Affiliates & Research Staff

Researchers associated with IRP consist of University of Wisconsin faculty members in the social sciences and a small number of social scientists at other institutions. Postdoctoral scholars and research scientists are also members of IRP.

There are about 75 formal affiliates representing a variety of disciplines, among them economics, sociology, social work, public policy, political science, human ecology (formerly family resources and consumer sciences), developmental psychology, educational policy studies, rural sociology, population health sciences, and law.

Affiliates enjoy a close relationship to IRP that gives them access to IRP editorial, publications, and computing services, and entitles them to apply for Institute financial support.

Alphabetical Listing of Affiliates

A       B       C       D       E       F       G       H       I       J       K       L       M       N      
O       P       Q       R       S       T       U       V       W       X       Y       Z      

A

Scott W. Allard

Associate Professor of Social Service Administration
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago
969 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-1131
sallard@uchicago.edu

• Inequality and poverty
• Institutional components of the safety net
• Federalism as it relates to antipoverty policy

Scott W. Allard’s research focuses on issues of inequality and poverty, the institutional components of the safety net, and matters of federalism as they relate to antipoverty policy. Recent work includes an examination of the transformation of the safety net from cash-based to service-based forms of assistance, and the role that faith-based and secular nonprofits play in delivering these new forms of assistance. Other recent work includes analysis of the spatial relationships between poverty, program participation, and opportunity, including several studies on the significant spatial variation in access to public and nonprofit service providers in urban America. Current ongoing projects include the study of faith-based service organizations, rural poverty and social service provision, and assessment of the impact of service accessibility on individual well-being.

Scott W. Allard's home page

A

Robert Asen

Associate Professor of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6172 Vilas Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-4518
rbasen@wisc.edu

• Welfare policy debate
• Markets and public policy
• Social and economic inequality and public deliberation

Robert Asen's poverty-related research explores historical and contemporary debates in institutional forums (i.e., congressional committee hearings, House and Senate floor debates) regarding U.S. social welfare policy. A particular focus of this research concerns the ways in which images of poor people are constructed and enter into the public debate. Robert Asen is also interested in the impact of social and economic inequalities on public deliberation, namely, how such inequalities may exclude some citizens from debating public issues and how these citizens seek to overcome such exclusions.

Robert Asen's home page

B

Judith Bartfeld

Professor of Consumer Science
School of Human Ecology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 336
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4765
bartfeld@wisc.edu

• Hunger and food insecurity
• Child support and low-income families

Judith Bartfeld's research interests are in the areas of food security and child support policy. Current projects include an analysis of the effects of state-level characteristics on hunger and food insecurity; a study focusing on local differences in food insecurity among families of elementary school children in Wisconsin; an assessment of the feasibility of using a self-administered survey to measure food security; and research on child support arrears as a barrier to subsequent child support payments. Bartfeld holds a joint appointment with Cooperative Extension at the UW-Madison. She directs the Wisconsin Food Security Project, an interactive web site providing county-level information about food security, economic well-being, and the availability and use of public and private programs to increase access to affordable food in Wisconsin.

Lawrence Berger

Assistant Professor of Social Work
School of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 311
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6332
lmberger@wisc.edu

• Child and family policy
• Child well-being
• Family resources and family structure
• Parenting, child maltreatment, and children's living arrangements
• Family leave policies
• Housing assistance policies

Lonnie Berger's research focuses on the ways in which economic resources, socio-demographic characteristics, and public policies affect parental behaviors and child and family well-being. His current projects are primarily concerned with: (1) exploring relationships between income, family structure, parental work, parenting behaviors, and children's care, development, and well-being; (2) examining the determinants of "substandard" parenting, child maltreatment, and out-of-home placements for children; (3) assessing the impacts of family leave on children's health and well-being; and (4) exploring the effects of subsidized housing on behaviors (e.g., labor supply) and well-being among low-income families.

Lonnie Berger's home page

Marianne N. Bloch

Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Women's Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
225 N. Mills Street
528B Teacher Education Building
Madison WI 53706
(608) 263-4673
bloch@education.wisc.edu

• Welfare reform and child care
• Child development and learning
• Ethnographic/qualitative research in community settings

Marianne Bloch's research has focused on historical and cross-cultural issues related to early childhood education and child care in the United States, Africa, and in East/Central Europe. Her interests include studies of women, work, child care, and child care policy. Her latest research focuses on the implications of welfare reform in Wisconsin on families, children, and child care.

