Income packaging, or piecing together cash and non-cash resources from a variety of sources, is a common financial survival strategy among low-income women. This strategy is particularly important for economically disconnected women, who lack both employment income and public cash assistance receipt. Using data from the confidential Census Bureau versions of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this study compares the use of public and private supports between disconnected and connected low-income women, controlling for differences in state welfare rules and county unemployment rates. Findings from bivariate comparisons and multilevel logistic regressions indicate that disconnected women utilize public non-cash supports at similar rates to connected women, but rely more heavily on private sources. Conclusions focus on the policy implications for outreach and program development.
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Neighborhood Income and Material Hardship in the United States
January 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-01
U.S. households face a number of economic challenges that affect their well-being. In this analysis we focus on the extent to which neighborhood economic conditions contribute to hardship. Specifically, using data from the 2008 and 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation panel surveys and logistic regression, we analyze the extent to which neighborhoods income levels affect the likelihood of experiencing seven types of hardships, including trouble paying bills, medical need, food insecurity, housing hardship, ownership of basic consumer durables, neighborhood problems, and fear of crime. We find strong bivariate relationships between neighborhood income and all hardships, but for most hardships these are explained by other household characteristics, such as household income and education. However, neighborhood income retains a strong association with two hardships in particular even when controlling for a variety of other household characteristics: neighborhood conditions (such as the presence of trash and litter) and fear of crime. Our study highlights the importance of examining multiple measures when assessing well-being, and our findings are consistent with the notion that collective socialization and community-level structural features affect the likelihood that households experience deleterious neighborhood conditions and a fear of crime.
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Transitions in Welfare Participation and Female Headship
February 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-01
This study uses data from the 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine how welfare policies and local economic conditions contribute to women's transitions into and out of female headship and into and out of welfare participation. It also examines whether welfare participation is directly associated with longer spells of headship. The study employs a simultaneous hazards approach that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in all of its transition models and for the endogeneity of welfare participation in its headship model. The estimation results indicate that welfare participation significantly reduces the chances of leaving female headship. The estimates also reveal that more generous welfare benefits contribute indirectly to headship by increasing the chances that mothers will enter welfare. More generous Earned Income Tax Credit benefits are associated with longer spells of headship, nonheadship, and welfare participation and nonparticipation. Other measures of welfare policies, including indicators for the adoption of welfare waivers and the implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs, are generally not significantly associated with headship or welfare receipt. Better economic opportunities are estimated to increase headship but reduce welfare participation among unmarried mothers.
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The Impact of Welfare Waivers on Female Headship Decisions
February 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-03
While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at affecting decisions about living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage and cohabitation. This paper focuses on women's decisions to become or remain unmarried mothers, that is, female heads of families. We assess the impact of welfare reform waivers on those decisions while controlling for confounding local economic and social contextual conditions. We pool the 1990, 1992, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) which span the calendar time when many states began adopting welfare waivers. For its descriptors of local labor market conditions, the project uses skill specific measures of wages and employment opportunities for counties. We estimate models for levels of female headship and proportional hazard models for entry and exit from female headship. In the hazards, we employ stratified Cox partial likelihood methods and investigate the use of state fixed effects or state stratified hazard models to control for unmeasured state influences. Based on data through 1995, we find limited evidence that workencouraging waivers had a beneficial effect by reducing female headship of families. We find little evidence that family caps, teenage coresidence requirements or termination limits will reduce the number of single-parent families.
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Spillovers From Costly Credit
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-11
Recent research on the effects of credit access among low- and moderate-income households finds that high-cost payday loans exacerbate, rather than alleviate, financial distress for a subset of borrowers (Melzer 2011; Skiba and Tobacman 2011). In this study I find that others, outside the borrowing household, bear a portion of these costs too: households with payday loan access are 20% more likely to use food assistance benefits and 10% less likely to make child support payments required of non-resident parents. These findings suggest that as borrowers accommodate interest and principal payments on payday loan debt, they prioritize loan payments over other liabilities like child support payments and they turn to transfer programs like food stamps to supplement the household's resources. To establish this finding, the analysis uses a measure of payday loan access that is robust to the concern that lender location decisions and state policies governing payday lending are endogenous relative to household financial condition. The analysis also confirms that the effect is absent in the mid-1990s, prior to the spread of payday lending, and that the effect grows over time, in parallel with the growth of payday lending.
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High Labor Force Attachment, but Few Social Ties? Life-Course Predictors of Women's Receipt of Childcare Subsidies
September 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-26
The U.S. federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) childcare subsidy represents the largest source of means-tested assistance for U.S. families with low incomes. The CCDF subsidy aims to help mothers with low incomes gain employment and education, with implications for women's labor force participation, and the wellbeing of their children. Because recipients of the CCDF subsidy are either already employed, or seek the subsidy with the goal of gaining employment or schooling, this group may represent the public assistance recipients who are best able to succeed in the low-wage labor market. However, existing research on the CCDF observes recipients only after they begin receiving the subsidy, thus giving an incomplete picture of whether recipients may select into subsidy receipt, and how subsidy recipiency is situated in women's broader work and family trajectories. My study links administrative records from the CCDF to the American Community Survey (ACS) to construct a longitudinal data set from 38 states that observes CCDF recipients in the 1-2 years before they first received the subsidy. I compare women who subsequently received the CCDF subsidy to other women with low incomes in the ACS who did not go on to receive the subsidy, with a total of roughly 641,000 individuals. I find that CCDF recipients are generally positively-selected on employment history and educational attainment, but appear to have lower levels of social support than non-recipients.
