Economic research on the safety net has evolved significantly over time, moving away from a near exclusive focus on the negative incentive effects of means-tested assistance on employment, earnings, marriage and fertility to include examination of the potential positive benefits of such programs...

In this paper, we comprehensively examine the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty, with particular attention to the role of the social safety net in mitigating the adverse effects of shocks to earnings and income. Using a state panel data model and data for 2000 to 2014, we estimate...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilibrium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of...

In this paper, we examine what groups of children are served by core childhood social-safety net programs--including Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and AFDC/TANF--and how that's changed over time. We find that virtually all gains in spending on the social safety net for children since 1990 have gone...

The past 25 years has seen substantial change in the social safety nets for families with children in the US and Canada. Both countries have moved away from cash welfare but the US has done so relying more exclusively on inwork benefits with work requirements. This paper examines this evolution...

How do parents contend with threats to the health and survival of their children? Can the social safety net mitigate negative economic effects through transfers to affected families? We study these questions by combining the universe of cancer diagnoses among Danish children with register data...

Evaluations of changes to the Medicaid program have focused on increases in the generosity of income cutoffs for Medicaid eligibility. Previous research shows that despite dramatic increases in the number of births paid for by the Medicaid program, women often enroll in Medicaid at the point of...

Was the $278 billion reboot of the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in early 2021 disbursed equitably to minority communities? This paper provides the first analysis of how PPP funds were disbursed to minority communities in the third and final round of the program, which was...

Is healthcare employment recession proof? We examine the hypothesis that healthcare employment is stable across the business cycle. We explicitly distinguish between negative aggregate demand and supply shocks in studying how healthcare employment responds to recessions, and show that this...

Based on patterns of employment transitions, we identify three different types of workers in the US labor market: α's β's and γ's. Workers of type α make up over half of all workers, are most likely to remain on the same job for more than 2 years and, when they become unemployed, typically...