Karen Bogenschneider

Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Family Policy Specialist, University of Wisconsin-Extension
1430 Linden Drive, Room 201A
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4070
kpbogens@wisc.edu

• Family policy
• Connecting research to policy and practice
• Parenting of adolescents
• Adolescent substance use

Karen Bogenschneider has served as director of the Wisconsin Family Impact Seminars since their inception in 1993. This project offers a series of seminars, briefing reports, newsletters, and discussion sessions for state policymakers. Of the 21 seminars held since 1993, about one fourth have dealt directly with such poverty-related issues as welfare reform, child support, moving families out of poverty, and helping poor children succeed. She also serves as Executive Director of the Policy Institute for Family Impact Seminars, which is providing technical assistance to 18 other states that are conducting or planning to conduct seminars in their state capitols. Her writing on family policy often highlights family poverty, drawing attention to how policies and programs may influence a family's ability to provide economic support for its members. Her research on adolescent development examines whether processes fundamental to competent parenting by adolescents vary as a function of educational level, ethnicity, or family structure. Her research on strategies for bringing research to bear on policy and practice examines whether strategies such as parent education newsletters and community coalition-building have similar benefits for families who face few or multiple risks.

Kerry Bolger

Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1430 Linden Drive, Room 204
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2381
kbolger@wisc.edu

• Social and emotional development
• Family and peer relationships
• Child maltreatment

Kerry Bolger's research focuses on parent-child relationships and the implications of early adversity for children's social and emotional development. Her current poverty-related projects include a longitudinal study of developmental risk and resilience among maltreated children.

Tonya Brito

Professor of Law
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8103 Law Building
975 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6475
tlbrito@wisc.edu

• Family law, particularly issues relating to children
• Law and society
• Poverty law

Tonya Brito's home page

William Brock

Vilas Research Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6665
wbrock@ssc.wisc.edu

• Econometrics of policy evaluation and social interaction effects
• Economic growth and the environment
• Dynamics of human-dominated ecosystems

William A. Brock does research on robustification of policy analysis to model uncertainty with applications to macroeconomic policy, growth policy, and management of human-dominated ecosystems and well as econometric issues raised by measuring social interactions effects.

William Brock's home page

Meta Brown

Microeconomics and Regional Studies Function
Research and Statistics Group
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10005
(212) 720-5589
meta.brown@ny.frb.org

• End of life transfers and elder care
• Family structure and child outcomes
• Sources of long-term care for the disabled elderly

Meta Brown's research deals with transfers between parents and children, both early and late in the life cycle of the family. Among older families, one question is the extent to which the large amount of unpaid elder care observed in the United States is compensated through planned end-of-life transfers. A current project examines the division of parents' estates among siblings with competing time demands and varying altruistic benefit from helping parents. Brown's research on younger families focuses on the influence of family law on parents' investment in children and attachment to families.

Meta Brown's home page

Patricia Brown

Senior Researcher, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6402 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7770
brownp@ssc.wisc.edu

• Child support policy, especially in Wisconsin
• Administrative and survey data

Patricia Brown's primary interests are in the use of administrative and survey data and research in the area of child support, including child support guidelines, child custody, and shared physical placement.

Larry Bumpass

N. B. Ryder Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
bumpass@ssc.wisc.edu

• Family well-being
• Children's experiences and life-course development
• Cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing
• Family change in East Asia

Research by Larry Bumpass focuses on the social demography of the family, including cohabitation, marriage, the stability of unions, contraception and fertility (especially unmarried childbearing), and the implications of these processes for children's living arrangements and subsequent life-course development. Over the last ten years, this work has found particular focus in the design, execution, and analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households, of which he is co-director.

Larry Bumpass's home page

C

Glen Cain

Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7329 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7897
cain@ssc.wisc.edu

• Labor markets and the labor force
• Evaluation research

Glen Cain is a member of the IRP Executive Committee. His current research interests include assessing the effects of U.S. macroeconomic performance on the incidence of poverty; a survey study of the work and well-being of W-2 welfare participants in Milwaukee during two years after applying for welfare; and long-run changes in the labor force composition and work time of the U.S. population, 1890 to 2000.

