Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. In this study, we claim that differences in political context and institutional design constrain the policy choices…

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is an essential lifeline for millions of Americans. Without it, many families would be in deep financial distress. SSDI is insurance that workers pay for through premiums deducted from their pay. In return, workers gain the right to monthly benefits if a disabling condition ends their capacity to earn a…

Burkhauser and Daly claim that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is growing at an unsustainable rate and has depressed employment rates and incomes of people with disabilities following enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. In the authors' view, SSDI is sustainable and affordable, despite increasing prevalence of…

This article examines the impacts of Building Strong Families, a healthy marriage and relationship skills education program serving unmarried parents who were expecting or had recently had a baby. Based on a random assignment research design, the analysis uses survey data from more than 4,700 couples across eight research sites to estimate program…

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is growing at an unsustainable pace. Over the past 40 years the number of disabled worker beneficiaries has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 1.5 million in 1970 to 8.2 million in 2010. Rapid growth in the rolls has put increasing pressure on program finances. The rapid rise in SSDI…

This paper examines Korea's employment dynamics and analyzes how adverse impacts could be mitigated during the recent economic crisis in comparison with the 1997 to 1998 Asian crisis. A clear lesson is that policies to mitigate adverse impacts of financial crisis on the macroeconomic level should be given priority for preserving employment. In…

SSDI beneficiaries lose their entire cash benefit if they perform work that is substantial gainful activity (SGA) after using Social Security work incentive programs. The complete loss of benefits might be a work disincentive for beneficiaries. We report results from a pilot project that replaces the complete loss of benefits with a gradual…

The sharp rise in U.S. incarceration rates has heightened long-standing concerns among scholars and policymakers that lengthy incarceration permanently harms the future labor market outcomes of prisoners. If true, then lengthy prison sentences will not only punish criminals for crimes committed, but will also make it far more difficult for…

The underlying theory behind child support guidelines implies that child support orders should change when the incomes of noncustodial parents change. This paper documents changes in noncustodial fathers' earnings over a five-year period and examines the relationship between the changes in earnings and modifications in child support orders. Using…

In December of 2009, many within the American community of analysts, policymakers, and program managers are looking expectantly at the possibility of change in the basic measure used to gauge poverty in the United States. A broad consensus has emerged that the current official measure of poverty in the United States is deeply flawed, in the income…

International comparisons of inequality based on measures of disposable income may not be valid if the size and incidence of publicly provided in-kind benefits differ across the countries considered. The benefits that are financed by taxation in one country may need to be purchased out of disposable income in another. We estimate the size and…

Poverty is generally defined as income or expenditure insufficiency, but the economic condition of a household also depends on its real and financial asset holdings. This paper investigates measures of poverty that rely on indicators of household net worth. We review and assess two main approaches followed in the literature: income-net worth…

Shifting the tax burden from labor to consumption is proposed in many developed countries as a way to make the tax system more incentive compatible. This article deals with the simulation of such a policy change to sharpen the distributional picture. Expenditures are imputed into the EUROMOD microsimulation program. Then social security…

The need to improve the U.S. poverty measure has received renewed attention as state and local governments have initiated antipoverty efforts and wish to judge their effect. This paper describes the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity's implementation of the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations for measuring poverty. The…

At the Joint OECD/University of Maryland Conference on "Measuring Poverty, Income Inequality, and Social Exclusion: Lessons from Europe" (held in Paris, 2009), many of the conference papers focused on alternative measures of income, evaluating their impacts on inequality and poverty. The conference papers highlighted the impact of making detailed…