Z Parolin
Biographic Data
| ID | 44372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Z Parolin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Z |
| FAMILY NAME | Parolin |
| SIGNATURE | PAROLIN Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bocconi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4065-3711 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 322 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Countervailing Powers: Labor Unions Against the Buyer Power of Walmart Supercenters
Power is central to sociological accounts of economic inequality; however, buyer power-market conditions in which one or a few dominant employers can limit workers' outside options for employment-has received little attention relative to worker power. We study how the entry of Walmart Supercenters, the archetype of a high-buyer-power employer, affects the size and protective strength of union membership (a key dimension of worker power). We analy…
Poverty reduction during the Covid-19 pandemic: How did the European union perform relative to the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic led to declines in market income and increases in unemployment across much of the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), and had the potential to increase poverty rates. However, the US and EU Member States adopted vastly different strategies for mitigating the economic consequences of the crisis. Using EU-SILC data and the U.S. Current Population Survey, this study compares the poverty-reduction performance of the …
Targeted Child Tax Credit: An affordable option for state governments to reduce child poverty rates
The federal expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in 2021 contributed to a record low child poverty rate for the United States; however, the expansion expired after 1 year and Congress is unlikely to reinstate the expansion in the near future. State governments are increasingly interested in implementing their own fully‐refundable CTCs, yet face strict budgetary constraints relative to the federal government. This policy report proposes a state…
What explains recent trends in income inequality in the European Union
We investigate trends in income inequality in the European Union (EU) from 2007 to 2019. Using EU-SILC data, we find that EU-wide inequality declined between 9 and 20%, depending on the inequality measure applied, despite rising within-country income inequality during the same period. Applying a series of decomposition techniques, we find that between-country convergence in pre-tax/transfer incomes fully explains the declining EU-wide inequality.…
Employment and Consumption Responses to the Withdrawal of Unemployment Benefits
The authors study the responses to the withdrawal of two generous unemployment benefit (UB) schemes introduced in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploiting variations across states in the timing of the policy change. Using data from the Current Population Survey, they find that the expiration of UBs increased unemployment-to-employment transitions. However, approximately half of this effect was driven by job recalls. Evidence als…
Fiscal Centralization and Inequality in Children's Economic Mobility
Disparities in state and local government spending are key drivers of spatial inequality in social outcomes, including economic mobility. Yet beyond spending levels, the fiscal centralization of state and local governments-that is, the relative role of higher- versus lower-level governments in taxing, spending, and public employment-also differs substantially, traceable to place-specific founding circumstances and path dependent historical trajec…
Policy Brief
Consumption responses to an unconditional child allowance in the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic put families in the United States under financial stress. The federal government’s largest response in 2021 was the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a large, unconditional child allowance providing monthly payments to families with children. This study investigates consumption responses to the CTC expansion using anonymized mobile-location data and debit/credit card data th…
Intergenerational persistence of poverty in five high-income countries
Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of adult poverty. However, past research offers conflicting accounts of cross-national variation in the strength of—and mechanisms underpinning—the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Here the authors investigate differences in intergenerational poverty in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom using administrative- and survey-based panel datasets. Intergenerational p…
Diverging Paths: Heterogeneities in Single Parenthood and Consequences for Child Poverty
The authors propose an expanded conceptualization of single parenthood that acknowledges within-group heterogeneity and investigate differential short- and long-term poverty outcomes on the basis of pathways into single parenthood. Using representative panel data for the United States, the authors present descriptive trends in the evolution of four pathways into single parenthood (divorce, separation, widowhood, and never getting married) and the…
Cumulative Unionization and Physical Health Disparities among Older Adults
Whereas previous research shows that union membership is associated with improved health, static measurements have been used to test dynamic theories linking the two. We construct a novel measure of cumulative unionization, tracking individuals across their entire careers, to examine health consequences in older adulthood. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1970-2019) and predict self-rated health, functional limitations, and ch…
Transitioning to adulthood: Are conventional benchmarks as protective today as they were in the past
More young adults in the United States are studying beyond high school and working full-time than in the past, yet young adults continue to have high poverty rates as they transition to adulthood. This study uses longitudinal data on two cohorts of young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to assess whether conventional benchmarks associated with economic success-gaining an education, finding stable employment, and …
Administrative Burdens and Economic Insecurity Among Black, Latino, and White Families
