Ann Huff Stevens Professor of Economics and Deputy Director, Center for Poverty Research
Ann Huff Stevens is Deputy Director of the Center for Poverty
Research and Professor of Economics at UC Davis. She studies low
income workers and labor markets, the incidence and effects of
job loss, connections between economic shocks and health, and
poverty and safety-net dynamics.
Her current work examines returns to vocational education
programs, the dynamics of EITC eligibility, and long-term effects
of labor force non-participation.
Stevens previously served on the faculty at Rutgers and Yale
Universities and is a faculty research associate with the
National Bureau of Economic Research. At UC Davis, Stevens has
served as Chair of the Department of Economics and Interim Dean
of the Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. from
the University of Michigan and has served as a principal
investigator on grants from the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, the National Science Foundation and other
agencies.
1153 Social Sciences and Humanities Bldg
Davis, CA
Living in “deep poverty” means living on an income less than half the official poverty threshold, or, for a family of three in 2017, living with annual income of less than $9758. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 18.5 million individuals in the United States—5.7 percent of the population—lived in deep poverty in 2017. At such low levels of income, it may be particularly important to understand for how long individuals continue to live in deep poverty. My recent study investigates the long-term persistence of deep poverty. While most spells of deep poverty in the U.S.
For the past two decades, U.S. anti-poverty policy has coalesced around the idea that work should be at the center of anti-poverty programs. Bi-partisan welfare reform in the 1990s focused on work requirements and time limits. The growth of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which increases after-tax income for those working at the bottom of the wage distribution, has also emphasized the importance of work.
On September 12, 2017 the Census Bureau released the
official poverty rate for 2016 (12.7%), showing that 40.6
million Americans live below the federal poverty line
(FPL), currently set at $24,563 for a family of four. This
poverty measure is an estimate of the annual income required to
meet basic needs.
These lectures are part of a UC Davis hybrid course on poverty
and public policy taking place in 2016. The course is led by Ann
Huff Stevens, a Professor of Economics and Director of
the Center for Poverty Research.
The connection between poverty and labor markets is complex.
High, stable wages and stable full-time employment can keep many
out of poverty. However, the stagnation of wages at the bottom of
the US wage distribution over the past several decades and
continuing low rates of full-time work, especially in
single-parent households, work will often leave families below
the official poverty threshold.
The Census Bureau’s latest poverty statistics show that last year
13.5 percent of Americans still lived below the federal poverty
line. The official poverty rate is a valuable measure of how
well we as a nation ensure opportunity for those who earn the
least. However, just as important is understanding why the
poverty rate has not changed, how it affects those who are poor
and what policies can make a difference.
Where in California has the gap between rich and poor grown most
since the recession? The Bay Area, home of some of the most
expensive ZIP codes in the country, seems like a logical answer.
Where in California has the gap between rich and poor grown most
since the Great Recession?
The Bay Area, home of your Zuckerbergs and Steyers and some of
the most expensive zip codes in the country, seems like
a logical answer. Over the past decade, what other part of
California has minted as many members of the “1 percent” as
Silicon Valley?
Transiciones hacia y fuera de la pobreza frecuentemente ocurren
después de acontecimientos importantes como casamientos,
divorcios o cambios en ingresos. También las transiciones son
asociadas con factores económicos, como tasas de desempleo y
salarios. Entendiendo los impactos de cada uno puede mostrar las
diferencias entre la pobreza de corto plazo o circunstancial y la
pobreza a largo plazo asociada con limitaciones permanentes en
ingresos, empleo y estructura familiar. En un estudio reciente,
yo encontré que en los Estados Unidos, semanas individuales
trabajadas y niveles agregados de salarios son los más
importantes predictores de cómo uno puede escapar o evitar la
pobreza desde un año a otro.
In this presentation, economist and Center for Poverty Research
director Ann Huff Stevens discusses how stagnation of wages at
the bottom of the US wage distribution over the past several
decades and continuing low rates of full-time work, especially in
single-parent households, often leave families below the official
poverty threshold.
California’s wealthiest taxpayers are the state’s only group
experiencing rising incomes, a reflection of a broader national
problem of growing wage inequality.
