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Reducing Poverty in California...Permanently

What if we decided to go beyond the usual lip-service commitments to reducing poverty and actually tried to do something big? Learn more about a new plan to reduce poverty—substantially and permanently—in California.

Linking U.S. School District Test Score Distributions to a Common Scale, 2009-2013

In the U.S., there is no recent database of district-level test scores that is comparable across states. We construct and evaluate such a database for years 2009-2013 to support large-scale educational research. First, we derive transformations that link each state test score scale to the scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Next, we apply these transformations to a unique nationwide database of district-level means and standard deviations, obtaining estimates of each districts’ test score distribution expressed on the NAEP measurement scale.

Coming of Age in the Other America

Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility.

‘Membership Has Its Privileges’: Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education

Prizes – formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior – play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools.

Poverty, Pregnancy, and Birth Outcomes: A Study of the Earned Income Tax Credit

Economic interventions are increasingly recognised as a mechanism to address perinatal health outcomes among disadvantaged groups. In the US, the earned income tax credit (EITC) is the largest poverty alleviation programme. Little is known about its effects on perinatal health among recipients and their children. We exploit quasi-random variation in the size of EITC payments to examine the effects of income on perinatal health. We find that EITC payment size is associated with better levels of several indicators of perinatal health.

Poverty and Child Development: A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit

Although adverse socioeconomic conditions are correlated with worse child health and development, the effects of poverty-alleviation policies are less understood. We examined the associations of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on child development and used an instrumental variable approach to estimate the potential impacts of income. We used data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (n = 8,186) during 1986–2000 to examine effects on the Behavioral Problems Index (BPI) and Home Observation Measurement of the Environment inventory (HOME) scores.

The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014

In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy across income groups increased over time. However, the association between life expectancy and income varied substantially across areas; differences in longevity across income groups decreased in some areas and increased in others. The differences in life expectancy were correlated with health behaviors and local area characteristics.

Including Health Insurance in Poverty Measurement: The Impact of Massachusetts Health Reform on Poverty

We develop and implement what we believe is the first conceptually valid health-inclusive poverty measure (HIPM)—a measure that includes health care or insurance in the poverty needs threshold and health insurance benefits in family resources—and we discuss its limitations. Building on the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, we construct a pilot HIPM for the under-65 population under ACA-like health reform in Massachusetts. This pilot is intended to demonstrate the practicality, face validity and value of a HIPM.

Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood

We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s. First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substantially across the parental income distribution. Notably, the traditional gender gap in employment rates is reversed for children growing up in poor families: boys in families in the bottom quintile of the income distributionare less likely to work than girls.

State of the Union 2016: Health

The U.S. population is not just sicker, on average, than the European population, but also has a higher level of health inequality than the European population. The U.S. states that combine low self-rated health with high health inequality look strikingly similar—in terms of their health profiles—to Central and Eastern European countries.

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