This study investigates how administrative burdens influence differential receipt of income transfers after a family member loses a job. Using the panel component of the Current Population Survey from 1990 through 2019, we find that administrative burdens have increased in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Unemployment Insurance programs but declined for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. These administrative burden effe…
Decent wage floors in Europe: Does the minimum wage directive get it right
The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages represents a watershed initiative adding substance to the EU’s social dimension. It contains two ambitious objectives: establishing the minimum level of statutory minimum wages at 60% of the gross median wage, and increasing collective bargaining coverage (CBC) to at least 80% of workers. In this article, we assess how statutory minimum wages and collective bargaining coverage are associated with the likeli…
The United States’ Record-Low Child Poverty Rate in International and Historical Perspective: A Research Note
In 2021, the federal government of the United States expanded a set of income transfers that led to strong reductions in child poverty. This research note uses microdata from more than 50 countries and U.S. data spanning more than 50 years to place the 2021 child poverty rate in historical and international perspective. We demonstrate that whether using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), relative poverty measures, or an absolute poverty meas…
Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State
Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the U.S. social safety net has shifted away from direct cash assistance for the lowest-income households and toward tax-based transfers targeted at working families with children. Previous research has assessed this shift by evaluating its effect on the national poverty rate. Doing so, however, overlooks how it may also have led to increased inequality among low-income households. We apply a decomposition fr…
The Child Tax Credit and Family Well-Being: An Overview of Reforms and Impacts
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) has become an increasingly important element of the U.S. safety net. We discuss the structure of the CTC and its effects on childhood poverty and other indicators of well-being during its three distinct phases: prior to the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) expansion, during the expansion, and after the expansion's expiration. We also examine recent efforts to establish state-level CTCs. We show that, in 2020, roughly one…
The Consequences of the 2021 Child Tax Credit Expansion: An Introduction to the Volume
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily transformed the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a more generous cash benefit that was more frequently distributed to families with children in the U.S. From July to December 2021, the families of more than 90 percent of U.S. children received monthly cash payments of up to $250 per child (or $300 per young child under six); and at tax time in 2022, families received lump-sum tax refunds of up to $1,500…
The Cumulative Advantage of a Unionized Career for Lifetime Earnings
Studies on labor union earnings premiums generally investigate their size through point-in-time estimates. This study posits, by contrast, that point-in-time estimates of the union premium overlook the cumulative earnings advantages of long-term, persistent union membership. Using a sample of men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1969 to 2019, the authors investigate how lifetime union membership contributes to earnings advantages. The…
Estimating Monthly Poverty Rates in the United States
Official poverty estimates for the United States are presented annually, based on a family unit's annual resources, and reported with a considerable lag. This study introduces a framework to produce monthly estimates of the Supplemental Poverty Measure and official poverty measure, based on a family unit's monthly income, and with a two‐week lag. We argue that a shorter accounting period and more timely estimates of poverty better account for int…
The Enduring Significance of Ethno-Racial Inequalities in Poverty in the U.S., 1993–2017
Care earnings in the United States and 24 European countries: The role of social policy and labour market institutions
Care occupations are gendered and remain relatively poorly paid, particularly in the United States. Prior research on the ‘care penalty’ primarily points to individual, relational, and market‐valuation factors in explaining the relative earnings of care workers. This study integrates these explanations with a comparative institutional perspective. Using higher‐quality data and methods than previous comparative research in the field—that is, harmo…
Exposure to Childhood Poverty and Racial Differences in Economic Opportunity in Young Adulthood
Young adults in the United States, especially young Black adults, experience high poverty rates relative to other age groups. Prior research has largely attributed racial disparities in young adult poverty to differential attainment of benchmarks related to education, employment, and family formation. This study investigates that mechanism alongside racial differences in childhood poverty exposure. Analyses of Panel Study of Income Dynamics data …
Income Support Policies for Single Parents in Europe and the United States: What Works Best
Poverty rates among single parents vary considerably across countries, in part reflecting differences in the generosity and design of minimum income protections. We ask what the optimal ways are to target income support to single parents, if the prime objective of policy is to shelter those households from poverty. We map minimum income provisions for working and nonworking single-parent households across Europe and the United States, showing tha…
Economic Precarity among Single Parents in the United States during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Single-parent families have historically faced greater economic precarity relative to other family types in the United States. We investigate how and whether those disparities widened after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on exposure to school and childcare center closures, unemployment, poverty, food hardship, and frequent worrying among single-parent families versus two-parent families throughout 2020 and 2021, we find that the c…
