Data Snapshot: Poorer Working Families with Young Children and No Out-of-Pocket Child Care Struggle Financially

Low-income families with working parents face significant burdens paying for child care, which can function as a barrier to work and often means parents must rely on child care arrangements that are less formal and less stable

Child Care Expenses Make Middle-Class Incomes Hard to Reach

In this brief, authors Robert Paul Hartley, Marybeth Mattingly, and Christopher Wimer present estimates of the number of families that cannot maintain a middle-class income as a result of child care expenses. Estimates are based on 2013–2017 data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which corresponds to income and expenses during 2012–2016. They report that approximately 9 percent of working families with children under age 6 are pushed out of the middle class as a result of child care expenses. For working families with very young children (under age 3), 8 percent are pushed below the middle-class threshold. If all middle-class working families with young children were to pay what typical upper-middle and middle-class families pay for child care, roughly $6,900 per year on average, an additional 21 percent would be pushed below the middle-class threshold. They report that the current funding infrastructure for helping parents find and pay for affordable, quality child care is woefully inadequate. One way to support working families would be to increase funding for the Child Care and Development Fund, which is currently targeted toward families below the middle class

IDEAS WEREN’T ENOUGH: THE STRATEGIES BEHIND PAUL SIMON’S RUN FOR PRESIDENT, 1987-88

Ideas. That word best describes the fifty-two years Paul Simon spent as a public person, journalist, politician, author, and head of a policy institute. His ideas flowed nonstop at the local community level, state legislature, and in Congress. When Simon opened his 1987-88 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he did what he always did: fed the public his ideas for solving the ills of the federal government and setting a national direction. As he stated in his announcement, “I dream of an America at work in a world at peace.” Straight stuff. But would voters outside familiar ground in Illinois buy it

Epidemiological Surveillance and Control of Communicable Disease: Basis for Evidence Based Health Promotion and Early Response - Practical Perspective

The adoption by WHO’s member states of the International Health Regulations (2005) represents a paradigm shift away from mandatory reporting of specific diseases to a requirement for ministries of health to notify WHO concerning any potential Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The European Union (EU) has also issued legislation on CDS&C, epidemic early warning and response, bioterrorism, and large number of related fields, including food safety, water quality, zoonotic diseases, blood safety, border controls, data protection and confidentiality etc, that are binding on EU member states. Harmonisation of national public health legislation to this acquis communautaire is a requirement for accession to the EU. This paper reviews the key guidance on strengthening CDS&C systems to meet the IHR and EU requirements, and it attempts to give a brief overview of international resources and implementation activities. If WHO member states are to respect the deadline of 2012 for achieving the stated IHR minimum core capacities, significant domestic investment will also be required, particularly for laboratory strengthening. Furthermore, Field Epidemiology Training Programmes and laboratory scientist training schemes will need to be established within the context of attractive careers in public health

ESSAYS ON INTERGENERATIONAL DEPENDENCY AND WELFARE REFORM

This dissertation consists of three essays related to the effects of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation as well as effects on labor supply and childcare arrangements. States implemented welfare reform at different times from 1992 to 1996, and these policies notably introduced work requirements and other restrictions intended to limit dependency of needy families. One mechanism reforms were intended to address was childhood exposure to a culture of ongoing welfare receipt. In Essay 1, I estimate the effect of reform on the transmission of welfare participation for 2961 mother-daughter pairs in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) over the period 1968-2013. I find that a mother\u27s welfare participation increased her daughter\u27s odds of participation as an adult by roughly 30 percentage points, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50 percent, or at least 30 percent over the baseline odds of participation. While I find comparable-sized transmission patterns in daughters\u27 adult use of the broader safety net and other outcomes such as educational attainment and income, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform. In Essay 2, I estimate behavioral labor supply responses to reforms using experimental data from Connecticut\u27s Jobs First welfare waiver program in 1996. Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of Jobs First suggesting evidence that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. However, estimates obtained by a semi-parametric panel quantile estimator allowing women to vary arbitrarily in preferences and welfare participation costs indicate no evidence of behavioral-induced participation. These findings show that a welfare program imposes an estimated cost up to 10 percent of quarterly earnings, and these costs can be heterogeneous throughout the conditional earnings distribution. Lastly, in Essay 3, I return to PSID data to examine the relationship between welfare spending on childcare assistance and the care arrangements chosen by low-income families. Experimental evidence has shown that formal child care can result in long-term socioeconomic gains for disadvantaged children, and work requirements after welfare reform have necessitated increased demand for child care among single mothers. I find that an increase of a thousand dollars in state-level childcare assistance per child in poverty increases the probability of formal care among low-earnings single-mother families by about 27 to 30 percentage points. When public assistance makes child care more affordable, families within the target population reveal a higher preference for formal care relative to informal, which may be related to perceived quality improvements for child enrichment and development

The Art of Veterinary Practice

Medicine, indeed veterinary medicine, as a science has made enormous progress with the unfolding of time. On the other hand the application or practice of this science would seem to progress at a much slower pace, if at all, and cannot properly be called a science being instead an art

Distributional Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments: A Panel Quantile Regression Examination

In an influential article, Bitler, Gelbach and Hoynes (American Economic Re- view, 2006; 96, 988-1012) illustrate the importance of estimating heterogeneous impacts of welfare reform experiments. They find that the mean treatment effect offers an uninfor- mative summary of opposing effects, while the treatment effects are significantly different across quantiles. We replicate their results and evaluate the robustness of their findings to accounting for individual-specific heterogeneity possibly associated with welfare program participation. We find results that are in general similar to Bitler’s et al. findings, although the interpretation of labor supply effects in the upper tail is revised. We find no evidence of behavioral induced participation