Maria Cancian

Professor of Public Affairs and Social Work
3436 Social Science Building
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-9037
cancian@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Welfare reform and evaluation
• Child support and family policy
• Economics of the family
• Distribution of income

Maria Cancian's research interests include poverty, welfare and child support policy, and the economic well-being of families with children. She is Principal Investigator, with Daniel Meyer, of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation in Wisconsin. Other areas of research include the impact of married women's earnings on the distribution of income, the labor supply effects of the EITC, and the relationship between changes in assortative mating and changes in women's labor force participation.

Maria Cancian's home page

Marcia J. Carlson

Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
4458 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1085
carlson@ssc.wisc.edu

• Child and family well-being and related public policy
• Father involvement
• Co-parenting
• Union formation and relationship quality among unmarried parent

Marcia (Marcy) Carlson’s primary research interests center on the links between family contexts and the well-being of children and parents, including implications for relevant public policies. Her most recent work is focused on father involvement, co-parenting, union formation, and couple relationship quality among unmarried parents—a demographic group at high risk of poverty. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology (demography) from the University of Michigan in 1999, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University (Center for Research on Child Wellbeing) from 1999 to 2001, and was an Assistant/Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work from 2001 to 2008. Prior to graduate school, she worked for three years on social policy issues in Washington, DC.

Marcy Carlson's home page

Emma Caspar

Researcher and Focus Editor, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3426 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-4168
ecaspar@ssc.wisc.edu

• Welfare reform and child support policy, with special emphasis on program evaluation

Howard Chernick

Professor of Economics
Hunter College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021-5024
(212) 772-5440
howard.chernick@hunter.cuny.edu

• Fiscal effects of block grants and matching grants for welfare programs
• Long-run tax incidence and economic mobility
• State and local tax incidence
• Fiscal capacity and metropolitan finance
• Welfare participation and earnings

Howard Chernick's current research includes:

1. The construction of political-economic models to explain wide differences across U.S. states in the progressivity of their tax systems and to examine the relationship between progressivity and economic performance;
2. Reestimation of the various welfare expenditure models to try to narrow the range of uncertainty on the effect of matching grants and to improve our understanding of the past fiscal interactions between Food Stamps, AFDC, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. These interactions are intended to provide a fiscal "baseline" for evaluation of the TANF programs.
3. Welfare and earnings of low-income New Yorkers (with Cordelia Reimers, Hunter College).
4. International comparisons of the fiscal treatment of large cities (with Andrew Reschovsky, UW-Madison).

Professor Chernick chairs the economics group in a study of the recovery of New York City from the 9/11/01 terrorist attack, sponsored by the Russell Sage foundation.

Howard Chernick's home page

Poverty-related publications

J. Michael Collins

Assistant Professor of Consumer Science
School of Human Ecology
Department of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1300 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0369
jmcollins@wisc.edu

• Consumer behavior in financial markets
• Low-income working families
• The role of public policy in influencing credit, savings, and investment choices

Michael Collins's current research focuses on consumer responses to foreclosure, the role of default counseling on loan repayment behavior, and the effects of consumer protection policies on mortgage borrowers. He founded PolicyLab Consulting Group, LLC, a consulting firm working primarily with national foundations and nonprofits, and also co-founded MortgageKeeper Referral Services, a database mortgage servicers and counselors use to refer distressed borrowers to social services. He is also the lead researcher for several low-income tax preparation programs evaluating strategies to encourage consumer saving at tax time.

J. Michael Collin's home page

Jane Collins

Evjue Bascom Professor of Rural Sociology and Gender & Women’s Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
312 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1510
jcollins@ssc.wisc.edu

• Sociology of economic change and development
• Sociology of culture
• Gender
• Latin America
• Qualitative methods

Jane Collins has conducted ethnographic studies of work in the U.S. and Latin America. She has studied family labor on small farms in Peru, women's work in the agricultural export sector in Brazil and women's work in the globalizing apparel industry in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to studying the workplace itself, her work focuses on home/work relations and household survival strategies of very low-wage workers.

