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
Books
Children of the Great Recession
About This Book
Many working families continue to struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In Children of the Great Recession, a group of leading scholars draw from a unique study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children. By exploring the discrepancies in outcomes between these families—particularly between those headed by parents with college degrees and those without—this timely book shows how the most disadvantaged families have continued to suffer as a result of the Great Recession.
Several contributors examine the recession’s impact on the economic well-being of families, including changes to income, poverty levels, and economic insecurity. Irwin Garfinkel and Natasha Pilkauskas find that in cities with high unemployment rates during the recession, incomes for families with a college-educated mother fell by only about 5 percent, whereas families without college degrees experienced income losses three to four times greater. Garfinkel and Pilkauskas also show that the number of non-college-educated families enrolled in federal safety net programs—including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or food stamps)—grew rapidly in response to the Great Recession.
Other researchers examine how parents’ physical and emotional health, relationship stability, and parenting behavior changed over the course of the recession. Janet Currie and Valentina Duque find that while mothers and fathers across all education groups experienced more health problems as a result of the downturn, health disparities by education widened. Daniel Schneider, Sara McLanahan and Kristin Harknett find decreases in marriage and cohabitation rates among less-educated families, and Ronald Mincy and Elia de la Cruz-Toledo show that as unemployment rates increased, nonresident fathers’ child support payments decreased. William Schneider, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Jane Waldfogel show that fluctuations in unemployment rates negatively affected parenting quality and child well-being, particularly for families where the mother did not have a four-year college degree.
Although the recession affected most Americans, Children of the Great Recession reveals how vulnerable parents and children paid a higher price. The research in this volume suggests that policies that boost college access and reinforce the safety net could help protect disadvantaged families in times of economic crisis.
IRWIN GARFINKEL is the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems and co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.
SARA MCLANAHAN is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
CHRISTOPHER WIMER is Research Scientist at the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.
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Extensive research documents large and growing disparities in academic achievement and educational attainment between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution. Researchers have increasingly used state-level school administrative data to examine disparities in outcomes. Administrative data, compared to surveys, have near-universal population coverage, comprehensive information on achievement and attainment, and fewer problems with non-response and attrition. However, they lack detailed measures of socioeconomic status.
There is increasing evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) is not determined by either nature or nurture, but rather, by the interplay of the two. However, social scientists have struggled to identify the empirical importance of nature-nurture interactions, because the relationship between SES and environmental circumstances is typically confounded by third factors (for example, individuals born to higher-SES parents may inherit wealth and family connections).