Supported by our Great Recession initiative, economist Robert A. Moffitt has released a working paper that investigates the performance of the social safety net during the Great Recession. Here is the abstract:

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families with more employed members and with fewer employed members. However, the increase in transfer amounts was not strongly progressive across income classes within the low-income population, increasingly slightly more for those just below the poverty line and those just above it, compared to those at the bottom of the income distribution. This is mainly the result of the EITC program, which provides greater benefits to those with higher family earnings. The expansions of SNAP and UI benefited those at the bottom of the income distribution to a greater extent.

Here are the key questions that Moffitt seeks to address in his paper:

This paper examines the performance of the social safety net during the Great Recession in four separate ways:
(1) How much did aggregate expenditures from all safety net programs rise? How did this compare to past recessions?
(2) What were the most important programs responsible for the aggregate expenditure increase that occurred?
(3) Since different programs serve different demographic groups, then, if the expenditure increase was different for different programs, did the increase in safety net expenditure favor certain demographic groups over others?
(4) Since different programs serve families at different income levels--for example, means-tested programs typically serve families with lower income than do social insurance programs--did the increase in expenditure primarily benefit the very poor or those at somewhat higher income levels, including those with income above the poverty line?

Read the paper here. Other briefs and working papers from our Great Recession initiative are available here.