Jane Collins's home page

Jane Cooley

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
7440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9891
jcooley@ssc.wisc.edu

• Peer effects in education production
• Inequality in educational outcomes

Jane Cooley's research focuses on determining the effect of peers on educational achievement in the U.S. and the resulting implications for the optimal allocation of students to classrooms in the context of competing objectives.

Jane Cooley's home page

Thomas Corbett

Senior Scientist Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7401 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5843
corbett@ssc.wisc.edu

• Welfare reform
• Implementation research, especially at state and local levels
• Child support

Tom Corbett has emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and remains an active affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty where, until his retirement, he served as Associate Director. He has long studied trends in welfare reform and social programs that affect the well-being of vulnerable families, along with methods for assessing their effectiveness and monitoring the status of vulnerable populations. He served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that examined methods for evaluating contemporary welfare reform. Recently, he co-edited a book with Mary Clare Lennon titled Policy Into Action, an exploration of implementation-evaluation methods. He also continues to examine and write on how social indicators can be used to shape and understand emerging innovations in the design and management of social assistance systems. Over the years, he has worked on welfare reform issues at all levels of government, including a year as senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He continues to work with a number of senior state welfare officials in the Midwest on various welfare reform issues through the Welfare Peer Assistance Network (WELPAN), and consults with several organizations attempting to help state and local sites successfully introduce integrated service models.

Mark Courtney

Professor; Executive Director, Partners for Our Children; Ballmer Endowed Chair for Child Well-Being
School of Social Work
University of Washington
4101 15th Avenue, NE
Seattle, WA 98105-6299
(206) 221-3144
markec@u.washington.edu

• Child welfare services
• Foster care
• Welfare reform

Mark Courtney's research interests include the relationship between poverty and the functioning of the child welfare services system. He is currently involved in conducting two longitudinal studies of child welfare services. One is a comprehensive evaluation of the Milwaukee County child welfare services system. The other considers the post-discharge functioning of youth who turn 18 and thus leave out-of-home care in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Professor Courtney is also studying the potential impact of welfare reform in Milwaukee on the well-being of children and their involvement with child welfare services.

Mark Courtney's home page

Katherine J. Curtis

Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
350 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-1900
kcurtis@ssc.wisc.edu

• Racial and gender inequality among participants of the Great Migration
• Racial inequality in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico
• U.S. poverty and racial inequality in the South, 1970-2000

Katherine Curtis’s research investigates the relationship between economic transitions, demographic responses, and emerging or persisting systems of stratification. She utilizes an array of quantitative methodology in her research, including spatial data analysis, multilevel modeling, and various forms of regression analysis. Three current research projects are: (1) an examination of the spatial distribution of poverty during the 20th century in an effort to understand the historical process underlying contemporary patterns of persistent poverty; (2) an extension of her earlier work on the Great Migration, which examines the social and economic consequences of the Great Migration which resulted in the redistribution of the U.S. southern population, and the return migration that also has dramatically altered the demographic and social landscape of the U.S.; and (3) demographic change and inequality in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico

Katherine Curtis’s home page

D

Sandra K. Danziger

Professor of Social Work and Public Policy
University of Michigan
School of Social Work
1080 S. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
(734) 615-4648
sandrakd@umich.edu

• Welfare reform implementation
• Barriers to employment of low-income single mothers
• Well-being effects of services and policies for low-income families and children

Sandra K. Danziger's primary research interests are the effects of public programs on the well-being of families and children. More broadly, she focuses on poverty, demographic trends in child and family well-being, program implementation and evaluation, and qualitative research methods. Professor Danziger's current projects address the implementation of welfare reform policies and their impacts for low-income families and children. She is a Principal Investigator on the Women's Employment Study and the From Welfare to Jobs and Independence project.

Sandra Danziger's home page

Martin David

Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Contact:
2603 Middleton Beach Road
Middleton, WI 53562
(608) 238-2181
david@ssc.wisc.edu

• Income and wealth--assets, net worth, intergenerational transmission
• SIPP methodology

Martin David is investigating correction of models and food stamp participation for response error. That research shows correlation of false reports to later attrition in the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Current work extends the analysis to problems of reporting in multiple program use, and multiple reports of food stamps. In 1996, Professor David developed a template for thinking about using administrative data to evaluate welfare reform. That work is reported in IRP Special Report #69 and "Monitoring Income for Social and Economic Development," in Empirische Forschung und Wirtschaftspolitische Beratung, ed. H. Galler and G. Wagner (Frankfurt/New York: Campus).

