Income Support during the Great Recession: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data

Abstract

This project examines the poverty reducing and distributional effects of income support programs during the great recession. A new linked data set allows me to account for the pronounced program misreporting in the data used in previous evaluations. Most studies rely on survey reports that suffer from misreporting or on administrative records with limited income and demographic information. We combine the advantages of each data source by linking administrative records from multiple government programs to three large economic surveys. We will use this new and unique data set to analyze what share of the drop in income of disadvantaged households during the recession was replaced by safety net programs and how much the programs reduced poverty. We will also examine whether the programs interact to form an effective safety net or whether some households or demographic groups are missed