National efforts to increase college attainment and to address
the nation’s skills gap have focused heavily on community
colleges. Understanding returns to community college programs is
particularly important for low-income students, since nearly half
of low-income students begin their college careers at community
colleges, compared to just 15 percent of high-income students.[1]
Using administrative data from California, we find that
students who earn vocational certificates and degrees see large
earnings gains that vary substantially by course of study.
Summary:
This paper estimates the earnings returns to vocational, or
career technical, education programs in the nation’s largest
community college system.
The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United
States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low
income families. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for
Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides federal grants to
states to support nutrition for pregnant and post-partum mothers
and children up to age five. Our study, one of the first to
convincingly describe the program’s causal effect, found that
WIC’s implementation led to an increase in average birthweight,
especially among mothers with low levels of education. This
suggests that the value of WIC benefits for needy participants is
substantial compared to the program’s relatively low costs.
DAVIS, Calif. — In this new video series released by the UC
Davis Center for Poverty Research, Faculty Affiliates discuss
some of the causes and consequences of poverty in the U.S. as
well as possible solutions suggested by research from across
academic disciplines.
These lectures are part of a UC Davis hybrid course on poverty
and public policy offered in fall 2017. The course is led by Ann
Huff Stevens, a Professor of Economics.
This special podcast report describes a new study by center
director Ann Stevens and graduate student affiliate Chloe East
that examines how many workers at or near the minimum wage still
rely on safety net programs to help their families get by.
Listen now.
DAVIS, Calif. — UC Davis graduate students affiliated with the
Center for Poverty Research have recently won a number of
prestigious fellowships for their research.
This year, fellowships graduate student affiliates have won
include the UC Davis Provost’s Fellowship in the Arts,
Humanities, and Social Sciences; National Academy of
Education/Spencer Foundation dissertation fellowships and the
American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship.
In recent years, UC Davis, with the support of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, has taken on a crucial
role in the fight against domestic poverty.
Every Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a
nonprofit organization made up of some of North America’s most
respected economists, releases its latest batch of working
papers. The papers aren’t peer-reviewed, so their conclusions are
preliminary (and occasionally flat-out wrong). But they offer an
early peek into some of the research that will shape economic
thinking in the years ahead. Here are a few of this week’s most
interesting papers.
Imagine you’re a 37-year-old woman, three months pregnant, living
in the Arden-Arcade area, taking the bus to your job at Burger
King, where every week you work 40 hours but only earn $9.25 for
each.
UC Davis economics professor and director of the Center for
Poverty Research Ann Huff Stevens says that when people are
“talking about moving $9 an hour to $15 an hour, we know
virtually nothing” about how that will impact employment or small
businesses. “We really don’t know, and so there’s a risk.”
In this podcast, Harry Holzer and Center Director Ann Stevens
discuss how colleges have taken on the role of building the U.S.
labor force. In March, 2015, Holzer visited the center as a
Visiting Scholar to present the seminar “Building Labor Market
Skills among Disadvantaged Americans.”
In his State of the City speech Thursday night, Sacramento Mayor
Kevin Johnson said he wanted to put together a task force to look
at raising the minimum wage in the capital city.
Currently, the city’s minimum wage is the same as California’s
state minimum wage — $9 per hour. In 2016, it will increase to
$10 per hour. But some cities across the nation, such as San
Francisco and Seattle, have sought higher minimum wages for their
workers.
In this podcast, Kathleen Short and Center Director Ann Stevens
discuss the Supplemental Poverty Measure and other attempts to
measure poverty throughout the nation. In November, 2014, Short
visited the center to present the seminar “The Supplemental
Poverty Measure for 2013: Latest Estimates and Research.”
DAVIS, Calif. — Center director Ann Huff Stevens has been
appointed interim dean of the Graduate School of Management.
Stevens will continue to direct the center but will give up her
position as chair of the Department of Economics. She will serve
as dean until the position is filled permanently, but will not be
a candidate for the job. Stevens’ appointment is effective
October 1.
