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"Shaefer, H. Luke"
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The injustice of place : uncovering the legacy of poverty in America
\"Three of the nation's top scholars, known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America, turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America, including inequalities shaping people's health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the \"internal colonies\" in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common: a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation's places of deepest need\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Decline of Cash Assistance and the Well-Being of Poor Households with Children
ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has become less generous, and what remains more often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change parallels others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups are “deserving” and “undeserving.” This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? This study examines the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare between 2001 and 2015 and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance was associated with increases in both forms of hardship.
Journal Article
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Lifetime Prevalence of Homelessness in the United States
Homelessness in the United States is often examined using cross-sectional, point-in-time samples. Any experience of homelessness is a risk factor for adverse outcomes, so it is also useful to understand the incidence of homelessness over longer periods. We estimate the lifetime prevalence of homelessness among members of the Baby Boom cohort (n = 6,545) using the 2012 and 2014 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative survey of older Americans. Our analysis indicates that 6.2 % of respondents had a period of homelessness at some point in their lives. We also identify dramatic disparities in lifetime incidence of homelessness by racial and ethnic subgroups. Rates of homelessness were higher for non-Hispanic blacks (16.8 %) or Hispanics of any race (8.1 %) than for non-Hispanic whites (4.8 %; all differences significant with p < .05). The black-white gap, but not the Hispanic-white gap, remained significant after adjustment for covariates such as education, veteran status, and geographic region.
Journal Article
A Universal Child Allowance: A Plan to Reduce Poverty and Income Instability among Children in the United States
To reduce child poverty and income instability, and eliminate extreme poverty among families with children in the United States, we propose converting the Child Tax Credit and child tax exemption into a universal, monthly child allowance. Our proposal is based on principles we argue should undergird the design of such policies: universality, accessibility, adequate payment levels, and more generous support for young children. Whether benefits should decline with additional children to reflect economies of scale is a question policymakers should consider. Analyzing 2015 Current Population Survey data, we estimate our proposed child allowance would reduce child poverty by about 40 percent, deep child poverty by nearly half, and would effectively eliminate extreme child poverty. Annual net cost estimates range from $66 billion to $105 billion.
Journal Article
Rising Extreme Poverty in the United States and the Response of Federal Means-Tested Transfer Programs
This study documents an increase in the prevalence of extreme poverty among US households with children between 1996 and 2011 and assesses the response of major federal means-tested transfer programs. Extreme poverty is defined using a World Bank metric of global poverty: $2 or less, per person, per day. Using the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we estimate that in mid-2011, 1.65 million households with 3.55 million children were living in extreme poverty in a given month, based on cash income, constituting 4.3 percent of all nonelderly households with children. The prevalence of extreme poverty has risen sharply since 1996, particularly among those most affected by the 1996 welfare reform. Adding SNAP benefits to household income reduces the number of extremely poor households with children by 48.0 percent in mid-2011. Adding SNAP, refundable tax credits, and housing subsidies reduces it by 62.8 percent.
Journal Article
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Material Hardships among Low-Income Households with Children
This study estimates the effects of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the risk of food as well as nonfood material hardships experienced by low-income households with children. Data are drawn from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We examine the relationship between SNAP and material hardships by modeling jointly the likelihood of household participation in SNAP and the risk of experiencing material hardships using a bivariate probit model. We estimate that SNAP reduces household food insecurity by 12.8 percentage points, reduces the risk that households will fall behind on their nonfood essential expenses, including housing (by 7.2 percentage points) and utilities (by 15.3 percentage points), and reduces the risk of medical hardship (by 8.5 percentage points).
Journal Article
Communities Moving Ahead, Falling Behind
Using a multidimensional index weighting factors related to income, health, and social mobility—the Index of Deep Disadvantage (IDD)—we rank the well-being of disadvantaged U.S. counties (initial scores below the median IDD) when they were on the cusp of the Great Recession and then again well into the recovery. We compare the characteristics of counties that saw improvements to those that saw declines. We find that a clear majority of counties were stable in relative rank. Counties showing improvement tended to have been worse off prerecession than counties where well-being declined. Improving counties were less likely to be urban, tended to have smaller fractions of the population identifying as Black and larger fractions as white, and had a lower proportion of jobs in manufacturing. Stable counties were, on average, the worst off prerecession and thus remained the worst off near the end of the recovery. All county groups improved in income and employment through the recovery, but these advances were not consistently associated with gains in other areas such as incidence of low-weight births.
Journal Article
Association of Income and Adversity in Childhood with Adult Health and Well-Being
We analyze data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics–Childhood Retrospective Circumstances Study to explore the relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), childhood household income, and adult health and socioeconomic well-being. Building on the ACEs studies and the social causation of health literature, we test three hypotheses: (1) childhood income is associated with ACEs, (2) both childhood income and ACEs are associated with adverse adult outcomes, and (3) childhood income influences the relationship between ACEs and adult outcomes. Results indicate significant associations between ACEs, childhood income, and adult well-being and offer suggestive evidence that childhood income may dampen the relationship between ACEs and some adult outcomes. When possible, research on the relationship between poverty or trauma and adult health and well-being should consider both influences.
Journal Article
Nonstandard Work Schedules: Employer‐ and Employee‐Driven Flexibility in Retail Jobs
Nonstandard scheduling is a pervasive feature of the American workplace. Drawing from interviews with 54 low‐income mothers employed in six retail workplaces in the Chicago area, and from interviews with representative human resource managers in each workplace, this study demonstrates how employer practices introduce variability and unpredictability into the schedules of female workers who have young children. It also suggests that employee‐driven control over scheduling, made available through informal workplace practices, can temper the instability of nonstandard schedules more than formal flexibility delivered through employer policies. The lack of worker control over schedules is posited to lead to various work‐family challenges.
Journal Article
Protecting the health of children with universal child cash benefits
This Health Policy examines the relationship between child cash benefits and child health, with the goal of informing future policy development in the USA. As of 2024, more than 140 countries have adopted large-scale, government-funded child cash transfer programmes. High-income countries more often adopt universal or near universal programmes, while lower-income countries often impose means tests or condition benefits on specific behaviours. Evidence on the adoption of child cash benefits from a broad set of nations finds that they can improve a range of child health outcomes, with the most robust evidence of health benefits occurring when delivered to children younger than 5 years and during the prenatal period. During the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), the USA briefly joined other high-income countries by introducing a near universal, unconditional child cash benefit, which led to a historic decline in child poverty. Although the expanded CTC expired, state and local governments and communities have continued to advocate for and implement policies like it. On the basis of this success and building on global evidence, the USA should adopt a permanent child cash benefit consistent with other high-income countries and the 2021 expanded CTC. Nations further developing their cash benefits should also give special attention to the prenatal and infant period.
Journal Article