Promoting banking services among low-income customers

Many low-income people rely on payday lenders, check cashers, and other alternative financial service providers to get by. But the high costs make it hard for families to save. A 2008 Brookings Institution report highlights the reasons that the so-called unbanked turn to such services. It also suggests solutions-including both expanded bank offerings and increased access to government programs that stabilize incomes and reduce the need for emergency, high-cost credit.Unbanked

Why are Wages Cyclical in the 1970's?

This paper investigates cyclicality in real wages between 1969 and 1982, using 14 years of data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. First, it investigates the extent to which movements in and out of the labor market created apparent wage cyclicality. Second, it investigates whether cyclical movements of workers between heterogeneous wage sectors within the labor market created cyclicality. Little evidence of the first effect is found. The second effect is much more important, and cyclicality clearly occurs in the movement of workers between different labor market sectors. However, sector selection is not correlated with wage determination. Thus, individual wage change estimates of cyclicality need to control for sector location, but need not account for sector selection. The third conclusion of the paper is that cyclicality is present in real wages even within sectors over this time period, and is the result of both cyclicality in overall wage levels (cyclicality in the constant term in wage equations), as well as in the coefficients associated with particular worker characteristics.

An Overview of Welfare-to-Work Efforts

Workfare, Wohlfahrtstheorie, Vereinigte Staaten, Welfare economics, United States

Declining caseloads/increased work: what can we conclude about the effects of welfare reform?

Welfare ; Public welfare

POVERTY, POLICY AND PLACE: HOW POVERTY AND POLICIES TO ALLEVIATE POVERTY ARE SHAPED BY LOCAL CHARACTERISTICS

Food Security and Poverty,

Can Equity and Efficiency Complement Each Other?

Economists tend to assume that redistributive transfers increase equity but cause a loss in efficiency, the so-called 'leaky bucket' effect. This paper explores situations where efficiency losses are small or where equity and efficiency might even complement each other. A simple model identifies key parameters that cause leaky buckets and which policy can affect. Three situations are discussed where the equity/efficiency tradeoff may be low: When transfers go to populations with no capacity to change their behavior; when transfers go to programs that limit efficiency losses through behavioral requirements; and when commodities are subsidized that function as long-term investments and create future income gains.

When Can Public Policy Makers Rely on Private Markets? The Effective Provision of Social Services

The privatization of social services is being increasingly discussed. The social services market is characterized by multiple market failures, including informational asymmetries, agency problems, externalities, and distributional concerns. Consumers may care as much or more about quality of services than about price. If quality is readily observable, the government can regulate private providers to assure standards are met. But when standards are difficult to observe or when the recipient is not the agent who makes the decisions, government ownership may be preferable. This paper categorizes the market situations in which the government provision of social services is likely to be most versus least attractive.

Disaggregating the Effect of the Business Cycle on the Distribution of Income

This paper disaggregates total household income into a complete set of components and studies the comparative cyclicality of these components to economic growth. Comparisons of the relative responsiveness to GNP growth of wages, hours of work, and total labor market income of heads and wives, and transfer income sources of households are made across income, race, sex and age groups. This provides a picture of the channels by which economic growth produces income change. Significant differences in elasticities are found to exist both between different income components and between different population groups for the same components. The narrowing income distribution in times of high growth occurs primarily because of large elasticities on head's labor market income among the poor. Both wages and hours show evidence of cyclicality. The labor market earnings of women -- both wives and household heads -- are far less responsive to growth. Cyclicality in transfer income varies enormously between population groups and by type of transfer.

"Why Were Poverty Rates So High in the 1980s?"

This paper explores the unexpectedly slow decline in poverty that occurred over the expansion of the 1980s. We present evidence on the "stickiness" in the poverty rate in the past decade, compared to earlier decades. The following section investigates several potential non-earnings-related explanations for this fact. There is little evidence that the slowdown in the response of poverty to economic growth is due to problems with the measurement of poverty, to changes in transfer policy in the early 1980s, to the regional distribution of the poor during the 1980s expansion, or to changes in family composition among the poor. The final section of the paper investigated the decreased responsiveness of income and earnings to the rnacroeconomy among low-income households in the 1980s. A growing body of literature has recently began to explore the widening in wage differentials among less-skilled and more skilled workers over the 1980s.1 That literature indicates that substantial real wage declines occurred among low-wage workers throughout the expansion of the 1980s, while substantial real wage increases occurred among higher-wage workers. These trends are clearly correlated with the trends in poverty. Declining real wages will make it harder for low-income families to escape poverty. The point of this paper is not to describe that wage decline further, but to investigate how important this decline was relative to other factors that were operating at the bottom of the income distribution. The lower responsiveness of poverty to economic growth is not due changes in labor market responsiveness over the 1980s expansion. In fact, labor market involvement was more responsive during the 1980s: the unemployment rate fell more rapidly, and earners in the bottom quintile of the population increased their work effort more sharply in the 1980s than in the 1960s. The lower responsiveness of income among low-income households to the economic expansion of the 1980s is entirely due to declining real wages, which offset the increase in labor market effort, resulting in slower income growth. The implication of these results is that the changing wage structure of the l980s made economic growth a far less effective it was in the expansion of the 1960s. It is still an open question whether these trends will continue into the l990s. If they do, economic growth cannot be expected to produce substantial declines in the poverty rate.