Linking Tax Refunds and Low-Cost Bank Accounts: A Social Development Strategy for Low-Income Families?

This article describes a pilot program encouraging low-income workers to have their tax refunds directly deposited into low-cost bank accounts. The program did not lead to substantial saving and asset accumulation in the short-term. However, surveys and interviews suggest that the program helped some participants spend money more slowly and more thoughtfully, introduced some to account ownership or direct deposit, and encouraged some to obtain other mainstream financial products. Thus, the program may have helped low-income families “get on track” for future saving and asset accumulation

Decision-making by children

In this paper, we examine the determinants of decision-making power by children and young adolescents. Moving beyond previous economic models that treat children as goods consumed by adults rather than agents, we develop a noncooperative model of parental control of child behavior and child resistance. Using child reports of decision-making and psychological and cognitive measures from the NLSY79 Child Supplement, we examine the determinants of shared and sole decision-making in seven domains of child activity. We find that the determinants of sole decision-making by the child and shared decision-making with parents are quite distinct: sharing decisions appears to be a form of parental investment in child development rather than a simple stage in the transfer of authority. In addition, we find that indicators of child capability and preferences affect reports of decision-making authority in ways that suggest child demand for autonomy as well as parental discretion in determining these outcomes

The Washington State Merged Longitudinal Administrative Database

This paper describes a uniquely comprehensive database constructed from merged state administrative data. State Unemployment Insurance (UI) systems provide an important source of data for understanding employment effects of policy interventions but have also lack several key types of information: personal demographics, non-earnings income, and household associations. With UI data, researchers can show overall earnings or employment trends or policy impacts, but cannot distinguish whether these trends or impacts differ by race or gender, how they affect families and children, or whether total income or other measure of well-being change. This paper describes a uniquely comprehensive new administrative dataset, the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Database (WMLAD), created by University of Washington researchers to examine distributional and household economic effects of the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance, an intervention that more than doubled the federal minimum wage. WMLAD augments UI data with state administrative voter, licensing, social service, income transfer, and vital statistics records. The union set of all individuals who appear in any of these agency datasets will provide a near-census of state residents and will augment UI records with information on age, sex, race/ethnicity, public assistance receipt, and household membership. In this paper, we describe 1.) our relationship with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services that permits this data access and allows construction of this dataset using restricted personal identifiers; 2.) the merging and construction process, including imputing race and ethnicity and constructing quasi-households from address co-location; and 3.) planned benchmarking and analysis work

Policy Recommendations for Meeting the Grand Challenge to Reduce Extreme Economic Inequality

This brief was created forSocial Innovation for America’s Renewal, a policy conference organized by the Center for Social Development in collaboration with the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare, which is leading theGrand Challenges for Social Work initiative to champion social progress. The conference site includes links to speeches, presentations, and a full list of the policy briefs

Work-Based Antipoverty Programs for Parents Can Enhance the School Performance and Social Behavior of Children

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65246/1/1467-8624.00281.pd

Trying to keep children out of trouble: Child characteristics, neighborhood quality, and within-household resource allocation

Prior ethnographic evidence suggests that parents combat neighborhood dangers through spending time with and money on children perceived to be at risk. This paper summarizes a secondary data investigation of whether interactions between neighborhood quality and child characteristics predict patterns of intra-household resource allocation. Using a sample of N = 1879 12- and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that in neighborhoods with greater numbers of problems, parents spend more time and money with firstborn children and children who are particularly short or impulsive relative to how parents treat such children in lower problem neighborhoods. Comparisons of cross-sectional and sibling fixed-effect models suggest the shortness and firstborn effects are not due to unobserved family characteristics. These results lend modest support to the assertion that parents systematically try to use within-family resources to protect certain children from threats posed by neighborhoods with high levels of crime or low levels of social cohesiveness.Neighborhood quality Intra-household resource allocation Parent-child relationships

Local mandate improves equity of paid sick leave coverage: Seattle’s experience

Abstract Background Paid sick leave allows workers to take time off work for personal or family health needs, improving health and potentially limiting infectious diseases. The U.S. has no national sick leave mandate, and many American workers - particularly those at lower income levels - have no right to paid time off for their own or family members’ health needs. This article reports on outcomes of a local mandate, the City of Seattle Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance, which requires certain employers to provide paid sick leave to eligible workers. Methods Survey collectors contacted a stratified random sample of Seattle employers before the Ordinance went into effect and one year later. Pre- and post- analysis draws on responses to survey items by 345 employers who were subject to the paid sick leave mandate. Results Awareness of the policy and provision of paid leave grew significantly over the year after the Ordinance was enacted. More employers offered leave to full-time workers (80.8 to 93.9%, p < .001) and part-time workers (47.1 to 66.7%, p < .001) with particularly large increases in the hospitality sector, which includes food workers (coverage of any hospitality employee: 27.5 to 85.0%, p < .001). Conclusions Absent a federal policy, local paid sick time mandates can increase paid sick leave coverage, an important social determinant of health

How Much Does Work Pay? New Data on Combined Marginal Tax Rates

This paper summarizes new evidence about the incidence and correlates of the Marginal Tax Rates (MTRs) and possible labor supply effects under a reasonably current policy regime. In prior work, the author used a unique longitudinal data set consisting of state human services caseload data merged with Unemployment Insurance and Department of Revenue data to calculate the incidence of high MTRs for Wisconsin residents in 2000 (Holt & Romich, 2007). This study reports on an extension of this work that involves linking additional data from 2001 and 2002 to the original data and describing longitudinal patterns