhood behavior and competence influence decision patterns in young adolescence. Individual models are used to test whether traits predict decision patte…
Trying to keep children out of trouble
Sharing the Work
This manuscript reports on a study of how low-income employed single mothers and young adolescents manage household daily life. Analysis is based on longitudinal ethnographic data collected from families of 35 young adolescents over 3 years following the 1996 welfare reforms. Although mothers worked, young adolescents spent time unsupervised, performed household chores, and provided child care for younger siblings. Mother-youth relationships mark…
Difficult Calculations
Means‐tested benefits and progressive tax measures are intended to support low‐income working families, but they often create high effective marginal tax rates (MTRs). Low‐wage workers who increase the number of hours at work or accept raises may find that increased earnings are partially, fully, or more than offset by decreased benefits or increased tax liability. Using longitudinal ethnographic data from 40 families, this study shows how famili…
Work-Based Antipoverty Programs for Parents Can Enhance the School Performance and Social Behavior of Children
We assess the impact of the New Hope Project, an antipoverty program tested in a random assignment experimental design, on family functioning and developmental outcomes for preschool- and school-aged children (N = 913). New Hope offered wage supplements sufficient to raise family income above the poverty threshold and subsidies for child care and health insurance to adults who worked full-time. New Hope had strong positive effects on boys' academ…
An Introduction to Household Economic Instability and Social Policy
This special issue of Social Service Review presents original research on the determinants and consequences of economic instability, with a focus on the interplay between instability and social policy. To frame that discussion, we define economic instability as repeated changes in employment, income, or financial well-being over time, particularly changes that are not intentional, predictable, or part of upward mobility. We also present a concept…
Difficult Calculations
Means‐tested benefits and progressive tax measures are intended to support low‐income working families, but they often create high effective marginal tax rates (MTRs). Low‐wage workers who increase the number of hours at work or accept raises may find that increased earnings are partially, fully, or more than offset by decreased benefits or increased tax liability. Using longitudinal ethnographic data from 40 families, this study shows how famili…
Coupling a Federal Minimum Wage Hike with Public Investments to Make Work Pay and Reduce Poverty
For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen the policy's effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty-reducing effects of th…
Trajectories of Economic Disconnection among Families in the Child Welfare System
This study examined economic disconnection, an extreme case of economic exclusion in which families lack both employment and cash assistance, among families in the child welfare system. We hypothesized that child welfare intervention has the potential to be a mechanism of economic inclusion or exclusion for vulnerable families, with implications for family reunification. We utilized a novel administrative dataset containing data from three state …
Trying to keep children out of trouble
Sharing the Work
This manuscript reports on a study of how low-income employed single mothers and young adolescents manage household daily life. Analysis is based on longitudinal ethnographic data collected from families of 35 young adolescents over 3 years following the 1996 welfare reforms. Although mothers worked, young adolescents spent time unsupervised, performed household chores, and provided child care for younger siblings. Mother-youth relationships mark…
Dual-System Families
Dual-system families, those involved with the child welfare system and receiving public cash assistance, may be more vulnerable than families only connected to either of the two systems. This study advances our understanding of the heterogeneous and dynamic cash assistance histories of dual-system families in the post-welfare reform era. With merged administrative data from [state name removed] over the period 1998 to 2009, we use cluster analysi…
Employer Responses to a City-Level Minimum Wage Mandate
A growing number of cities and counties have recently raised their minimum wages. How employers respond to these mandates provides insight into the impact such policies might have on workers and local labor market. Drawing on two survey waves tracking initial responses to Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Ordinance by 439 employers with low-wage workers, we show how employers adjusted to higher wages. Most commonly, firms raised prices (56% reported thi…
Is Raising the Minimum Wage a Good Idea? Evidence and Implications for Social Work
When considering policy options to reduce poverty and income inequality, social work scholars and practitioners endorse the seemingly obvious solution of raising the minimum wage. In coalition with other progressive advocates, social workers campaign for higher wage floors (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2014), a call echoed by scholars writing in this journal and others (for example, Goldberg, 2012; Lim et al., 2014; Siegel & Abb…
Independence Giving or Autonomy Taking? Childhood Predictors of Decision‐Sharing Patterns Between Young Adolescents and Parents
This article reports on a study of whether young adolescents make decisions autonomously, share decisions with their parents, or have decisions made for them by parents. Using a sample of 2,632 12-and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child Survey we examine how childhood behavior and competence influence decision patterns in young adolescence. Individual models are used to test whether traits predict decision patte…
Major Means-Tested and Income Support Programs for the Working Class, 2009–2019
