In this chapter I provide a brief history of the TANF program, including changes made as part of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. I then present a variety of program statistics, including trends in aggregate and state-level caseloads and spending, along with changes in the demographic composition...

One strand of the literature in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the U.S. over the last several decades. There are disagreements in the empirical literature on this question, with some suggestions...

We examine trends in employment, earnings, and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The U.S. safety net is a patchwork of different programs...

A prominent theoretical controversy in the compensating differentials literature concerns unobservable individual productivity. Competing models yield opposite predictions depending on whether the unobservable productivity is safety-related skill or productivity generally. Using five panel waves...

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary...

Our research examines empirically the age pattern of the implicit value of life revealed from workers' differential wages and job safety pairings. Although aging reduces the number of years of life expectancy, aging can affect the value of life through an effect on planned life-cycle...

The federal government enacted massive spending in the Pandemic Recession. But was this spending scaled to the magnitude of the economic downturn? We examine the responsiveness of the safety net to the Pandemic Recession and compare it to that in the Great Recession. Using monthly state-level...

The paper provides the first assessment of: (i) America's progress in lifting the lower bound--the floor--of the distribution of real income; (ii) whether the country's largest antipoverty program, SNAP ("food stamps"), helped do so. An operational method of estimating the floor is implemented on...

Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the...