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1. The Socioeconomic and Gendered Organization of Social Reproduction in the Anglo-American Welfare Model: Transformations in the US and UK over Four Decades

Author:
Katherine Moos and Pilar Gonalons-Pons
Publication Date:
06-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
Drawing on both gender regime theory and social reproduction theory, this paper employs survey data to offer a quantitative comparative analysis of the socioeconomic and gendered organization of social reproduction in the United States and United Kingdom from 1973 to 2013. Our analysis focuses on household production, paid work, and government social benefits to examine how men and women of different socioeconomic groups contribute to household social reproduction. We combine data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Multinational Time-Use Surveys (MTUS), and additional sources to construct an integrated dataset of harmonized household survey data. We find that household social reproduction in the US and UK reflect variations and path dependence within the Anglo-American model. While our results illustrate important shifts in the organization of social reproduction related to neoliberalism and feminism, we do not observe that social reproduction in either country has been fundamentally destabilized, refamiliarized, or degendered.
Topic:
Welfare, Socioeconomics, Gender, and Social Reproduction
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and United States of America

2. The Role of Non-Pecuniary Considerations: Location Decisions of College Graduates from Low Income Backgrounds

Author:
Yifan Gong, Todd Stinebrickner, Yuxi Yao, and Ralph Stinebrickner
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Western University
Abstract:
We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions allow us to measure the full non-pecuniary benefits of each relevant geographic location, in dollar equivalents. A new specification test is designed and implemented to provide evidence about the quality of these non-pecuniary measures. Supplementing perceived location choice probabilities and expectations about pecuniary factors with our new non-pecuniary measures allows a new approach for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors for location decisions. We compare this approach to alternative expectations-based approaches. We also combine the non-pecuniary measures with realized location and earnings outcomes to characterize inequality in overall welfare.
Topic:
Income Inequality, Welfare, Higher Education, Data, and Location Choice
Political Geography:
North America, United States of America, and Appalachia

3. The State's Response to the Crisis of Neoliberalism: A Comparison of the Net Social Wage in China and the United States, 1992-2017

Author:
Katherine Moos and Hao Qi
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
We compare the welfare states and taxation regimes of the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, from 1992 to 2017. We begin with a comparison of each country’s net social wage—that is, the difference between total benefits received by and taxes paid by labor—using two established methods. While the net social wage in the two countries exhibited similar trends, the increasing net social wage has distinctly different implications in the two countries due to their specific historical trajectories in the neoliberal era. In the US, the increasing net social wage reflects an ambivalent and reluctant response to workers’ social reproduction. In China, it reflects institutional changes in the welfare state, which we interpret as the Chinese state’s attempt to resolve the social-reproduction crisis caused by neoliberal reforms of the 1990s.
Topic:
Political Economy, Economy, Neoliberalism, Crisis Management, and Welfare
Political Geography:
China and United States of America

4. Stress Test: People, Technology, and the Safety Net In Response To Covid-19

Author:
Justin King and Financial Security Program
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
COVID-19 jolted the American economy — and it caused at least 30 million Americans to lose their jobs or have their working hours curtailed by April. The speed and volume of those suddenly un- and under-employed has been unprecedented, and it has resulted in a remarkable amount of stress on the nation’s social safety net. SNAP and other safety net supports administered by state governments struggle to meet the needs of millions of people. Some state online applications systems are so poorly designed that applicants remain stuck trying to access support weeks and months after beginning the application process. What can state human service administrators and policymakers do to build accessible intake and application systems? How should we re-design the safety net? Read the brief to better understand how to create a safety net that is people-centered, tech-enabled, and aligned with private benefit systems.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Welfare, Public Health, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Safety Net
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

5. Building a Federal Water Assistance Program: What can we learn from federal programs that protect low income families

Author:
Energy and Environment Program
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
The annual Aspen-Nicholas Water Forum, a collaborative initiative between the Aspen Institute Energy and Environment Program and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, serves as a platform for addressing domestic water challenges in the 21st century. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Forum took place across a series of virtual sessions exploring what constitutes good water governance through the lenses of water affordability and equity. While this topic was chosen prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic has further revealed and exacerbated health and financial disparities across racial, gender, and geographic lines. On September 10th, the group came together for the third session of the 2020 Aspen-Nicholas Water Forum Virtual Series on Water Affordability to address the critical issues and solutions in the water sector brought to light by the pandemic. Participants learned from experts on federal assistance programs in food, energy, and taxes that have been developed to support low-income Americans struggling with poverty and discussed their greatest successes, failures, and potential to meet the needs of the water community. Building a Federal Water Assistance Program summarizes these discussions of the September session.
Topic:
Security, Water, Welfare, Federalism, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

6. Leveraging the Potential of Home Visiting Programs to Serve Immigrant and Dual Language Learner Families

Author:
Maki Park and Caitlin Katsiaficas
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Migration Policy Institute (MPI)
Abstract:
A child’s first years are ones of exceptionally rapid growth, a period that can lay the foundation for school readiness and healthy socioemotional development. Growing awareness of the importance of investing in infants and toddlers is reflected in the spread of home visiting programs—family-focused social services provided in the home on a regular basis to expectant mothers and new parents alongside their young children. The federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, for example, has seen its funding rise since it was created in 2010, and many states and counties have launched or expanded their own programs. Children with immigrant parents and those exposed to a language other than English in the home (known as Dual Language Learners, or DLLs) are important target populations for such early childhood programs. As of 2013–17, one-fourth of U.S. children ages 5 and under were children of immigrants, and nearly one-third were DLLs. Young children of immigrants are also more likely than their peers to live in low-income households—a priority service population for many home visiting initiatives. Yet studies show that DLLs and children in immigrant families are underserved by home visiting services. This policy brief examines the characteristics that make these children and their families important targets for such programs and barriers that may hinder their participation. It also highlights opportunities to address them, including by making these groups visible in MIECHV needs assessments, improving program data collection, and strengthening partnerships with community-based organizations.
Topic:
Education, Health, Children, Immigrants, Family, and Welfare
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