STANFORD, Calif. — The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
featured work by Center for Poverty Research directors and
affiliates in their summer 2014 issue of Pathways magazine. The
articles by Ann Stevens, Marianne Page, Giovanni Peri and Hilary
Hoynes, focused on aspects of labor markets ranging from
immigrants to job loss to safety net programs.
DAVIS, Calif. — The UC Davis Center for Poverty Research has
launched a program to host undergraduates from Historically Black
Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) for summer experiences with
poverty research and mentorship toward academic careers.
THE immediate impact of the recession — widespread buyouts and
layoffs — may be fading, but the fear of losing a job hangs over
workplaces like a cloud of worry.
“There’s a myth that in the 1950s, everyone was very loyal to
companies and companies were very loyal to people,” said Ann Huff
Stevens, a professor of economics at the University of
California, Davis. “But we always had a contingent work force
that could be laid off at any time. They were called women.”
For the long-term unemployed, finding a job is hard — but keeping
one may be even harder.
…Negron’s experience echoed prescient research conducted nearly
two decades ago by economist Ann Stevens, now at the University
of California at Davis. She looked at data tracking workers from
1968 to 1988 and found that 41 percent who lost their job once
were unemployed at least once more during that period. Almost all
of the subsequent job losses occurred within five years of the
first one.
Stevens’s study did not explore the fate of the long-term
unemployed. Still, she found that multiple spells of unemployment
depressed workers’ wages by 9 percent even after several years.
“I think of the unemployment issue as another form of
inequality,” she said in an interview. “In some sense, it’s the
same people experiencing repeated unemployment and repeated job
losses.”
DAVIS, Calif. — More than 60 women leaders from the Sacramento
region convened at UC Davis in March to discuss the complex
challenges women face in the workplace with an eye toward policy
that could affect the nation.
Over the past 45 years, the United States has experienced a
rising standard of living, with real GDP per capita more than
doubling between 1959 and 2004. In contrast, living standards
among some groups seem to have stagnated. Although a number of
studies have documented a correlation between macroeconomic
conditions and poverty, the relationship is not as simple, or as
strong, as one might think. What additional factors can explain
the starkly different trends in economic well-being that are
measured by overall GDP growth and the poverty rate?
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Center for Poverty Research Director Ann
Huff Stevens presented on poverty in California at the first
meeting of the new legislative caucus on ending poverty in the
state.
In America’s new normal, plenty of Americans will tumble into
poverty at some point – but few will be stuck there forever.
Nearly one in three Americans experienced a stint of poverty
between 2009 and 2011, a new Census Bureau report finds, but only
a fraction of those people were stuck below the poverty line for
the entire three-year period.
“There’s a lot of movement in and out of poverty,” said Ann
Stevens, director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis.
California, the state renowned for Beverly Hills mansions,
glittery Hollywood stars, Malibu beaches, palm trees, and the
stunning Golden Gate Bridge, hides a deep, dark secret – it has
the nation’s highest poverty rate.
“Housing costs in Nevada or Florida… are nowhere near this
extreme,” said Ann Huff Stevens, director of the Center for
Poverty Research at University of California-Davis, in an
interview. “It is important to note that California is a
very expensive state, but it is also important to keep in mind
that this is the main factor that makes our poverty rate jump
from slightly higher than the national average in the official
measure to number 1 in the supplemental measures.”
DAVIS, Calif. — Amid the 500-plus pages of the newly released
Shriver Report on poverty among women, you will find the Thrive
Index, the work of UC Davis economics professor Ann Huff Stevens
with research assistance from MBA students in the Graduate School
of Management.
Stevens is chair of the Department of Economics and director of
the Center for Poverty Research. Read about the center’s
recent
two-day conference marking the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War
on Poverty.
When President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on
poverty” in his State of the Union address, 50 years ago this
week, the official poverty rate was 19 percent.
Last year, it stood at 15 percent. And so the war goes on.
What that official measure of poverty fails to capture are other,
harder-to-quantify successes, according to Ann Huff Stevens,
economics professor and director of the UC Davis Center for
Poverty Research.
“Because we now provide a substantial number of low-income
families with Medicaid, with health insurance for their children,
with food stamp nutrition support, with school lunch, we see
improvement in the health of the poor people,” Stevens said.