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Black-White child poverty gap in the United States
Black children in the USA are more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty. While past research has primarily attributed this phenomenon to the family structure of black children, this article investigates how state-level heterogeneity in social assistance programs contributes to the black-white child poverty gap. I find that racial inequities in states' administration of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) progra…
The Care Burden during Covid-19: A National Database of Child Care Closures in the United States
Access to child care centers reduces the care burden of parents, promotes child development, and creates employment opportunities. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, however, many child care centers closed or reduced capacity because of restrictions and declining demand for in-person care. The authors use anonymized and aggregated mobile phone data to track year-over-year changes in visits to child care centers across most counties in …
Large socio-economic, geographic and demographic disparities exist in exposure to school closures
The coronovirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted many school districts to turn to distance or at-home learning. Studies are emerging on the negative effects of distance learning on educational performance, but less is known about the socio-economic, geographic and demographic characteristics of students exposed to distance learning. We introduce a U.S. School Closure and Distance Learning Database that tracks in-person visits across …
Support for a universal basic income: A demand–capacity paradox
Debate around a universal basic income (UBI) tends to focus on the economic and social implications of the policy proposal. Less clear, however, are the factors influencing support for a UBI. Using the 2016 European Social Survey, we investigate how trade union membership and left political ideology (central to power resources theory) and attitudes towards immigrants’ access to welfare benefits (central to welfare state chauvinism) affect individ…
The Effect of Benefit Underreporting on Estimates of Poverty in the United States
Pathways toward Inclusive Income Growth: A Comparative Decomposition of National Growth Profiles
Despite rising interest in income inequality, scholars remain divided over the mechanisms underlying inclusive income growth and how these mechanisms vary across countries. This study introduces the concept of national growth profiles, that is, the additive contribution of changes in taxes, transfers, composition, and other factors including market institutions to changes across a country's income distribution. We present a decomposition framewor…
The Enduring Significance of Ethno-Racial Inequalities in Poverty in the U.S., 1993–2017
The Direct Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Changes in the U.S. Income Distribution, 1967–2015
Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to rising levels of income inequality in the United States. However, prior studies have provided an incomplete account of how changes to specific transfer programs have contributed to changes in income growth across the distribution. Our study decomposes the direct effects of tax and transfer programs on changes in the household income distribution from 1967 to 2015. We show that despite a rising Gini co…
A glass ceiling on poverty reduction? An empirical investigation into the structural constraints on minimum income protections
This article investigates whether declining or sluggish growth in earnings for low-wage workers contributes to declining levels of minimum income protections. Starting from the observation of lacklustre growth in minimum income protections, this article introduces a framework to conceptualize the tensions facing modern welfare states in their attempt to (1) provide poverty-alleviating minimum incomes, (2) achieve employment growth and (3) keep sp…
What a social investment ‘litmus test’ must address: A response to Plavgo and Hemerijck
Throughout the past decade, the notion that social policy should be applied as a tool to enhance the productive capacity of families, rather than to smooth consumption, has gained considerable traction under the moniker of social investment (SI). Against lingering critiques of the usefulness of SI research, Plavgo and Hemerijck primarily present bivariate, cross-sectional correlations of national-level outcomes to provide what they call a ‘social…
Extreme child poverty and the role of social policy in the United States
This paper applies improved household income data to reevaluate the levels, trends, composition, and role of social policy in extreme child poverty in the US from 1997 to 2015. We adjust for benefit underreporting and incorporate the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). This reduces the share of children below $2 per day from 1.8 per cent to 0.1 per cent in 2015. However, survey data omits the 1.3 million homeless children. Unlike …
The United States’ Record-Low Child Poverty Rate in International and Historical Perspective: A Research Note
In 2021, the federal government of the United States expanded a set of income transfers that led to strong reductions in child poverty. This research note uses microdata from more than 50 countries and U.S. data spanning more than 50 years to place the 2021 child poverty rate in historical and international perspective. We demonstrate that whether using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), relative poverty measures, or an absolute poverty meas…
Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State
Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the U.S. social safety net has shifted away from direct cash assistance for the lowest-income households and toward tax-based transfers targeted at working families with children. Previous research has assessed this shift by evaluating its effect on the national poverty rate. Doing so, however, overlooks how it may also have led to increased inequality among low-income households. We apply a decomposition fr…
Estimating Monthly Poverty Rates in the United States
