The proposed change under the American Families Plan (AFP) to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) Child Tax Credit (CTC) would increase maximum benefit amounts to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child) and make the full credit available to all low and middle-income families...

Over the past decade, rising youth use of e-cigarettes and other electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) has prompted aggressive regulation by state and local governments. Between 2010 and 2019, ten states and two large counties adopted ENDS taxes. Applying a continuous treatment...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors in cash welfare and SNAP receipt in three major U.S. household surveys. We find high rates of misreporting, particularly failure to report receipt. The surveys inaccurately capture patterns of multiple program participation, even...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families--the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

Recreational marijuana laws (RMLs), which legalize the possession of small quantities of marijuana for recreational use, have been adopted by 18 states and the District of Columbia. Opponents argue that RML-induced increases in marijuana consumption will serve as a "gateway" to harder drug use...

This study estimated the effects of welfare reform in the 1990s, which permanently restructured and contracted the cash assistance system in the U.S., on food insecurity--a fundamental form of hardship--of the next generation of households. An implicit goal underlying welfare reform was the...

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. Using the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID),...

We examine the distribution of household consumption, income and savings from 2019 through the end of 2020 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) and other data. This is the first work to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic well-being using nationally representative...

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of...

Public health experts caution that legalization of recreational marijuana may normalize smoking and undermine the decades-long achievements of tobacco control policy. However, very little is known about the impact of recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) on adult tobacco use. Using information from...