This article examines policy changes to and trends in five cash or near-cash income support programs for low-income workers and their families from 2009 to 2019. Our analyses show that the safety net expanded during the recession and then contracted via the tightening of eligibility rules and expiration of most temporary expansions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance (UI), and Temporary Assistance to N…
The U.S. Safety Net since the Great Recession
The negative impacts of the Great Recession (GR) (2007 to 2009) on the lives of families with low incomes warrant social work concerns about how well antipoverty policy responded to meet economic needs over this period and since. Given America's long-standing tension between welfare state adequacy and market-oriented policies, how well did the safety net respond to the economic downturn? Did GR-era changes reverse or accelerate trends in public a…
The impact of income on reunification among families with children in out-of-home care
Paid Leave Mandates May Fail to Reach Part-Time Workers
A Geography-Specific Approach to Estimating the Distributional Impact of Highway Tolls
This study contributes to the debate about tolls' equity impacts by examining the potential economic costs of tolling for low-income and non-low-income households. Using data from the Puget Sound metropolitan region in Washington State and GIS methods to map driving routes from home to work, we examine car ownership and transportation patterns among low-income and non-low-income households. We follow standard practice of estimating tolls' potenti…
Work-Based Antipoverty Programs for Parents Can Enhance the School Performance and Social Behavior of Children
We assess the impact of the New Hope Project, an antipoverty program tested in a random assignment experimental design, on family functioning and developmental outcomes for preschool- and school-aged children (N = 913). New Hope offered wage supplements sufficient to raise family income above the poverty threshold and subsidies for child care and health insurance to adults who worked full-time. New Hope had strong positive effects on boys' academ…
Difficult Calculations
Means‐tested benefits and progressive tax measures are intended to support low‐income working families, but they often create high effective marginal tax rates (MTRs). Low‐wage workers who increase the number of hours at work or accept raises may find that increased earnings are partially, fully, or more than offset by decreased benefits or increased tax liability. Using longitudinal ethnographic data from 40 families, this study shows how famili…
Sharing the Work
This manuscript reports on a study of how low-income employed single mothers and young adolescents manage household daily life. Analysis is based on longitudinal ethnographic data collected from families of 35 young adolescents over 3 years following the 1996 welfare reforms. Although mothers worked, young adolescents spent time unsupervised, performed household chores, and provided child care for younger siblings. Mother-youth relationships mark…
Independence Giving or Autonomy Taking? Childhood Predictors of Decision‐Sharing Patterns Between Young Adolescents and Parents
This article reports on a study of whether young adolescents make decisions autonomously, share decisions with their parents, or have decisions made for them by parents. Using a sample of 2,632 12-and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child Survey we examine how childhood behavior and competence influence decision patterns in young adolescence. Individual models are used to test whether traits predict decision patte…
Trying to keep children out of trouble
A Geography-Specific Approach to Estimating the Distributional Impact of Highway Tolls
This study contributes to the debate about tolls' equity impacts by examining the potential economic costs of tolling for low-income and non-low-income households. Using data from the Puget Sound metropolitan region in Washington State and GIS methods to map driving routes from home to work, we examine car ownership and transportation patterns among low-income and non-low-income households. We follow standard practice of estimating tolls' potenti…
Paid Leave Mandates May Fail to Reach Part-Time Workers
Dual-System Families
Dual-system families, those involved with the child welfare system and receiving public cash assistance, may be more vulnerable than families only connected to either of the two systems. This study advances our understanding of the heterogeneous and dynamic cash assistance histories of dual-system families in the post-welfare reform era. With merged administrative data from [state name removed] over the period 1998 to 2009, we use cluster analysi…
Trajectories of Economic Disconnection among Families in the Child Welfare System
This study examined economic disconnection, an extreme case of economic exclusion in which families lack both employment and cash assistance, among families in the child welfare system. We hypothesized that child welfare intervention has the potential to be a mechanism of economic inclusion or exclusion for vulnerable families, with implications for family reunification. We utilized a novel administrative dataset containing data from three state …
Local mandate improves equity of paid sick leave coverage
Absent a federal policy, local paid sick time mandates can increase paid sick leave coverage, an important social determinant of health
The impact of income on reunification among families with children in out-of-home care
Is Raising the Minimum Wage a Good Idea? Evidence and Implications for Social Work
When considering policy options to reduce poverty and income inequality, social work scholars and practitioners endorse the seemingly obvious solution of raising the minimum wage. In coalition with other progressive advocates, social workers campaign for higher wage floors (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2014), a call echoed by scholars writing in this journal and others (for example, Goldberg, 2012; Lim et al., 2014; Siegel & Abb…
An Introduction to Household Economic Instability and Social Policy