During the tail end of the recession and its aftermath, nearly a
third of Americans suffered bouts of poverty lasting two months
or more, the U.S. Census Bureau found in a newly released report.
“The fact that someone comes out of poverty for a few months
should not lead us to conclude that poverty is not chronic,” said
Ann Stevens, director of the UC Davis Center for Poverty
Research. Though only 3.5% of Americans were poor throughout the
entire period from 2009 to 2011, Stevens said, other research
suggests many more bobbed in and out of poverty.
Jan. 8 marks the 50th anniversary of legislation launching
America’s War on Poverty. The story of that war is often told
with a sort of reverse Hollywood ending: oversimplified and
wrapped up neatly as a failure. No one can claim that the war on
poverty has been won, but the failure narrative is just as wrong.
The real story with some fundamental facts highlighted is more
complex than simple wins and losses, and long overdue.
A new way of measuring poverty reveals California has by far the
biggest share of people in economic despair, eclipsing states
such as Mississippi and Louisiana, when housing and other costs
are factored.
The alternative yardstick, known as the supplemental poverty
measure, found nearly 2.8 million more people are struggling
across the country than the traditional benchmark shows.
“Anyone who has moved to California from somewhere else knows the
dramatic increase of the cost of living,” said Ann Stevens,
director for the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. “It’s
not more surprising that California looks more impoverished. It
is really driven by the cost of housing. California is a very
expensive place to live.”
These three projects won more than $1.3 million in the funding
this past June to support interdisciplinary research projects led
by Center for Poverty Research director Ann Huff Stevens, deputy
director Marianne Page, and faculty affiliate Giovanni Peri.
An alternative method of measuring poverty revealed that
California is the most impoverished state in the country, with
nearly a quarter of its residents living below the poverty line
due mostly to housing costs.
Under the study, a household of two adults and two children
earning less than about $35,000 would be considered below the
poverty line, said Ann Stevens, director for the Center for
Poverty Research at UC Davis. That number was increased from just
over $23,000 used in the official poverty measure in 2012.
“It is almost entirely the cost of housing that is used to make
the adjustment,” Stevens said. “It draws attention to the
combination of the resources that Californians have and the costs
that they face.”
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.
Listen to a conversation about the new methodology of measuring
poverty released by the US Census Bureau on KQED’s “Forum”
program. Ann Huff Stevens, Director of the Center for
Poverty Research and Sarah Bohn, Policy Fellow at the Public
Policy Institute of California, discuss what the new measurement
means for families and policy makers in California.
Listen to a conversation about the intergenerational effects of
the Great Recession on Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Daily
Circuit” program. Ann Huff Stevens, Director of the Center
for Poverty Research and Ariel Kalil, Director of the
Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and Professor of
Public Policy at the University of Chicago, discuss research on
the effects of parents’ unemployment on children, including
effects on earnings, education, and health that suggest a
long-lasting impact of the Great Recession across generations.
“Even if the economy was rebounding, I don’t think the official
poverty statistics show it that much,” said Ann Stevens, an
economics professor who directs the UC Davis Center for Poverty
Research.
Unemployment insurance gives many down-on-their-luck Americans
enough income to stay above the poverty line, but Stevens said
the official poverty measurements don’t count food stamps,
housing assistance and other programs that help people survive
but don’t give them cash income.
“They’re likely to be used to say, look, the war on poverty isn’t
working,” Stevens said of the latest numbers. “We know these
programs do have benefits, they just don’t show up in these basic
statistics.”
A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the
Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has
accomplished the goal of improving nutritional well-being and
health of low income families, but most studies have been based
on research designs that compare program participants to
non-participants. If selection into these programs is non-random,
then such comparisons will lead to biased estimates of the
program’s true effects. In this study, investigators use the
rollout of the WIC program across counties to estimate the impact
of the program on infant health.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California State Assembly Committee on
Accountability and Administrative Review held hearings in
December 2011 on the problem of inequality and the potential role
of state government. Center for Poverty Research Director Ann
Huff Stevens testified, along with researchers from a variety of
universities and institutes throughout the state.