Official poverty estimates for the United States are presented annually, based on a family unit's annual resources, and reported with a considerable lag. This study introduces a framework to produce monthly estimates of the Supplemental Poverty Measure and official poverty measure, based on a family unit's monthly income, and with a two‐week lag. We argue that a shorter accounting period and more timely estimates of poverty better account for int…
The Levels and Trends in Deep and Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1993–2016
Recently, there has been tremendous interest in deep and extreme poverty in the United States. We advance beyond prior research by using higher-quality data, improving measurement, and following leading standards in international income research. We estimate deep (less than 20% of medians) and extreme (less than 10% of medians) poverty in the United States from 1993 to 2016. Using the Current Population Survey, we match the income definition of t…
Poor State, Rich State: Understanding the Variability of Poverty Rates across U.S. States
According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, state-level poverty rates range from a low of less than 10 percent in Iowa to a high of more than 20 percent in California. We seek to account for these differences using a theoretical framework proposed by Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen (2017), which emphasizes the prevalence of poverty risk factors as well as poverty penalties associated with each risk factor. We estimate state-specific penalties and …
Incentive to Retrench? Investigating the Interactions of State and Federal Social Assistance Programs after Welfare Reform
Spending on cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has declined throughout the United States in recent decades. Simultaneously, spending on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs has increased. This article investigates whether retrenchment of TANF has led to increases in the participation in and levels of benefit receipt of SNA…
The Child Tax Credit and Family Well-Being: An Overview of Reforms and Impacts
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) has become an increasingly important element of the U.S. safety net. We discuss the structure of the CTC and its effects on childhood poverty and other indicators of well-being during its three distinct phases: prior to the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) expansion, during the expansion, and after the expansion's expiration. We also examine recent efforts to establish state-level CTCs. We show that, in 2020, roughly one…
The Cumulative Advantage of a Unionized Career for Lifetime Earnings
Studies on labor union earnings premiums generally investigate their size through point-in-time estimates. This study posits, by contrast, that point-in-time estimates of the union premium overlook the cumulative earnings advantages of long-term, persistent union membership. Using a sample of men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1969 to 2019, the authors investigate how lifetime union membership contributes to earnings advantages. The…
Income Support Policies and the Rise of Student and Family Homelessness
This study investigates whether the generosity and accessibility of publicly provided income support contributes to levels of family homelessness. Using data on student homelessness from most public school districts in the United States, I find that greater access to cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program reduces levels of family homelessness and that the reduction is particularly strong for majority-Black…
Administrative Burdens and Economic Insecurity Among Black, Latino, and White Families
This study investigates how administrative burdens influence differential receipt of income transfers after a family member loses a job. Using the panel component of the Current Population Survey from 1990 through 2019, we find that administrative burdens have increased in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Unemployment Insurance programs but declined for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. These administrative burden effe…
Decomposing the Decline of Cash Assistance in the United States, 1993 to 2016
Cash assistance allocations from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and its predecessor program fell from $34.3 billion to $7.4 billion in real value from 1993 to 2016, a 78% decrease. Some investigations of TANF point to favorable labor market changes as the source of the decline, whereas others point to declining benefit levels and barriers to benefit receipt. This study introduces a framework to decompose the decline of TANF cash a…
Income Support Policies for Single Parents in Europe and the United States: What Works Best
Poverty rates among single parents vary considerably across countries, in part reflecting differences in the generosity and design of minimum income protections. We ask what the optimal ways are to target income support to single parents, if the prime objective of policy is to shelter those households from poverty. We map minimum income provisions for working and nonworking single-parent households across Europe and the United States, showing tha…
Exposure to Childhood Poverty and Racial Differences in Economic Opportunity in Young Adulthood
Young adults in the United States, especially young Black adults, experience high poverty rates relative to other age groups. Prior research has largely attributed racial disparities in young adult poverty to differential attainment of benchmarks related to education, employment, and family formation. This study investigates that mechanism alongside racial differences in childhood poverty exposure. Analyses of Panel Study of Income Dynamics data …
Varieties of liberalism: A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States
The United States is generally recognised as an exemplar of liberal policy regime types. However, given evidence of state‐level divergence in social policy, this article investigates to what extent such variation is present and relevant in state‐level family policy. To this end, we pose a primary and secondary research question. Our primary question is whether varieties of liberalism exist across the 50 states in the United States. Our secondary …
Restoring the Entrails of Welfare Reform: Restoring the Entrails
