Welfare reform and New York City's low-income population

Welfare ; Poverty

The Decline in Welfare Receipt in New York City: Push vs. Pull

To evaluate the initial effects of welfare reform in New York City, we use the Current Population Survey to compare benefit receipt, earnings, and income among vulnerable households in 1994-95 and 1997-99. Overall, there were drops in public assistance and Food Stamps receipt, but the proportion getting Medicaid remained stable. Citizens and noncitizens lost welfare at similar rates, but the decline was significantly greater for Hispanic households than blacks, and was greatest among Puerto Ricans. Both the proportion with earnings and average earnings rose for Hispanics, but earnings did not increase for vulnerable blacks and whites. The sharp difference between Hispanics and blacks resulted in the convergence of Hispanics' higher welfare rates and lower incomes toward those of blacks. This convergence represents both the "pull" of a tighter labor market, together with improvements in Hispanics' education levels and shifts in family structure, and "push" of tighter administrative procedures.Assistance; Food Stamp; Medicaid; Public Assistance; Welfare

Consumption Taxes, Income Taxes, and Revenue Stability: States and the Great Recession

Abstract This paper translates state reliance on income versus consumption taxes into tax burdens by income slice and uses those burdens, together with changes in Adjusted Gross Income by income slice, to explain state tax revenue changes during the Great Recession. We find that more unequal income distributions increased tax base volatility, but greater base volatility did not systematically translate into more volatile tax revenues. While regressivity is decreased in states with higher income tax shares, and increased where there are higher consumption tax shares, simulation results from imposing national average income and consumption tax shares challenge the conventional wisdom that consumption taxes are more stable than income taxes. Volatility would have been greater in high income tax share states, and lower in high consumption share states, if they had more balanced tax structures. The interaction between tax burdens and base volatility by income slice is key to these surprising results

Retirement, Re-entry, and Part-time Work

This paper treats retirement as a dynamic process that may include partial retirement as well as market reentry, where partial retirement is defined as an earnings rate substantially be low one's lifetime peak. Transitions among the discrete states of full retirement, partial retirement, and nonretirement are examined and related to factors such as age, health, pension eligibility, occupation, industry, and past earnings. Among other findings, self-reported measures of retirement are poorly correlated with earnings status. Gradual retirement, moreover, is less likely to entail a transition to part-time employment than to a lower-wage full-time job.

Tax structure and revenue instability: the Great Recession and the states

The Great Recession had the most severe impact on state tax revenues of any downturn since the Great Depression. We hypothesize that states with more progressive tax structures are more vulnerable to economic downturns, and that progressivity and income volatility may interact to amplify the recession’s fiscal impact. We find that, while potential revenue exposure is greater in more progressive states, the most important source of variation was differences in income concentration and capital gains shares in the top 5 percent of taxpayers. Though the interaction between income volatility and high tax burdens at the top did produce large decreases in tax revenue in a few states, tax progressivity accounted for little of the overall interstate variation in revenue volatility

Genomic Dissection of Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia, Including 28 Subphenotypes

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Genomic Dissection of Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia, Including 28 Subphenotypes journaltitle: Cell articlelink: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.05.046 content_type: article copyright: © 2018 Elsevier Inc