Income and Wealth

Many public and subsidized housing developments in the U.S. are aging and in need of significant repairs. In a new article in Health Affairs, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Kacie L. Dragan, and Sherry Glied from the P4A Research Hub at New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, study the impact of a recent renovation and transfer program of public housing in New York City on the health and well-being of residents.

Approximately 16 percent of children in the U.S. live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. This early-life exposure to poverty may have negative long-term health effects. In a new working paper, Hansoo Ko, Renata Howland, and Sherry Glied of the P4A Research Hub at New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, estimate the causal impacts of the Supplemental Security Income program on child health outcomes and medical expenditures.

While Earned Income Tax Credit expansions are typically associated with improvements in maternal mental health, little is known about the mechanisms through which the program affects this outcome. Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Fredric Blavin, Jason Gates, and Breno Braga of the Urban Institute assess the impact of more than two decades of federal expansions in EITC credits and the implementation of state-specific EITC programs on maternal mental health in a new working paper.

California was the first state to enact a paid family leave entitlement in 2002, providing eligible workers up to six weeks of paid leave. Jessica E. Pac, Ann P. Bartel, and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, and Christopher J. Ruhm of the University of Virginia evaluated the effect of the policy on breastfeeding in this National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper.

William H. Dow, Anna Godoey, Christopher Lowenstein and Michael Reich released a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper investigating whether “deaths of despair” respond to two key policies that raise incomes for low-wage workers: the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

Heidi Hartmann and Will Dow are the codirectors of P4A’s new Research Hub at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the University of California, Berkeley. We sat down with them to learn more about their research portfolio and why it matters for policymakers, advocates, and community leaders.

Last week, an editorial on the decline in US life expectancy, authored by P4A codirector Laudan Aron and Stephen Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, was published in the British Medical Journal.

ABC/CARE was a comprehensive, birth through age five early childhood development program that included early health, nutrition, parental education and early childhood education. Complementing their recent cost-benefit analysis of the ABC/CARE program, Dr. James Heckman and his team look at the differences in outcomes based on gender in their paper, Gender Differences in the Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program.

This project will generate actionable evidence about the economic impacts of dual taxation and the effect of a dual-taxation solution concerning the existing racial wealth gap on Tribal lands.

Studies have shown employee ownership (EO) increases worker income and wealth, including for low- and moderate-income workers and workers of color. However, these studies are not conclusive regarding benefits to Black workers specifically, nor across all types of employee-owned companies, do not include the experience of Black business owners, and do not compare the Black EO experience against economic policies and practices in the government and private sectors.

This project will analyze public input from two statewide reparations processes for Black and Native Californians and create additional participatory research to define reparations with Black, Native, Asian, and Latinx owners of land-based businesses, advocates, and California State staff, engaging them in analyzing climate and agricultural programs for racial disparities.

While recently much attention has been given to the racial wealth gap, little systematic research exists on the relative effectiveness of proposals to eliminate the gap. Frequent claims regarding potential solutions have been made, including cancellation of student debt and “baby bonds” (a publicly funded child trust account).