Working Papers

California’s Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) Cash Assistance Program: Who Benefits?

Recession, Religion, and Happiness, 2006-2010

The General Social Survey panel of 2006-2010 tracked Americans' reactions to the election of Barack Obama and the Great Recession (officially lasting from December 2007 to March 2009) as well as to events in their personal lives. Americans were less happy in 2010 than in 2006; the percent "very happy" decreased by four percentage points and the percent "not too happy" increased almost as much. In the cross section, standard predictors - including church attendance, family income, and marital status - continued to matter.

Private Financial Transfers, the Great Recession, and Family Context

Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=4,701), we studied private financial transfers (PFTs) among mothers with young children during the Great Recession. We explored whether the unemployment rate was associated with PFTs received and whether family income and family structure moderated this association.

Immigrants Equilibriate Local Markets: Evidence from the Great Recession

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants' location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less responsive.

Necessary Reductions or Increased Support? Parental Investments in Children During the Great Recession

In this article, we examine the impact of one such event - the Great Recession of the late 2000s - on one potential mechanism of transmission: parents' financial investments in children. Because parents at different points in the income distribution have different resources, they may make different decisions or have different abilities to respond to times of economic hardship and uncertainty.

The Great Recession and Married Parents' Use of Time

This paper describes the time spent by married fathers and mothers in home production and child-care over the period 2003-2011 in the American Time Use Survey (n = 37,228). The recession increased the likelihood that fathers participated in both home production and childcare. However, it decreased the amount of fathers’ time in home production among participants. This had the overall effect of lowering the amount of fathers’ time in home production in the recession by about 35 minutes per week.

The Great Recession and Mother's Health

We investigate the impacts of the Great Recession on the health of women with children using the last two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study. We model the financial crisis with changes in the state unemployment rate and we focus on a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes, as well as health behaviors. Our findings from the individual fixed effects models suggest heterogeneous impacts across demographic and socioeconomic groups.

Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession

In the United States, the Great Recession has been marked by severe negative shocks to labor market conditions. In this study, we combine longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with Bureau of Labor Statistics data on local area unemployment rates to examine the relationship between adverse labor market conditions and intimate partner violence between 1999 and 2010. We find that rapidly worsening labor market conditions are associated with increases in the prevalence of violent/controlling behavior in marriage.

Who Enters Teaching? Encouraging Evidence that the Status of Teaching is Improving

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality.

Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Residential Preferences, Residential Mobility, and Neighborhood Change

This paper reviews methods for analyzing both individual preferences and choices about where to live, and the implications of these choices for residential patterns.

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