This special issue of Social Service Review presents original research on the determinants and consequences of economic instability, with a focus on the interplay between instability and social policy. To frame that discussion, we define economic instability as repeated changes in employment, income, or financial well-being over time, particularly changes that are not intentional, predictable, or part of upward mobility. We also present a concept…
Coupling a Federal Minimum Wage Hike with Public Investments to Make Work Pay and Reduce Poverty
For more than a century, advocates have promoted minimum wage laws to protect workers and their families from poverty. Opponents counter that the policy has, at best, small poverty-reducing effects. We summarize the evidence and describe three factors that might dampen the policy's effects on poverty: imperfect targeting, heterogeneous labor market effects, and interactions with income support programs. To boost the poverty-reducing effects of th…
Employer Responses to a City-Level Minimum Wage Mandate
A growing number of cities and counties have recently raised their minimum wages. How employers respond to these mandates provides insight into the impact such policies might have on workers and local labor market. Drawing on two survey waves tracking initial responses to Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Ordinance by 439 employers with low-wage workers, we show how employers adjusted to higher wages. Most commonly, firms raised prices (56% reported thi…
The Policy Roundtable Model
Robust exchange between those who make and carry out social policy and those who study social conditions can improve both policy and research. This article presents a programing model, Policy Roundtables, which promotes interchange and creates greater capacity for collaboration between two disparate communities, academic researchers and local policy practitioners. Data come from a formative evaluation of the host center’s programing. We asked aca…
There and Back Again
Previous articleNext article FreeThere and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020Jennifer Romich and Maria Y. RodriguezJennifer RomichUniversity of Washington Search for more articles by this author and Maria Y. RodriguezUniversity at Buffalo (SUNY) Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Co…
The U.S. Safety Net since the Great Recession
The negative impacts of the Great Recession (GR) (2007 to 2009) on the lives of families with low incomes warrant social work concerns about how well antipoverty policy responded to meet economic needs over this period and since. Given America's long-standing tension between welfare state adequacy and market-oriented policies, how well did the safety net respond to the economic downturn? Did GR-era changes reverse or accelerate trends in public a…
The Initial Nonprofit Exposure and Response to Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance
Nearly 40 local governments adopted minimum wage rates higher than the federal minimum in the last decade. Research on such laws focuses on employment and price adjustments of for-profit firms. Higher minimum wage rates, however, may pose unique challenges to community-based nonprofit organizations, many of which serve vulnerable communities and have limited ability to modify business practices. We use survey and in-depth interview data with more…
The Long Recovery from the Great Recession
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by the Great Recession (GR), which was followed by the longest recovery in U.S. history, here termed the Long Recovery (LR). The LR lasted more than 10 years and ended with a pandemic bang in March 2020. This article introduces the eighteen articles that make up our review of the effects of the LR on the working class. What did more than a decade of economic expansion following th…
Major Means-Tested and Income Support Programs for the Working Class, 2009–2019
This article examines policy changes to and trends in five cash or near-cash income support programs for low-income workers and their families from 2009 to 2019. Our analyses show that the safety net expanded during the recession and then contracted via the tightening of eligibility rules and expiration of most temporary expansions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance (UI), and Temporary Assistance to N…
Constructing monthly residential locations of adults using merged state administrative data
In any month, administrative data collected by government agencies contain a fraction of the polity's adults, namely those who have interacted with government agencies in that month. For researchers and policymakers who want to evaluate questions that require a spatial location of the whole population of adults at a given time (e.g. job-residence spatial mismatch, impacts of local policies), these fragmentary records are insufficient. Combining a…
Perinatal Wage Equity, Parental Leave Access, and Reproductive Justice Among American Indian and Alaska Native Working Mothers in Washington State
Researchers and policy makers who focus on paid family leave have devoted little attention to American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people. To address this gap, the authors investigate earnings stability, parental leave access, and associated outcomes among AIAN mothers in Washington state. Using mixed methods and grounded in an Indigenous theoretical framework, we explore factors that alternately facilitate and impede these mothers’ leave acc…
Advancing Administrative Data Justice Through Indigenous Representation and Co-Governance Methodologies
Minimum wage increases and SNAP participation
A large and contested body of research examines how minimum wage laws affect employment and earnings for different groups of workers and industries. Far less studied are the important but ambiguous expectations about minimum wage effects on participation in safety net programs. Different scenarios of minimum wage effects on employment and earnings could produce positive, negative, or null effects on participation in means-tested programs. This st…
Economics (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (11 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (8 works) · Welfare (8 works) · Demographic economics (7 works) · Labour economics (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Economic growth (6 works)