Suchergebnisse

.cs95E872D0{text-align:left;text-indent:0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt}.cs5EFED22F{color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-family:Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight:normal; font-style:normal; }The U.S. disability insurance system is an important part of the federal social safety net; it provides financial protection to working-age Americans who have illnesses, injuries, or conditions that render them unable to work as they did before becoming disabled or that prevent them from adjusting to other work. An examination of the workings of the system, however, raises deep concerns abo

AbstractPolicy research institutes in the United States play an important role in the creation of evidence for evidence‐based policymaking. This is the case with respect to their advocacy for the gathering and broad dissemination of "Big Data" and in the publication of policy analysis in the academic literature using these data. But they play a much more significant role, via non‐refereed working papers, in predicting the possible behavioral and distributional consequences of currently proposed policies being considered by the executive and legislative branches of government. Historically, however, policy research institutes, both inside and outside the Beltway, have also played a less understood role. This role is the nurturing of those mostly academic‐based economists who, as members of the Council of Economic Advisers, eventually end up advising presidents of the United States and their staff on the state of economic knowledge regarding the economic problems these policymakers are called to solve via evidence‐based policymaking.

Extending the work of Card and Krueger, we find minimum‐wage increases (1988–2003) did not affect poverty rates overall, or among the working poor or among single mothers. Despite employment growth among single mothers, most gainers lived in nonpoor families and most working poor already had wages above the proposed minimums. Simulating a new federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, we find 87% of workers who benefit live in nonpoor families. Poor single mothers receive 3.8% of all benefits. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would far more effectively reduce poverty, especially for single mothers. (JEL J21, J31, J38)