Poverty Research & Policy

In this episode, we hear from IRP Director Katherine Magnuson about components of the just-released American Families Plan. Magnuson discusses parental leave, funding for child care, universal pre-kindergarten, and expansions of child tax credits. She says efforts to support parents and invest in families can help them to meet their goals and do what they want to do for their children and for themselves.

In this episode, we hear from Joshua Wright, Community Project Coordinator with the Cancer Health Disparities Initiative at the UW Carbone Cancer Center. Wright shares the importance of making and keeping connections within the community both for educational and career purposes, and how getting involved with local efforts can lead to valuable experiences and relationships.

In this episode, we hear from Kadijha Marquardt-Davis, who was a legislative assistant in the Wisconsin State Legislature at the time of the interview and has since become policy advisor for a representative in the legislature. In the interview, Marquardt-Davis talks about how she became interested in policy, tips for transitioning from school to the professional world, and the importance of finding a mentor.

In this episode we hear from Kim Sutter, Director of Services for Porchlight, which is the largest provider of low-cost housing and homeless services in Dane County, Wisconsin. Sutter holds an undergraduate degree in social work from UW-Madison and shares her career path to oversees multiple programs as well as a large staff and volunteers. She also explains how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the homeless population and how Porchlight could provide services.

A striking number of women, and especially moms, have left the U.S. labor force since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In this podcast episode, labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards talks about some of the patterns she’s seen around why women are leaving the labor force and how the lack of support for working parents could roll back the gains we’ve seen in women’s work and the economic benefits that have come with them.

In the last few decades, there has been a major expansion in the number of states and localities offering full-day kindergarten. In this podcast episode, economist Chloe Gibbs of the University of Notre Dame talks about how these expansions impacted academic achievement and outcomes at the school district level.   

In this episode, Timothy Smeeding talks about proposals from Senator Mitt Romney and from Democratic leadership for a fully refundable monthly child tax credit or child allowance and how these types of policies could reduce child poverty and help working parents in the pandemic and beyond. Smeeding is the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty from 2008-2014. 

In this episode we hear from Jacob Faber of New York University about a federal government program called the Home Owners' Loan Corporation that started in the 1930s and how the decisions made in that program promoted residential segregation that is still with us today.

The goal of reducing incarceration has been gaining traction for at least the last decade in the United States. In an interview we did with sociologist Pamela Oliver in late 2020, she talked about how we got to where we are today when it comes to U.S. imprisonment (Part 1) and the impact that different reforms would have on reducing the U.S. prison population (Part 2).  The interview is based on a paper Professor Oliver wrote for the Marquette Law Review (Volume 103, Issue 3).  

The goal of reducing incarceration has been gaining traction for at least the last decade in the United States. In an interview we did with sociologist Pamela Oliver in late 2020, she talked about how we got to where we are today when it comes to U.S. imprisonment and the impact that different reforms would have on reducing the U.S. prison population. This is part 1 of the interview.  The interview is based on a paper Professor Oliver wrote for the Marquette Law Review (Volume 103, Issue 3).  

In this episode, Carolyn Heinrich of Vanderbilt University talks about a study she conducted with Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Annalee Good, and Huiping (Emily) Cheng that looked at the use of online education products in high schools to help students who were falling behind. Heinrich describes her team's observations of online course-taking and the longer-term academic and labor market outcomes of students in online settings versus those in traditional instruction. They find that, on average, students who took more credit recovery courses in online settings generally fared worse. Heinrich says that this raises equity concerns and asks if we are "disadvantaging the exact students we’re trying to help in the way we roll this out?" To learn more about the study, the instruments used in classroom observation, and related publications, see https://my.vanderbilt.edu/digitaled/.   

In this episode we hear from Eleanor Pratt, a grant writer with the Heartland Alliance and recent graduate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pratt talks about the importance of developing writing and editing skills, what she's learned from her experiences, and the challenge of doing anti-poverty work.  

For the first episode of the Anti-Poverty Intern, host Simon Guma talks to UW–Madison PhD candidate Troy M. Williams. They discuss Williams’ path to pursuing a PhD at UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, advice for students and researchers who are engaging with members of their communities, and the challenges of working in institutions that still have a lot of work to do when it comes to issues of race.

In this episode we hear from economist Eric Chyn about the impact of home removal—for reasons like neglect or abuse—on children’s later outcomes. In a paper he co-wrote with Anthony Bald, Justine Hastings, and Margarita Machelett, their perhaps surprising main result is that temporary home removal increases later test scores and reduces grade repetition for young girls, but doesn't show any significant impacts for young boys.  Dr. Chyn is an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper he talks about in this episode is NBER working paper number 25419 "The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes."  View transcript at https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/eric-chyn-on-the-impacts-of-removing-children-from-abusive-or-neglectful-homes/

In this episode, IRP and Morgridge Center for Public Service media intern Simon Guma talks to Troy M. Williams. They discuss Williams' path to pursuing a PhD at UW-Madison's School of Human Ecology, advice for students and researchers who are engaging with members of their communities, and the challenges of working in institutions that still have a lot of work to do when it comes to issues of race. 

In this episode, Stephanie Canizales of the University of California, Merced discusses her work talking to undocumented and unaccompanied youth workers in Los Angeles about their experiences and struggles with work and social integration in the United States. Read the transcript at https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/stephanie-canizales-on-the-experiences-of-undocumented-and-unaccompanied-youth-workers/

Mario Luis Small of Harvard University talks about social networks and social capital and about some of his work looking at those things in the context of programs like Head Start. Read the transcript at https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/mario-small-on-how-social-networks-and-social-capital-matter-for-human-services-programs/

This episode features Professor Sarah Halpern-Meekin, who discusses work from her 2019 book, Social Poverty. Halpern-Meekin is a sociologist at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and La Follette School of Public Affairs.  

In this episode, Peter Blair of Harvard University talks about a paper called “Job Market Signaling through Occupational Licensing” he wrote with Bobby Chung that looks at how licenses people need for jobs contribute to differences in pay and if the story is different depending on someone’s race or gender. He also talks about culture challenges in the economics profession, mentoring, and how growing up in the Bahamas influenced some of his goals as an economist.

We’ve all heard stories about the rise in helicopter parenting—parents who do their kids’ homework, drop off things at school for them that they’ve forgotten, and intervene to smooth the path for their children. It’s become so common that many schools now have rules against this kind of parental behavior. But our guest for this episode, sociologist Jessica Calarco of Indiana University, says that for many privileged parents and families, these rules just don’t seem to apply. She set out to find out why and tells us about it in this podcast episode.