Aimée Dechter

Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4896
dechter@ssc.wisc.edu

• Interrelationships of family structure, gender roles, work and economic well-being
• Socioeconomic and racial disparities in health

Aimée Dechter is interested in the nature and implications of marriage and cohabitation. She studies differences across family structure in work, economic well-being, and relationship quality and stability. Her current research includes an examination of the processes that generate a marriage premium in wages, including gender roles within the family. She is also interested in socioeconomic and ethnic disparities in health care and health. She is currently investigating the association between service and physical environments, and socioeconomic and racial differentials in mortality.

Aimée Dechter's home page

Thomas DeLeire

Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Population Health
University of Wisconsin–Madison
209 Observatory Hill Office Building
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4531
tdeleire@lafollette.wisc.edu

• economic mobility
• family structure

Thomas DeLeire's research focuses on labor and health economics. His recent work is on economic mobility, family structure, choice of occupation, health insurance spending, and the well-being of poor households. In other work, he has examined the impact of overtime regulations on hours of work, the effect of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the employment of disabled citizens, the extent to which disabled workers face wage discrimination by employers, and the role that tax-favored savings accounts play in increasing national savings.

Thomas DeLeire's home page

Stacy A. Dickert-Conlin

Associate Professor of Economics
Michigan State University
110 Marshall-Adams Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824-1038
(517) 353-7275
dickertc@msu.edu

• Tax policy
• Family structure

Stacy Dickert-Conlin received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Dickert-Conlin's research focuses on the effect of taxes and welfare programs on family structure and labor supply decisions. She is particularly interested in whether financial incentives implicit in the welfare, income tax, and Social Security systems discourage or encourage, marriage, cohabitation, and fertility.

Stacy Dickert-Conlin's home page

Robin Douthitt

Dean of the School of Human Ecology and Bascom Professor of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 141
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4847
douthitt@wisc.edu

• Consumer information and risk analysis
• Consumer expenditure studies
• Value of unpaid work in national income accounts: Satellite accounting

Robin Douthitt is Dean of the School of Human Ecology. She is also developing a model to calculate satellite measures of Gross Domestic Product that includes unpaid work. Ultimately, she will analyze the consequence for income distribution of including that measure in GDP. Her most recent work is in the area of mothers' health awareness and its impact on children's diets. She is the founder of the Women Faculty Mentoring Program at the UW-Madison.

Laura Dresser

Associate Director
Center on Wisconsin Strategy
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7122 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6944
ldresser@ssc.wisc.edu

• Low-wage labor market and work restructuring
• Workforce development systems
• Wisconsin labor markets

Laura Dresser has conducted research on urban labor markets, low-wage jobs, economic restructuring and its effects on low-wage workers, and workforce development policy in the United States. She has also actively worked to develop program and policy solutions to issues in low-wage labor markets. In Milwaukee, she has had a central design and implementation role in the development of the Milwaukee Jobs Initiative where labor, community, and business partners work to improve job access and advancement for central city workers. She has worked with the U.S. AFL-CIO to document labor's contribution to training and education systems in emerging High Road Regional Partnerships. Central in her current research interests is a focus on the dynamics of low-wage service sector work and on policy solutions to improve outcomes for workers in those industries.

Laura Dresser's home page

Mitchell Duneier

Professor of Sociology
Princeton University
155 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-8040
mduneier@princeton.edu

• Social ethnography
• Longitudinal field research

Mitchell Duneier is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His research interests include social interaction, poverty, inequality, and urban sociology. He is the author of two urban ethnographies: Sidewalk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) and Slim's Table (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Sidewalk received the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The 4th edition of Introduction to Sociology (with Anthony Giddens and Richard P. Appelbaum) was published in 2003.

Mitchell Duneier's home page

Steven Neil Durlauf

Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7464 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3859
sdurlauf@ssc.wisc.edu

• Social interaction effects
• Intergenerational income mobility

Steven N. Durlauf is a former Director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute and is currently affiliated with the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics of the Brookings Institution, the Center for Demography and Ecology at UW-Madison, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Durlauf is also codirector of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Social Interactions and Economic Outcomes. His primary research interests include income inequality, economic growth, and econometrics. His current research focuses on issues related to the role of social influences in explaining poverty as well as on developing techniques to facilitate the better use of statistical analyses in evaluating alternative government policies.

