Our policy briefs deliver our cutting-edge research directly to policy makers, researchers, and stakeholders in an accessible format. These peer-reviewed resources are short and informative analyses of our research relating to poverty and policy.
To grow up in poverty can have a lasting impact on a child. What is less understood is how it affects the early relationships that shape a child’s social and emotional growth.
In 2012, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that around 46 million or one in seven residents lived in poverty. However, the very term “poverty” continues to evoke debates on what it means to be poor.
In the recent recession, unemployment nearly doubled to 9.5 percent by mid-2009. This figure is powerful in and of itself, but does not tell the whole story.
Transitions into and out of poverty often happen after major events such as marriage, divorce, or changes in income. They are also associated with economic factors, such as unemployment rates or wages.
For an extended period now, U.S. farms have enjoyed an abundance of workers from Mexico who work for stable or decreasing real wages. However, since 2008 the overall number of these farm workers, both these working in the U.S. and those who remain in Mexico, has shrunk substantially.
One in five children in the United States is the child of immigrants. These new Americans, most of whom are U.S. citizens, are more than twice as likely as children of natives to have no health insurance. Prior research has shown that differences in income or employment between native and immigrant parents do not account for the disparity in coverage.
Those who come to the United States looking for work compete with some groups of native-born workers but complement others. Since wages and the local poverty rate play a part in how many arrive, it is a challenge to quantify the effect they in turn have on both, and whether they push native workers below the poverty line.
Linking income and health has been a notorious challenge for researchers. With multiple sources of income such as earnings, cash transfer and near cash transfer programs, it is difficult to isolate their effects on health. The 1993 expansion to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the largest and most recent of federal expansions to date, provided researchers a unique opportunity.
