The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes many provisions that expand health insurance coverage for women of reproductive age (15-44). By lowering financial barriers to reproductive services, these provisions may affect a woman’s decision to have a child, or prevent an unwanted pregnancy. They may also affect the demographic and socioeconomic composition of women with a recent birth.
This history covers the first forty years of Russell Sage Foundation's efforts toward "the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States of America." It records the things that were done, both as direct work and through grants, with considerable attention to the social situation which made them seen necessary or desirable. It is of value not only to those interested in the operation of the Russell Sage Foundation or other foundatons, but for the light it throws upon the origins and development of a wide variety of movements in the borad field of social science.
Over the past two decades, there has been a change in federal low-income housing policy, with a reduction in spending on large-scale public housing developments and an increase in vouchers that participants use to find private housing units. Starting in the early 2000s, the Housing Choice Voucher program (HCV)—commonly referred to as “Section 8”—became the primary form of low-income housing assistance. Those with vouchers find their own housing in the private market and pay landlords 30% of their income in rent.
State and local governments have recently enacted minimum wage legislation to raise wages at the bottom of the wage distribution. However, such policies may affect how low-wage employers compensate and staff their workforces, potentially leading to negative employment effects and spillovers throughout the firm and labor market.
Do the decisions a judge makes in a case depend on the decisions and outcomes in recent cases that the judge has decided? Studies suggest that on average, a legal case is evaluated as somewhat more serious when assessed after a case that is viewed as relatively mild, and as somewhat less serious when judged after a more egregious one. The comparison appears to alter not only how a judge morally evaluates the severity of wrongful conduct, but also seems to influence the decision over the appropriate size of a civil punitive damage award or the length of a criminal sentence.
A 1946 report suggesting how statistical research can be applied to better understand professional education and the structure and function of professional associations.
ESTHER LUCILE BROWN was director of the Department of Studies in the Professions at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Inequality in income, consumption, and wealth have all been increasing, but some evidence indicates that increased inequality in the joint distribution of the three measures of economic wellbeing exceeds that of inequality in any of the single distributions. However, to date, no single dataset currently allows researchers to examine rising inequality in the three measures simultaneously over a long period of time. As a result, studies often examine inequality and mobility using income, consumption, or wealth separately, without reference to the other two.
The U.S. labor market has experienced dramatic changes over the last several decades, including increased wage inequality and shifts in the distribution of jobs over time and across geographic regions. These changes raise questions about the associated changes in the tasks that workers perform and how skills applied to different tasks are rewarded. However, it is difficult to analyze the evolving structure of occupations because of limited availability of data measuring the skill requirements and task content of jobs.