Steven Durlauf's home page

E

Peter Eisinger

Henry Cohen Professor
Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy
New School University
72 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 229-5400
eisingep@newschool.edu

• Urban politics and policy
• State and local economic development
• State politics
• Federalism

Peter Eisinger has two major current research projects: a study of how emergency food programs (food pantries and soup kitchens) have dealt with the increased burden generated by tightening of food stamp eligibility and benefits brought about by the 1996 welfare reform (covered in depth in Focus, Vol. 20:3, p.23). The other project is a study of the takeover of the Detroit school system by the mayor, an initiative of the governor and state legislature. The mayor-appointed school board replaced the elected board and hired a CEO and gave him a strong mandate to effect changes. Professor Eisinger is currently tracking these efforts and setting them against education reform initiatives in other places.

Peter Eisinger's home page

F

Christopher J. Flinn

Professor of Economics
New York University
19 W 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
(212) 998-8925
christopher.flinn@nyu.edu

• Job mobility and unemployment
• Formation and dissolution of households
• Child support decisions
• Cohort size effects on labor market outcomes

Christopher Flinn's primary research interests lie in two areas: dynamic labor market analysis and family economics, especially with regard to the behavior of divorced parents. His research on labor market dynamics is centered on the theoretical and empirical analysis of unemployment, job mobility, and wage growth. His research in family economics (much of it done in collaboration with Daniela Del Boca) has focused on the effects of child support orders on child support transfers and the welfare of nonintact family members. In conducting empirical work on this topic, he has extensively utilized the Wisconsin Court Records Database, which is housed at the IRP. His current research projects include a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of minimum wages on labor market outcomes and an investigation of the effects of the institutional environment on the formation and dissolution of households.

Christopher Flinn's home page

G

Adam Gamoran

Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies
Director, Wisconsin Center for Education Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison
785C Educational Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2704
gamoran@ssc.wisc.edu

• Educational policy
• Stratification in school systems
• School reforms and inequality

Adam Gamoran's research focuses on stratification and inequality in school systems. His current work includes two studies of school racial composition. One uses two national longitudinal surveys to examine the consequences of high school racial composition for labor market outcomes, eight to ten years after high school. The other, in collaboration with colleagues at Vanderbilt University, is a study of the re-segregation of the Nashville schools following the end of court-ordered desegregation. Student achievement data from before, during, and after changes in school assignment policies shed new light on the relation between school composition and student outcomes, and the potential for school resources to mitigate the challenges of teaching high concentrations of disadvantaged minority children. Other work focuses on stratification and inequality in higher education, past and future trends in racial inequality in American education, and the organizational context of school reform.

His research includes a study, with Robert D. Mare, of the impact of early childhood education on cognitive growth among children from different family backgrounds. Other current projects examine the relation between organizational resources and teaching practices in schools, and the impact of classroom instruction on levels and inequality of achievement in middle and high school English. Gamoran has written much about the effects of tracking and ability grouping on student achievement, focusing especially on the quality and quantity of academic instruction that occurs in different groups and tracks.

Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap, a volume edited by Adam Gamoran and based on the 2006 IRP-WCER-UW–Madison School of Education conference Will Standards-Based Reform in Education Help Close the Poverty Gap?

Adam Gamoran's home page

Markus Gangl

Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4456 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9856
mgangl@ssc.wisc.edu

• Social stratification, with a particular focus on analyses of labor markets, unemployment, poverty, and income inequality
• The social consequences of economic inequality
• Relationship between educational policies and educational inequality in Western societies

Markus Gangl’s research interests are mainly in social stratification, with a focus on quantitative, cross-nationally comparative, and longitudinal analyses of labor markets, unemployment, poverty, and income inequality. In the past, he has worked extensively on unemployment incidence and unemployment duration in the U.S. and Germany, as well as on the relationship between labor market and welfare policies on longer-term scar effects of job loss in Western European countries and the U.S. New work extends his focus to the social consequences of economic inequality and the relationship between educational policies and educational inequality in Western societies.

