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State of the Union 2017: Safety Net

Given that poverty rates are signicantly higher among blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians than in the general population, it is not surprising that their enrollment in federal safety net programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps, is also higher. However, poor blacks and American Indians are significantly less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to enroll in Medicaid, which is the largest federal safety net program. No similar gap exists for enrollment in the food stamp or Supplemental Security Income programs.

State of the Union 2017: Poverty

Though some gaps have narrowed, there remain substantial racial-ethnic differences in poverty, with blacks and Native Americans continuing to experience the highest poverty rates, Hispanics following with slightly lower rates, and whites and Asians experiencing the lowest poverty rates. The sizes of these racial-ethnic gaps often differ substantially by region, with black women in the rural South, for example, facing poverty rates as high as 37 percent.

State of the Union 2017: Employment

Full recovery from the job losses of the Great Recession eluded African-American men even as the rest of the population approached full employment. Job loss can also unsettle those who haven’t lost their jobs. 1 in 9 African-Americans and 1 in 6 Hispanic Americans fear a job loss within one year, while just 1 in 18 whites do.

Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.

Using Tax Policy to Address Economic Need: An Assessment of California’s New State EITC

The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940

We estimate rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s.

Women’s Economic Empowerment: A Review of Evidence on Enablers and Barriers

Besides human rights protection and social welfare improvement, fostering female participation in the economy can stimulate growth with human capital accumulation and enhance the competitiveness of businesses. But women face many barriers to participating in the labor market, particularly in high productivity sectors, due to limited investments in education, time burdens from care responsibilities, legal prohibitions to land ownership, and sexual harassment and violence.

Polluting Black Space

Social psychologists have long demonstrated that people are stereotyped on the basis of race. Researchers have conducted extensive experimental studies on the negative stereotypes associated with Black Americans in particular. Across 4 studies, we demonstrate that the physical spaces associated with Black Americans are also subject to negative racial stereotypes. Such spaces, for example, are perceived as impoverished, crime-ridden, and dirty (Study 1).

Inequality and Mobility Using Income, Consumption, and Wealth for the Same Individuals

Recent studies of economic inequality almost always separately examine income inequality, consumption inequality, and wealth inequality, and hence, these studies miss the important synergy between the three measures explicit in the life-cycle budget constraint. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we study inequality in three dimensions, focusing on the conjoint distributions of income, consumption, and wealth for the same individuals. We find that the trends in inequality in income, consumption, and wealth similarly increase between 1999 and 2013.

Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2013: What Happened over the Great Recession?

I look at wealth trends from 1962 to 2013, particularly for the middle class. Asset prices plunged between 2007 and 2010 but then rebounded from 2010 to 2013. The most telling finding is that median wealth plummeted by 44 percent between 2007 and 2010, almost double the drop in housing prices. Wealth inequality, after almost two decades of little movement, was up sharply from 2007 to 2010.

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