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 famously “ended welfare as we [knew] it” by replacing the state-operated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a revised funding scheme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In the summer of 2012, controversy erupted over a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Childr…
Poor State, Rich State: Understanding the Variability of Poverty Rates across U.S. States
According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, state-level poverty rates range from a low of less than 10 percent in Iowa to a high of more than 20 percent in California. We seek to account for these differences using a theoretical framework proposed by Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen (2017), which emphasizes the prevalence of poverty risk factors as well as poverty penalties associated with each risk factor. We estimate state-specific penalties and …
Unequal unions? A comparative decomposition of income inequality in the European Union and United States
This study applies improved household income data to measure and decompose trends in pan-European income inequality from 2006 to 2014. To contrast the relative significance of economic homogeneity versus the efficacy of welfare state and labour market institutions in shaping income distributions, we compare the structure of inequality in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU-28) to that of the 50 United States. This comparison stands in …
Extreme child poverty and the role of social policy in the United States
This paper applies improved household income data to reevaluate the levels, trends, composition, and role of social policy in extreme child poverty in the US from 1997 to 2015. We adjust for benefit underreporting and incorporate the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). This reduces the share of children below $2 per day from 1.8 per cent to 0.1 per cent in 2015. However, survey data omits the 1.3 million homeless children. Unlike …
Support for a universal basic income: A demand–capacity paradox
Debate around a universal basic income (UBI) tends to focus on the economic and social implications of the policy proposal. Less clear, however, are the factors influencing support for a UBI. Using the 2016 European Social Survey, we investigate how trade union membership and left political ideology (central to power resources theory) and attitudes towards immigrants’ access to welfare benefits (central to welfare state chauvinism) affect individ…
A glass ceiling on poverty reduction? An empirical investigation into the structural constraints on minimum income protections
This article investigates whether declining or sluggish growth in earnings for low-wage workers contributes to declining levels of minimum income protections. Starting from the observation of lacklustre growth in minimum income protections, this article introduces a framework to conceptualize the tensions facing modern welfare states in their attempt to (1) provide poverty-alleviating minimum incomes, (2) achieve employment growth and (3) keep sp…
Incentive to Retrench? Investigating the Interactions of State and Federal Social Assistance Programs after Welfare Reform
Spending on cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has declined throughout the United States in recent decades. Simultaneously, spending on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs has increased. This article investigates whether retrenchment of TANF has led to increases in the participation in and levels of benefit receipt of SNA…
The Fiscalization of Social Policy: How Taxpayers Trumped Children in the Fight Against Child Poverty
The Fiscalization of Social Policy offers a comparative-historical perspective on the growing use of tax expenditures for social policy purposes. McCabe primarily focuses on the policymaking experiences of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, tracing differences in policy legacies to explain why the U.S., unlike its liberal counterparts, has not expanded its version of a child tax credit (CTC) to non-working families. The two puzzle…
The Effect of Benefit Underreporting on Estimates of Poverty in the United States
Covid-19, school closures, and child poverty: A social crisis in the making
While coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread across the globe, many countries have decided to close schools as part of a physical distancing policy to slow transmission and ease the burden on health systems. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization estimates that 138 countries have closed schools nationwide, and several other countries have implemented regional or local closures. These school closures are affectin…
Varieties of liberalism: A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States
The United States is generally recognised as an exemplar of liberal policy regime types. However, given evidence of state‐level divergence in social policy, this article investigates to what extent such variation is present and relevant in state‐level family policy. To this end, we pose a primary and secondary research question. Our primary question is whether varieties of liberalism exist across the 50 states in the United States. Our secondary …
The Levels and Trends in Deep and Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1993–2016
Recently, there has been tremendous interest in deep and extreme poverty in the United States. We advance beyond prior research by using higher-quality data, improving measurement, and following leading standards in international income research. We estimate deep (less than 20% of medians) and extreme (less than 10% of medians) poverty in the United States from 1993 to 2016. Using the Current Population Survey, we match the income definition of t…
The Direct Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Changes in the U.S. Income Distribution, 1967–2015
Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to rising levels of income inequality in the United States. However, prior studies have provided an incomplete account of how changes to specific transfer programs have contributed to changes in income growth across the distribution. Our study decomposes the direct effects of tax and transfer programs on changes in the household income distribution from 1967 to 2015. We show that despite a rising Gini co…
