Gregory Acs

Gregory Acs's picture
Labor Markets Research Group Leader, Vice President of Income and Benefits Policy Center
The Urban Institute
Dr. Acs is the Director of The Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. Previously, he served as Unit Chief for Labor and Income Security in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Health and Human Resources Division and as Vice-President of the Association for Policy Analysis and Management. His research focuses on issues of social insurance, social welfare, and the compensation of workers. Most recently, he has completed a study of the factors contributing to persistently high unemployment in the U.S. and policy responses to that problem. Those responses include programs to improve workers’ skills, modifications to Unemployment Insurance, and approaches to facilitate transitions back to work. In recent work, he has examined changes in economic mobility and economic security with a focus on low-income working families. Dr. Acs has also completed several reports on the well-being of children across living arrangements, how welfare policies influence family composition, and the status of families leaving welfare. In other work, he has examined how state and federal policies affect the incentives families face as they move from welfare to work. In the past, Dr. Acs has studied impact of disabilities on the duration of welfare receipt and the ability of welfare recipients to work and/or participate in education and training programs using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. He has also studied the employment patterns of young women to determine the paths women take to achieve good jobs--jobs paying enough to leave women better off working than on welfare. Further, Dr. Acs has examined the causes and consequences of non-marital childbearing using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. In addition, Dr. Acs has examined trends in health insurance coverage over time. Dr. Acs has also assessed the impact of non-wage benefits on the earnings distribution using data from the Current Population Survey.

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