7. Flawed Plan to Keep Out Welfare‐​Using Immigrants

Author:
David Bier
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The Trump administration has proposed a new regulation that would greatly expand an old rule banning legal residence to immigrants deemed “likely to become a public charge”—that is, someone who the government has the responsibility to care for (USCIS 2018). The rule does not, nor could it, change eligibility for welfare programs for noncitizens in the United States. Instead, it requires applicants to prove that they are not likely, in the future, to become so dependent on welfare that they become a “public charge.” Therefore, the question regarding this regulation is not whether it is appropriate for noncitizens to become dependent on welfare, but whether the government will accurately predict their likelihood of doing so.
Topic:
Immigration, Welfare, and Donald Trump
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

8. The Stupendous US Record Gets Suppressed

Author:
Amity Shlaes
Publication Date:
03-2018
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
In recent years, the consensus regarding the American past has slipped leftward, and then leftward again. No longer is American history a story of opportunity, or of military or domestic triumph. America’s has become, rather, a story of wrongs, racial and social. Today, any historical figure who failed at any time to support abolition, or, worse, took the Confederate side in the Civil War, must be expunged from history. Wrongs must be righted, and equality of result enforced. The equality campaign spills over into a less obvious field, one that might otherwise provide a useful check upon the non-empirical claims of the humanities: economics. In a discipline that once showcased the power of markets, an axiom is taking hold: equal incomes lead to general prosperity, and point toward utopia. Teachers, book club presidents, and especially professors withhold any evidence to the contrary. Universities lead the shift, and the population follows. Today, millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, outnumber baby boomers by the millions, and polls suggest that they support redistribution specifically, and government action generally, more than their predecessors. A 2014 Reason/Rupe poll found 48 percent of millennials agreeing that government should “do more” to solve problems, whereas 37 percent said that government was doing “too many things.” A full 58 percent of the youngest of millennials, those 18-24 when surveyed, held a “positive” view of socialism, in dramatic contrast with their parents: only 23 percent of those aged 55 to 64 viewed socialism positively.
Topic:
Government, Markets, History, Economy, Economic Growth, Tax Systems, Free Trade, and Welfare
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

9. Aging Eagle and Dark Clouds on the Security Horizon

Author:
Dong-Joon Jo
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
East Asia Institute (EAI)
Abstract:
The financial crisis in 2008 exposed a latent weakness that the United States would not have resources enough to cope with its population aging and maintain its global leadership. The crisis led the federal government to increase its welfare spending, bail out faltering industries, and rely on measures of economic stimulation. These measures resulted in the swelling of the public debt, which increased by $5,077 billion from fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2010, and intensified the U.S. federal government’s budgetary difficulties in meeting the welfare and medical needs of senior citizens and carrying out the war on terror abroad (See Figure 1). The belief in the sustainability of the public debt severely weakened, as the interest expense on the public debt rose to 8.6 percent of the total federal spending in 2010; the belief in the comparability between U.S. domestic welfare and its global leadership eroded. The financial crisis evoked a fairly routine set of behavior in partisan politics in 2011. When the public debt was about to reach the ceiling in 2011, Republicans and majority members of the Tea Party threatened not to agree on raising the debt ceiling. They pressured the Barack Obama administration to reduce the federal budget and governmental regulations. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and Democrats wanted to raise the maximum amount of governmental borrowing and keep boosting the economy. In the gunfire between the two parties loomed the possibility of sovereign default. Amid the partisan conflict the credit rating of the U.S. government bonds was downgraded for the first time in history; major market indexes plunged in the third quarter of 2011. The Budget Control Act was the result of bipartisan negotiations, accommodating conflicting goals and instruments from both sides. It provided breathing room for the Obama administration and Democrats by allowing the debt ceiling to increase by $900 billion two times in 2011 and additionally by $1.2 trillion in 2012. Meanwhile, it reduced the budgetary leeway of the administration and gave more power to the House, where Republicans and Tea Party members held the majority. More specifically, it established binding limits on annual appropriations bills to reduce the funding for discretionary programs, relative to the funding in the Congressional Budget Office’s 2010 baseline; it set up a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the “Supercommittee,” to come up with a bill to reduce deficits by at least $1.5 trillion through 2021. The legislation appeared to keep the partisan gunfire under control.
Topic:
Security, Financial Crisis, Budget, and Welfare
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

10. The Effect of TARP on Bank Risk-Taking

Author:
Lamont Black and Lieu Hazelwood
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
One of the largest responses of the U.S. government to the recent financial crisis was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). TARP was originally intended to stabilize the financial sector through the increased capitalization of banks. However, recipients of TARP funds were then encouraged to make additional loans despite increased borrower risk. In this paper, we consider the effect of the TARP capital injections on bank risk taking by analyzing the risk ratings of banks’ commercial loan originations during the crisis. The results indicate that, relative to non-TARP banks, the risk of loan originations increased at large TARP banks but decreased at small TARP banks. Interest spreads and loan levels also moved in different directions for large and small banks. For large banks, the increase in risk-taking without an increase in lending is suggestive of moral hazard due to government ownership. These results may also be due to the conflicting goals of the TARP program for bank capitalization and bank lending.
Topic:
Governance, Interest Rates, Risk, Welfare, Capital, and Banking
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America