Children represent the largest indirect beneficiaries of the U.S. social welfare system. Yet, many questions remain about the direct benefits of cash aid to children. The current understanding of the impacts of cash aid in the U.S. is drawn primarily from studies of in-kind benefits, tax...

We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and employment) of families and children with very low incomes. We use a parameterized difference-in-differences...

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child's outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children...

I discuss recent books offering differing explanations for persistent U.S. poverty. Desmond (2023) argues that aid to low-income Americans is captured by more powerful market actors. I contextualize this concern as about incidence and consider both policies for changing incidence (by changing...

This paper evaluates the UK New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) program, which aims to return lone parents to work. Using rich administrative data on benefit receipt histories and a "selection on observed variables" identification strategy, we find that the program modestly reduces benefit receipt...

This paper focuses on the role of minimum wages, tax and benefit policies in protecting workers against financial poverty, covering 21 European countries with a national minimum wage and three US States (New Jersey, Nebraska and Texas). It is shown that only for single persons and only in a...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

In-work poverty became a prominent policy issue in the United States long before the term itself acquired any meaning and relevance in other industrialized countries. With America's embrace of an employment-centered antipoverty strategy, the working poor have become even more of an issue. This...

This article presents and explores a rich new data source to analyse the determinants of pay and job rank amongst academic Economists in the UK. Characteristics associated with individual productivity and workplace features are found to be important determinants of the relative wage and...

We propose a new measure of the rate of poverty we call the Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure (SEPM) based on expenditure in the Consumer Expenditure survey. It treats household expenditure as a measure of resources available to purchase the minimum bundle necessary to meet basic needs....