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Food Security Status Across the Rural-Urban Continuum Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-01
Background: Food security, defined as consistent access to sufficient food to support an active life, is a crucial social determinant of health. A key dimension affecting food security is position along the rural-urban continuum, as there are important socio-economic and environmental differences between communities related to urbanicity or rurality that impact food access. The COVID-19 pandemic created social and economic shocks that altered financial and food security, which may have had differential effects by rurality and urbanicity. However, there has been limited research on how food security differs across the shades of the rural-urban community spectrum, as most often researchers have characterized communities as either urban or rural.
Methods: In this study, which linked restricted use Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data to census-tract level United States Department of Agriculture Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes, we estimated the prevalence of household food security across temporal (2015-2019 versus 2020-2021) and socio-spatial (urban, large rural city/town, small rural town, or isolated rural town/area) dimensions in order to characterize variations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by urbanicity/rurality. We report prevalences as point estimates with 95% confidence intervals.
Results: The prevalence of food security was 87.7% (87.5-88.0%) in 2015-2019 and 88.8% (88.4-89.3%) in 2020-2021 for urban areas, 85.5% (84.7-86.2%) in 2015-2019 and 87.1% (85.7-88.3%) in 2020-2021 for large rural towns/cities, 82.8% (81.5-84.1%) in 2015-2019 and 87.3% (85.7-89.2%) in 2020-2021 for small rural towns, and 87.6% (86.3-88.8%) in 2015-2019 and 90.9% (88.7-92.7%) in 2020-2021 for isolated rural towns/areas.
Conclusion: These findings show that rural communities experiences of food security vary and aggregating households in these environments may mask areas of concern and concentrated need.
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Disconnected Geography: A Spatial Analysis of Disconnected Youth in the United States
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-37
Since the Great Recession, US policy and advocacy groups have sought to better understand its effect on a group of especially vulnerable young adults who are not enrolled in school or training programs and not participating in the labor market, so called 'disconnected youth.' This article distinguishes between disconnected youth and unemployed youth and examines the spatial clustering of these two groups across counties in the US. The focus is to ascertain whether there are differences in underlying contextual factors among groups of counties that are mutually exclusive and spatially disparate (non-adjacent), comprising two types of spatial clusters ' high rates of disconnected youth and high rates of unemployed youth. Using restricted, household-level census data inside the Census Research Data Center (RDC) under special permission by the US Census Bureau, we were able to define these two groups using detailed household questionnaires that are not available to researchers outside the RDC. The geospatial patterns in the two types of clusters suggest that places with high concentrations of disconnected youth are distinctly different in terms of underlying characteristics from places with high concentrations of unemployed youth. These differences include, among other things, arrests for synthetic drug production, enclaves of poor in rural areas, persistent poverty in areas, educational attainment in the populace, children in poverty, persons without health insurance, the
social capital index, and elders who receive disability benefits. This article provides some preliminary evidence regarding the social forces underlying the two types of observed geospatial clusters and discusses how they differ.
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Introduction of Head Start and Maternal Labor Supply: Evidence from a Regression
Discontinuity Design
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-35
I use the non-public decennial censuses in 1970 to investigate the effect of the Head Start program on maternal labor supply and schooling in its early years. I exploit a discontinuity in county-level Head Start funding beginning in the late 1960s to explore differences in countylevel maternal employment and maternal schooling. The results provide suggestive evidence that the more availability of Head Start led to an increase the nursery school enrollment of children and a decrease in maternal labor supply. In addition, the ITT estimates imply a relatively large, negative effect of enrollment on maternal labor supply. However, the estimates are somewhat sensitive to addition of covariates and the standard errors are also large to draw firm inferences.
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Is Subsidized Childcare Associated with Lower Risk of Grade Retention for Low-Income Children? Evidence from Child Care and Development Fund Administrative Records Linked to the American Community Survey
June 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-06
This study investigates whether low-income young children's experience of Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)-subsidized childcare is associated with a lower subsequent likelihood of being held back in grades K-12. High-quality childcare has been shown to improve low-income children's school readiness. However, no previous study has examined the link specifically between subsidized care and grade retention. I do so here by matching information on children from CCDF administrative records to later observations of the same children in the American Community Survey (ACS). I use logistic regression to compare the likelihood of grade retention between CCDF-recipient children and non-recipient children who also appear in the ACS in the years 2008-2014 (N=2,284,857). I find strong evidence for an association between CCDF-subsidized care and lower risk of grade retention, especially among non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children. I also find evidence that receiving CCDF-subsidized center-based care in particular is associated with a lower risk of being held back than CCDF-subsidized family daycare, babysitter care, or relative care, again with the largest apparent benefit to non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children.
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The Effect of Housing Assistance Program on Labor Supply and Family Formation
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-35
This paper studies the effect of U.S. Housing Choice Voucher Program Section 8 on low-income people' labor supply and family formation. I analyse this effect using data from the 2014 Panel and 2018 Panel of the restricted-use Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). My economic approach is to explore the policy which assigns housing vouchers based on an income cutoff as an instrument to study the effect of housing vouchers on low-income people's employment and family formation. The assignment policy states that households with income lower than 50% of the median income for the MSA area are eligible for housing vouchers. With household eligibility status, I compare the households whose income is slightly below the income cutoff (eligible households) with the households whose income is slightly above the income cutoff (ineligible household) to identify the effect of housing vouchers on employment and family formation. I find that housing vouchers have a negative impact on individual labor supply through both extensive and intensive margins. In addition, housing vouchers also negatively impact family formation by decreasing marriage and increasing divorce rates. This project will contribute to understanding the effect of Section 8 Housing Vouchers on low-income households' labor supply and family formation.
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