In a political climate marked by calls to ban Muslims from entering the country, tensions between non-Muslim and Muslim Arab Americans have intensified. How does this environment affect relationships between Muslim Arabs and other Americans? Can prejudice between the groups be reduced? And finally, can such reactions have long-lasting effects?
Disparities in financial wellbeing and access to credit mean that the poor, compared to the non-poor, are more likely to borrow at higher interest rates and use higher-interest credit products such as payday loans. They are also more likely to be liquidity-constrained, have limited access to formal credit, have bills designated for third-party collection, and be categorized as high-risk or sub-prime borrowers.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps) enrolled nearly 20% of all households in 2014, including a substantial number of families in the lower half of the income distribution. If SNAP benefits were considered income, they would remove nearly four million Americans, including nearly two million children, from poverty. Despite its importance in the safety net, however, much remains unknown about its effects on overall food spending and the quality of a family’s diet.
The rise in economic inequality over the past decades in both the U.S. and many other developed countries has received considerable attention from policymakers, scholars and the public. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman contend that despite this attention, there are three limitations in the measurement of income inequalities. First, there is a large gap between national accounts (which focus on economic aggregates and macro-economic growth) and inequality studies (which focus on distributions using survey and tax data).
To what extent has the rise in economic inequality over the past 40 years has affected social mobility? The stronger the economic relationship between parents and children, the more likely it is that children from affluent families will achieve greater economic success than children from more disadvantaged families. Yet, we know relatively little about the channels by which the transmission of advantage occurs.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has witnessed a dramatic rise in income inequality, with much attention focused on the top one percent of earners and the explosion in executive pay. Recent research has focused on the role that firms and industries play in rising earnings inequality. For example, much of the increase in wage inequality from 1970 to 2012 can be attributed to disparities in average pay across, rather than within, companies. This raises the question of why inequality has risen so much between companies.
Each year, millions of individuals experience unemployment spells of greater than six months. Most will fail to find a permanent full-time job within the following year. Reduced job vacancies play a big role, but displaced workers may also lack awareness and/or understanding of job opportunities that are well-aligned with their existing skills and work experience.
Findings: The Impact of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Public Program Participation and Labor Market Outcomes of Low-Wage Workers; Lara Shore-Sheppard, Lucie Schmidt, and Tara Watson, Williams College
Co-funded with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made health insurance newly available to about 15 million individuals, both through expanded Medicaid coverage for very low-income adults and through the availability of new, subsidized private coverage for low- and middle-income households. In addition to reducing cost-related barriers to care and providing protection from high medical costs, the new coverage options have the potential to impact household budgets. Presumably, as households spend less on health care and health insurance,
Co-funded with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth