COVID-19 and the US Safety Net.

We examine trends in employment, earnings and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The US safety net is a patchwork of different programmes providing in-kind as well as cash benefits, and it had many holes prior to the pandemic. In addition, few of the programmes are designed explicitly as automatic stabilisers.

Food Hardship during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Great Recession.

I compare the extent of food hardships in the United States among adults and seniors before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Food insufficiency increased threefold compared to 2019, and more than doubled relative to the Great Recession. Food insufficiency among seniors increased 75% during the COVID period, but more than doubled when including reduced intake of food varieties.

The Effect Of The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program On Mortality.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest food assistance program in the United States. Although participation in it has been shown to reduce food insecurity, there is comparatively less clear causal evidence of positive health effects of participation, particularly among adults. We examined the relationship between SNAP participation and premature mortality using data for 1997-2009 from the National Health Interview Survey, linked to data for 1999-2011 from the National Death Index.

The Changing Safety Net for Low-Income Parents and Their Children: Structural or Cyclical Changes in Income Support Policy?

Refundable tax credits and food assistance are the largest transfer programs available to able-bodied working poor and near-poor families in the United States, and simultaneous participation in these programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s. To understand this growth, we construct a series of two-year panels from the 1981-2013 waves of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement to estimate the effect of state labor-market conditions, federal and state transfer program policy choices, and household demographics governing joint participation in food and refundable tax credit programs. Overall, changing policy drives much of the increase in the simultaneous, biennial use of food assistance and refundable tax credits.

Food Insecurity And Health Outcomes.

Almost fifty million people are food insecure in the United States, which makes food insecurity one of the nation's leading health and nutrition issues. We examine recent research evidence of the health consequences of food insecurity for children, nonsenior adults, and seniors in the United States. For context, we first provide an overview of how food insecurity is measured in the country, followed by a presentation of recent trends in the prevalence of food insecurity.

Poverty and macroeconomic performance across space, race, and family structure.

We examined the effects of macroeconomic performance and social policy on the extent and depth of poverty in America using state-level panel data from the 1981-2000 waves of the Current Population Survey. We found that a strong macroeconomy at both the state and national levels reduced both the number of families who were living in poverty and the severity of poverty. The magnitude and source of these antipoverty effects, however, were not uniform across family structures and racial groups or necessarily over time.