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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.
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The Impact of Parental Resources on Human Capital Investment and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Great Recession
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-34
I study the impact of parents' financial resources during adolescence on postsecondary human capital investment and labor market outcomes, using house value changes during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 as a natural experiment. I use several restricted-access datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau to create a novel dataset that includes intergenerational linkages between children and their parents. This data allows me to exploit house value variation within labor markets, addressing the identification concern that local house values are related to local economic conditions. I find that the average decrease to parents' home values lead to persistent decreases in bachelor's degree attainment of 1.26%, earnings of 1.96%, and full-time employment of 1.32%. Children of parents suffering larger house value shocks are more likely to substitute into two-year degree programs, drop out of college, or be enrolled in a college program in their late 20s.
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Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics (MOVS):
Infrastructure Files and Public Use Data
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-23
Federal statistical agencies and policymakers have identified a need for integrated systems of household and personal income statistics. This interest marks a recognition that aggregated measures of income, such as GDP or average income growth, tell an incomplete story that may conceal large gaps in well-being between different types of individuals and families. Until recently, longitudinal income data that are rich enough to calculate detailed income statistics and include demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, have not been available. The Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics project (MOVS) fills this gap in comprehensive income statistics. Using linked demographic and tax records on the population of U.S. working-age adults, the MOVS project defines households and calculates household income, applying an equivalence scale to create a personal income concept, and then traces the progress of individuals' incomes over time. We then output a set of intermediate statistics by race-ethnicity group, sex, year, base-year state of residence, and base-year income decile. We select the intermediate statistics most useful in developing more complex intragenerational income mobility measures, such as transition matrices, income growth curves, and variance-based volatility statistics. We provide these intermediate statistics as part of a publicly released data tool with downloadable flat files and accompanying documentation. This paper describes the data build process and the output files, including a brief analysis highlighting the structure and content of our main statistics.
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The Demographics of the Recipients of the First Economic Impact Payment
May 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-24
Starting in April 2020, the federal government began to distribute Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) in response to the health and economic crisis caused by COVID-19. More than 160 million payments were disbursed. We produce statistics concerning the receipt of EIPs by individuals and households across key demographic subgroups. We find that payments went out particularly quickly to households with children and lower-income households, and the rate of receipt was quite high for individuals over age 60, likely due to a coordinated effort to issue payments automatically to Social Security recipients. We disaggregate statistics by race/ethnicity to document whether racial disparities arose in EIP disbursement. Receipt rates were high overall, with limited differences across racial/ethnic subgroups. We provide a set of detailed counts in tables for use by the public.
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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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The Two-Income Trap:
Are Two-Earner Households More Financially Vulnerable?
June 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-19
We test whether two-earner married couples are more likely to file for consumer bankruptcy in the future than similar married couples. Since two-earner households are unable to adjust their income on the extensive margin, they are more vulnerable to income shocks, and thus at risk of bankruptcy in the future. We find that two-earner married couples in 1999 are more likely to file for bankruptcy from 2002-2004 compared to other married couples. Additionally, we present supporting information that suggests that two-earner households have a higher average propensity to consume.
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Capturing More Than Poverty: School Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Data and Household Income
December 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-09
Educational researchers often use National School Lunch Program (NSLP) data as a proxy for student poverty. Under NSLP policy, students whose household income is less than 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch and students whose household income is between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Linking school administrative records for all 8th graders in a California public school district to household-level IRS income tax data, we examine how well NSLP data capture student disadvantage. We find both that there is substantial disadvantage in household income not captured by NSLP category data, and that NSLP categories capture disadvantage on test scores above and beyond household income.
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DOES PARENTS' ACCESS TO FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES? EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-67
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.8% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 12% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. After accounting for selection, the direct effects of family planning programs on parents' incomes account for roughly two thirds of these gains.
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DOES FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES?
EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-29
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of the average child. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.5% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 11% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. Even with extreme assumptions about selection, these estimates are large enough to imply that family planning programs directly increased children's resources, including increases in mothers' paid work and increased childbearing within marriage.
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Using Linked Survey and Administrative Data to Better Measure Income: Implications for Poverty, Program Effectiveness and Holes in the Safety Net
October 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-35
We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs in household survey data for several prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We focus on the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics, but provide evidence that our qualitative conclusions are likely to apply to other surveys. We link administrative data for food stamps, TANF, General Assistance, and subsidized housing from New York State to the CPS at the individual level. Program receipt in the CPS is missed for over one-third of housing assistance recipients, 40 percent of food stamp recipients and 60 percent of TANF and General Assistance recipients. Dollars of benefits are also undercounted for reporting recipients, particularly for TANF, General Assistance and housing assistance. We find that the survey data sharply understate the income of poor households, as conjectured in past work by one of the authors. Underreporting in the survey data also greatly understates the effects of anti-poverty programs and changes our understanding of program targeting, often making it seem that welfare programs are less targeted to both the very poorest and middle income households than they are. Using the combined data rather than survey data alone, the poverty reducing effect of all programs together is nearly doubled while the effect of housing assistance is tripled. We also re-examine the coverage of the safety net, specifically the share of people without work or program receipt. Using the administrative measures of program receipt rather than the survey ones often reduces the share of single mothers falling through the safety net by one-half or more.
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