-
Kids to School and Moms to Work: New York City's Universal Pre-K Expansion and Mother's Employment
September 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-62
Using the restricted data from American Community Survey from 2011 to 2017, this paper examines the impact of New York City's (NYC) expansion of universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) on labor force participation of mothers with the youngest child of 4 years of age. Starting in Fall of 2014, any child who is 4 years old and residing in NYC for the past year is eligible for UPK for the academic year, for example all children born in 2010 would qualify for the academic year 2014-15. It uses a triple-difference approach - first compare mothers in NYC with the youngest child of 4-year-olds (treated mothers) to mothers with the youngest child of 5 and 6-year-olds (control mothers) before and after the program. Next, it compares this difference with mothers living in adjacent counties in the New York Metropolitan Area (NMA) in New York to NYC. I find that the program increased mothers' labor force participation by 5 percentage points (a 7.5 percent impact) in NYC. The results are robust to various robustness checks like comparing with mothers living in all of NMA and mothers in Philadelphia.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Receipt of Public and Private Food Assistance Across the Rural-Urban Continuum Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of Current Population Survey Data
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-51
Background: The nutrition safety net in the United States is critical to supporting food security among households in need. Food assistance in the United States includes both government-funded food programs and private community-based providers who distribute food to in need households. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted experiences of food security and use of private and public food assistance resources. However, this may have differed for households residing in urban versus rural areas. We explored receipt of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits or food from community-based emergency food providers across a detailed measure of the rural-urban continuum before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: We linked restricted use Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data to census-tract level United States Department of Agriculture Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes to estimate prevalence of self-reported SNAP participation and receipt of emergency food support across temporal (2015-2019 versus 2020-2021) and socio-spatial (urban, large rural city/town, small rural town, or isolated rural town/area) dimensions. We report prevalences as point estimates with 95% confidence intervals, all weighted for national representation.
Results:
The weighted prevalence of self-reported SNAP participation was 8.9% (8.7-9.2%) in 2015-2019 and 9.1% (8.5-9.5%) in 2020-2021 in urban areas, 11.4% (10.8-12.2%) in 2015-2019 and 11.6% (10.5-12.9%) in 2020-2021 in large rural towns/cities, 13.4% (12.3-14.6%) in 2015-2019 and 12.3% (10.5-14.5%) in 2020-2021 in small rural towns, and 9.7% (8.6-10.9%) in 2015-2019 and 10.9% (8.8-13.4% )in 2020-2021 isolated rural towns. The weighted prevalence of self-reported receipt of emergency food was 4.9% (4.8-5.1%) in 2015-2019 and 6.2% (5.8-6.5%) in 2020-2021 in urban areas, 6.8% (6.2-7.4%) in 2015-2019 and 7.6% (6.6-8.6%) in 2020-2021 in large rural towns/cities, 8.1% (7.3-9.1%) in 2015-2019 and 7.1% (5.7-8.8%) in 2020-2021 in small rural towns, and 6.8% (5.9-7.7%) in 2015-2019 and 8.5% (6.7-10.6%) in 2020-2021 isolated rural towns.
Conclusion: Households in rural communities use public and private food assistance at higher rates than urban areas, but there is variation across communities depending on the level of rurality.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Consequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-35
Amidst rising and increasingly unaffordable rents, 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year across the United States'and eviction rates are twice as high for renters with children. One important and neglected population who may experience unique levels of housing insecurity is college students, especially given that one in five college students are parents. In this study, we link 11.9 million student records to eviction filings from housing courts, demographic characteristics reported in decennial census and survey data, incomes reported on tax returns by students and their parents, and dates of birth and death from the Social Security Administration. Parenting students are more likely than non-parenting students to identify as female (62.81% vs. 55.94%) and Black (19.66% vs. 14.30%), be over 30 years old (42.73% vs. 20.25%), and have parents with lower household incomes ($100,000 vs. $140,000). Parenting students threatened with eviction (i.e., had an eviction filed against them) are much more likely than non-threatened parenting students to identify as female (81.18% vs. 62.81%) and Black (56.84% vs. 19.66%). In models adjusted for individual and institutional characteristics, we find that being threatened with an eviction was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of degree completion, reduced post-enrollment income, reduced likelihood of being married post-enrollment, and increased post-enrollment mortality. Among parenting students, 38.38% (95% confidence interval (CI): 32.50-44.26%) of non-threatened students completed a bachelor's degree compared to just 15.36% (CI: 11.61-19.11%) of students threatened with eviction. Our findings highlight the long-term economic and health impacts of housing insecurity during college, especially for parenting students. Housing stability for parenting students may have substantial multigenerational benefits for economic mobility and population health.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Impact of Childcare Costs on Mothers' Labor Force Participation
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-25
The rising costs of childcare pose challenges for families, leading to difficult choices including those impacting mothers' labor force participation. This paper investigates the relationship between childcare costs and maternal employment. Using data from the National Database of Childcare Prices, the American Community Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, we estimate the impact of childcare costs on mothers' labor force participation through two empirical strategies. A fixed-effects approach controls for geographic and temporal heterogeneity in costs as well as mothers' idiosyncratic preferences for work and childcare, while an instrumental variables approach addresses the endogeneity of mothers' preferences for work and childcare by leveraging exogenous geographic and temporal variation in childcare licensing requirements. Our findings across both research designs indicate that higher childcare costs reduce labor force participation among mothers, with lower-income mothers exhibiting greater responsiveness to changes in childcare costs.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution
