Balancing data privacy and usability in the federal statistical system.

The federal statistical system is experiencing competing pressures for change. On the one hand, for confidentiality reasons, much socially valuable data currently held by federal agencies is either not made available to researchers at all or only made available under onerous conditions. On the other hand, agencies which release public databases face new challenges in protecting the privacy of the subjects in those databases, which leads them to consider releasing fewer data or masking the data in ways that will reduce their accuracy. In this essay, we argue that the discussion has not given proper consideration to the reduced social benefits of data availability and their usability relative to the value of increased levels of privacy protection. A more balanced benefit-cost framework should be used to assess these trade-offs. We express concerns both with synthetic data methods for disclosure limitation, which will reduce the types of research that can be reliably conducted in unknown ways, and with differential privacy criteria that use what we argue is an inappropriate measure of disclosure risk. We recommend that the measure of disclosure risk used to assess all disclosure protection methods focus on what we believe is the risk that individuals should care about, that more study of the impact of differential privacy criteria and synthetic data methods on data usability for research be conducted before either is put into widespread use, and that more research be conducted on alternative methods of disclosure risk reduction that better balance benefits and costs.

The PSID and Income Volatility: Its Record of Seminal Research and Some New Findings.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other dataset in the United States. Its record of providing data for seminal research is unmatched. In this article, we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the topic. Then we review the major papers that have used the PSID to study income volatility, comparing their results to those using other datasets. Last, we present new results for income volatility among U.S. men through 2014, finding that both gross volatility and the variance of transitory shocks display a three-phase trend: upward trends from the 1970s to the 1980s, a stable period in the 1990s through the early 2000s, and a large increase during the Great Recession.

Rasch Analyses of Very Low Food Security among Households and Children in the Three City Study.

The longitudinal Three City Study of low-income families with children measures food hardships using fewer questions and some different questions from the standard U.S. instrument for measuring food security, the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) in the Current Population Survey (CPS). We utilize a Rasch measurement model to identify thresholds of very low food security among households and very low food security among children in the Three City Study that are comparable to thresholds from the HFSSM. We also use the Three City Study to empirically investigate the determinants of food insecurity and of these specific food insecurity outcomes, estimating a multivariate behavioral Rasch model that is adapted to address longitudinal data. The estimation results indicate that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program reduce food insecurity, while poverty and disability among caregivers increase it. Besides its longitudinal structure, the Three City Study measures many more characteristics about households than the CPS. Our estimates reveal that financial assistance through social networks and a household's own financial assets reduce food insecurity, while its outstanding loans increase insecurity.

Assessing the need for a new nationally representative household panel survey in the United States.

We introduce this special issue on the critical matter of whether the existing household panel surveys in the U.S. are adequate to address the important emerging social science and policy questions of the next few decades. We summarize the conference papers which address this issue in different domains. The papers detail many new and important emerging research questions but also identify key limitations in existing panels in addressing those questions. To address these limitations, we consider the advantages and disadvantages of initiating a new, general-purpose omnibus household panel in the U.S. We also discuss the particular benefits of starting new panels that have specific targeted domains such as child development, population health and health care. We also develop a list of valuable enhancements to existing panels which could address many of their limitations.

The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net.

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families with more employed members and with fewer employed members. However, the increase in transfer amounts was not strongly progressive across income classes within the low-income population, increasingly slightly more for those just below the poverty line and those just above it, compared to those at the bottom of the income distribution. This is mainly the result of the EITC program, which provides greater benefits to those with higher family earnings. The expansions of SNAP and UI benefitted those at the bottom of the income distribution to a greater extent.

Trends in the Covariance Structure of Earnings in the U.S.: 1969-1987.

We examine the increasing variance of earnings of white men over the 1970s and 1980s by focusing on changes in the covariance structure of earnings. Using data from the Michigan PSID from 1969-1987, we find that about half of the increase has arisen from an increase in the variance of the permanent component of earnings and half from an increase in the variance of the transitory component, where the transitory component is composed of serially correlated shocks that die out within three years. We thus find that increases in the variability of earnings are of equal importance to increases in the dispersion of permanent earnings in explaining recent increases in earnings inequality.

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. We show that the safety net response to employment losses in the COVID-19 pandemic largely consists only of increased support from unemployment insurance and food assistance programmes, an inadequate response compared with the magnitude of the downturn. We discuss options to reform social assistance in the United States to provide more robust income floors in times of economic downturns.

Welfare Reform in the mid-2000s: How African-American and Hispanic Families in Three Cities are Faring.

This article reports on a sample of 538 African American and Hispanic women who were receiving TANF in 1999, 416 of whom left the program by 2005. The Hispanic women consisted of a Mexican-origin group and a second group that was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. Combining the experiences of the employed and the non-employed welfare leavers, we find at best a modest decline in the average poverty rate among African American welfare leavers between 1999 and 2005. Mexican-origin and other Hispanic leavers showed larger average declines in poverty. Among just the welfare leavers who were employed in 2005, the averages for women in all racial-ethnic groups showed increases in household income and declines in poverty. Among those who were not employed, African-Americans had experienced a decline in household income and were further below the poverty line than in 1999, whereas Hispanic women had experienced modest declines or slight increases in their household incomes.

The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the U.S. Welfare System.

Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-elderly, nondisabled single-parent families to married-parent families; and from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect long-standing, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not.

Trends in the Transitory Variance of Male Earnings: Methods and Evidence.

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using an error components model and simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the early 1970s, continued to increase through the mid-1980s, and then remained at this new higher level through the 1990s and beyond. Thus the increase mostly occurred about thirty years ago. Its increase accounts for between 31 and 49 percent of the total rise in cross-sectional variance, depending on the time period.

Handedness and earnings.

We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labour market and, in particular, to earnings. We find a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education. This positive wage effect is strongest among those who have lower than average earnings relative to those of similar high education. This effect is not found among women.

Remarks on the analysis of causal relationships in population research.

The problem of determining cause and effect is one of the oldest in the social sciences, where laboratory experimentation is generally not possible. This article provides a perspective on the analysis of causal relationships in population research that draws upon recent discussions of this issue in the field of economics. Within economics, thinking about causal estimation has shifted dramatically in the past decade toward a more pessimistic reading of what is possible and a retreat in the ambitiousness of claims of causal determination. In this article, the framework that underlies this conclusion is presented, the central identification problem is discussed in detail, and examples from the field of population research are given. Some of the more important aspects of this framework are related to the problem of the variability of causal effects for different individuals; the relationships among structural forms, reduced forms, and knowledge of mechanisms; the problem of internal versus external validity and the related issue of extrapolation; and the importance of theory and outside evidence.

Mothers' transitions from welfare to work and the well-being of preschoolers and adolescents.

Results from a longitudinal study of 2402 low-income families during the recent unprecedented era of welfare reform suggest that mothers' transitions off welfare and into employment are not associated with negative outcomes for preschoolers (ages 2 to 4 years) or young adolescents (ages 10 to 14 years). Indeed, no significant associations with mothers' welfare and employment transitions were found for preschoolers, and the dominant pattern was also of few statistically significant associations for adolescents. The associations that did occur provided slight evidence that mothers' entry into the labor force was related to improvements in adolescents' mental health, whereas exits from employment were linked with teenagers' increased behavior problems.