Further Analyses Reinforce Our Conclusions About Extreme Poverty
Our study (presented earlier in this issue of Demography) shows that deep and extreme poverty have increased in the United States from 1993 to 2016, particularly for childless households. In his response, James Sullivan raises concerns that (1) the Transfer Income Model, version 3 (TRIM3) overallocates Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to lower-income households, and (2) earnings among lower-income households are underrepo…
Automation, Occupational Earnings Trends, and the Moderating Role of Organized Labor
Routine-biased technological change has emerged as the dominant explanation for the differential earnings growth of occupations at greater risk of automation, such as machine operators or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. In contrast, this paper finds that the declining earnings returns to an occupation's routine task intensity (RTI) can largely be attributed to the decline of organized labor. Using individual-level data on 3.3…
What the Covid-19 Pandemic Reveals about Racial Differences in Child Welfare and Child Well-Being: An Introduction to the Special Issue
This paper introduces the special issue on race, child welfare, and child well-being. In doing so, I summarize the evidence of racial/ethnic disparities in child well-being after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent findings demonstrate that, compared to white children, black and Latino children are more likely to have experienced poverty and food insufficiency, to have had parents lose their jobs, and to be exposed to distance learning and…
What a social investment ‘litmus test’ must address: A response to Plavgo and Hemerijck
Throughout the past decade, the notion that social policy should be applied as a tool to enhance the productive capacity of families, rather than to smooth consumption, has gained considerable traction under the moniker of social investment (SI). Against lingering critiques of the usefulness of SI research, Plavgo and Hemerijck primarily present bivariate, cross-sectional correlations of national-level outcomes to provide what they call a ‘social…
Decomposing the Decline of Cash Assistance in the United States, 1993 to 2016
Cash assistance allocations from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and its predecessor program fell from $34.3 billion to $7.4 billion in real value from 1993 to 2016, a 78% decrease. Some investigations of TANF point to favorable labor market changes as the source of the decline, whereas others point to declining benefit levels and barriers to benefit receipt. This study introduces a framework to decompose the decline of TANF cash a…
Income Support Policies and the Rise of Student and Family Homelessness
This study investigates whether the generosity and accessibility of publicly provided income support contributes to levels of family homelessness. Using data on student homelessness from most public school districts in the United States, I find that greater access to cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program reduces levels of family homelessness and that the reduction is particularly strong for majority-Black…
Large socio-economic, geographic and demographic disparities exist in exposure to school closures
The coronovirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted many school districts to turn to distance or at-home learning. Studies are emerging on the negative effects of distance learning on educational performance, but less is known about the socio-economic, geographic and demographic characteristics of students exposed to distance learning. We introduce a U.S. School Closure and Distance Learning Database that tracks in-person visits across …
Pathways toward Inclusive Income Growth: A Comparative Decomposition of National Growth Profiles
Despite rising interest in income inequality, scholars remain divided over the mechanisms underlying inclusive income growth and how these mechanisms vary across countries. This study introduces the concept of national growth profiles, that is, the additive contribution of changes in taxes, transfers, composition, and other factors including market institutions to changes across a country's income distribution. We present a decomposition framewor…
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Black-White child poverty gap in the United States
Black children in the USA are more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty. While past research has primarily attributed this phenomenon to the family structure of black children, this article investigates how state-level heterogeneity in social assistance programs contributes to the black-white child poverty gap. I find that racial inequities in states' administration of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) progra…
The Care Burden during Covid-19: A National Database of Child Care Closures in the United States
Access to child care centers reduces the care burden of parents, promotes child development, and creates employment opportunities. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, however, many child care centers closed or reduced capacity because of restrictions and declining demand for in-person care. The authors use anonymized and aggregated mobile phone data to track year-over-year changes in visits to child care centers across most counties in …
Estimating Monthly Poverty Rates in the United States
Official poverty estimates for the United States are presented annually, based on a family unit's annual resources, and reported with a considerable lag. This study introduces a framework to produce monthly estimates of the Supplemental Poverty Measure and official poverty measure, based on a family unit's monthly income, and with a two‐week lag. We argue that a shorter accounting period and more timely estimates of poverty better account for int…
The Enduring Significance of Ethno-Racial Inequalities in Poverty in the U.S., 1993–2017
Economics (43 works) · Demographic economics (34 works) · Economic growth (31 works) · Poverty (29 works) · Political science (24 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (19 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (15 works) · Income, Poverty, and Inequality (15 works) · Development economics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works)