February 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-16
Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge educational administrative data from Oregon with measures of family income derived from IRS records to document student exposure to economically diverse school and classroom peers. Our findings indicate that affluent children in public schools are relatively isolated from their less affluent peers, while low- and middle-income students experience relatively even peer income distributions. Students from families in the top percentile of the income distribution attend schools where 20 percent of their peers, on average, come from the top five income percentiles. A large majority of the differences in peer exposure that we observe arise from the sorting of students across schools; sorting across classrooms within schools plays a substantially smaller role.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Potential Bias When Using Administrative Data to Measure the Family Income of School-Aged Children
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-03
Researchers and practitioners increasingly rely on administrative data sources to measure family income. However, administrative data sources are often incomplete in their coverage of the population, giving rise to potential bias in family income measures, particularly if coverage deficiencies are not well understood. We focus on the school-aged child population, due to its particular import to research and policy, and because of the unique challenges of linking children to family income information. We find that two of the most significant administrative sources of family income information that permit linking of children and parents'IRS Form 1040 and SNAP participation records'usefully complement each other, potentially reducing coverage bias when used together. In a case study considering how best to measure economic disadvantage rates in the public school student population, we demonstrate the sensitivity of family income statistics to assumptions about individuals who do not appear in administrative data sources.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Comparison of Child Reporting in the American Community Survey and Federal Income Tax Returns Based on California Birth Records
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-55
This paper takes advantage of administrative records from California, a state with a large child population and a significant historical undercount of children in Census Bureau data, dependent information in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1040 records, and the American Community Survey to characterize undercounted children and compare child reporting. While IRS Form 1040 records offer potential utility for adjusting child undercounting in Census Bureau surveys, this analysis finds overlapping reporting issues among various demographic and economic groups. Specifically, older children, those of Non-Hispanic Black mothers and Hispanic mothers, children or parents with lower English proficiency, children whose mothers did not complete high school, and families with lower income-to-poverty ratio were less frequently reported in IRS 1040 records than other groups. Therefore, using IRS 1040 dependent records may have limitations for accurately representing populations with characteristics associated with the undercount of children in surveys.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Effect of Food Assistance Work Requirements on Labor Market Outcomes
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-54
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly named the Food Stamp Program, has long been an integral part of the US social safety net. During US welfare reforms in the mid-1990s, SNAP eligibility became more restrictive with legislation citing a need to improve self-sufficiency of participating households. As a result, legislatures created two of these eligibility requirements: the General Work Requirement (GWR), which forces an adult to work to receive benefits, and the Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents (ABAWD) work requirement, which requires certain adults to work a certain number of hours to receive benefits. Using restricted-access SNAP microdata from nine states, we exploit age cutoffs of the ABAWD work requirement and General Work Requirement (GWR) to estimate the effect of these policies on labor outcomes. We find that at the ABAWD age cutoff, there is no statistically significant evidence of a discontinuity across static and dynamic employment outcomes. At the GWR age cutoff, unemployed SNAP users and SNAP-eligible adults are on average more likely to leave the labor force than to continue to search for work.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Who Scars the Easiest? College Quality and the Effects of Graduating into a Recession
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-47
Graduating from college into a recession is associated with earnings losses, but less is known about how these effects vary across colleges. Using restricted-use data from the National Survey of College Graduates, we study how the effects of graduating into worse economic conditions vary over college quality in the context of the Great Recession. We find that earnings losses are concentrated among graduates from relatively high-quality colleges. Key mechanisms include substitution out of the labor force and into graduate school, decreased graduate degree completion, and differences in the economic stability of fields of study between graduates of high- and low-quality colleges.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Revisiting Methods to Assign Responses when Race and Hispanic Origin Reporting are Discrepant Across Administrative Records and Third Party Sources
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-26
The Best Race and Ethnicity Administrative Records Composite file ('Best Race file') is an composite file which combines Census, federal, and Third Party Data (TPD) sources and applies business rules to assign race and ethnicity values to person records. The first version of the Best Race administrative records composite was first constructed in 2015 and subsequently updated each year to include more recent vintages, when available, of the data sources originally included in the composite file. Where updates were available for data sources, the most recent information for persons was retained, and the business rules were reapplied to assign a single race and single Hispanic origin value to each person record. The majority of person records on the Best Race file have consistent race and ethnicity information across data sources. Where there are discrepancies in responses across data sources, we apply a series of business rules to assign a single race and ethnicity to each record. To improve the quality of the Best Race administrative records composite, we have begun revising the business rules which were developed several years ago. This paper discusses the original business rules as well as the implemented changes and their impact on the composite file.
View Full
Paper PDF
