Where a student attends college has become increasingly important in the last few decades. As education has grown significantly more important in the labor market, competition among students for access to the most selective colleges and universities has grown as well. In this brief we examine patterns of enrollment, by race and family income, in the most selective colleges and universities.

Mass imprisonment is one of the most important policy changes the United States has seen in the past forty years. In 2011, 1.6 million people, or 1 in 200 adults, in the U.S. were in prison (Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol 2011). Understanding the factors that affect neighborhood imprisonment rates is particularly important for improving the quality of life in disadvantaged communities. This paper examines the impact of one such factor, racial residential segregation, on imprisonment rates at the neighborhood level.

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families with more employed members and with fewer employed members.

Non-governmental free food assistance is available to many low-income Americans through food pantries, yet many do not avail themselves of this assistance. As the monetary value of such assistance can be over $2,000 per year, non-use poses a puzzle from an economic standpoint. This study uses original data collected through in-depth interviews with 63 low-income San Franciscans who did not use free food assistance from food pantires. The data paint a nuanced picture of the reasons low-income people do not obtain assistance from local food pantries.

How do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? Most prior studies of the causal effects of material well-being on health use identification strategies involving income increases; these studies as well as prior research on stock market accumulations may not inform this question if the effect of wealth on health is asymmetric. We use exogenous variation in the interview dates of the 2008 Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of large wealth losses on mental health among older U.S. adults.