Markus Gangl’s home page

Irwin Garfinkel

Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in Social Work
Columbia University
1255 Amsterdam Avenue, Room 714
New York, NY 10027-5927
(212) 851-2383
ig3@columbia.edu

• Child support and nonresident fathers
• Social welfare policy
• Income maintenance and labor supply

Irwin Garfinkel was Director of the IRP from 1975 to 1980. His earlier research into child support issues has been instrumental in legislative enactment of child support reforms. His recent research examines the effects of child support reforms on child support payments, behaviors of resident and nonresident parents, and ultimately on child well-being. Recently, his work has focused more on nonresident fathers--their economic and social circumstances and the effects of child support reforms on their behavior. He is currently a co-principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, a longitudinal survey of new (mostly unwed) parents and their children in 21 U.S. cities.

Irwin Garfinkel's home page

Sara Goldrick-Rab

Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
575K Educational Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-2141
srab@education.wisc.edu

• Policies affecting college access and persistence for disadvantaged populations
• Workforce development
• Community colleges and career pathways

Sara Goldrick-Rab's research is in the area of higher education policy. She was recently awarded a 2006–2007 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and was named a 2004 Rising Scholar by the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good. Her research has been published in Sociology of Education, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Teachers College Record, and she is the co-author of Putting Poor People to Work, published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2006. She is currently conducting a study on the college mobility patterns of Chicago public school students and is collaborating with several IRP affiliates on an examination of access and equity at UW–Madison. Other projects include an analysis of inequality in postsecondary transitions, an assessment of how high school coursework affects delay in the transition to college, and a study of state variation in community college growth over time. She teaches courses on higher education policy, community colleges, sociology of education, and gender and higher education. Dr. Goldrick-Rab is a faculty affiliate of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and an affiliated primary investigator at the Consortium for Chicago School Research.

Sara Goldrick-Rab's home page

Linda Gordon

Vilas Professor Emerita of History
New York University
53 Washington Square, S
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998-8627
linda.gordon@nyu.edu

• History of the welfare state
• Family violence
• Single motherhood
• Abortion and birth control

Peter Gottschalk

Professor of Economics
Boston College
448 Administration Building
21 Campanella Way
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3859
(617) 552-4517
Peter.Gottschalk@bc.edu

• Trends in poverty
• Trends in earnings inequality
• Welfare duration
• Welfare participation across generations

Peter Gottschalk's poverty-related research has focused on three issues: 1. Changes in earnings inequality and poverty. This work (joint with Sheldon Danziger) examines changes in earnings and family income inequality in the United States and in other industrialized countries. 2. Work dynamics among low-wage workers. His recent research (joint with Helen Connolly) on work dynamics has focused on earnings growth while on a job and between jobs. 3. Data quality. One branch of this work ( joint with Minh Huynh) examines the reliability of SIPP earnings data. Another branch develops a technique for identifying and eliminating measurement error.

Peter Gottschalk's home page

Gary Paul Green

Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
346D Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2710
gpgreen@wisc.edu

• Job training
• Regional development

Gary Green's research and teaching focuses primarily on community and economic development. He is currently involved in two projects related to poverty and low-income workers. The first project examines the role of employers, community colleges, and community-based organizations in providing job training in rural areas. He is especially interested in the constraints that employers face in providing general training and the effectiveness of community-based organizations in overcoming these obstacles. Second, he is examining the relationship between amenities and development in rural areas. He is interested in understanding the effects of amenity-led development on poverty and income inequality in these regions and the effectiveness of local strategies to balance the preservation of amenities and the promotion of growth.

Gary Green's home page

David Greenberg

Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Maryland-Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250-0002
(410) 455-2160
dhgreenb@umbc.edu

• Evaluation of welfare, employment and training programs
• Social experimentation and public policy
• Labor supply and welfare reform

Much of David Greenberg's research focuses on the evaluation of government programs that are targeted at the low-income population, especially public assistance, employment, and training programs. He has coauthored a textbook on cost-benefit analysis, a technique that can be used to help assess the effectiveness of government programs. He has coauthored the Digest of Social Experiments (Urban Institute Press), a reference book that provides summary information on all previous and on-going social experiments.

Poverty-related publications

David Grusky

Professor of Sociology
Stanford University
Building 120, Room 210
450 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA  94305-2047
(650) 725-9150
grusky@stanford.edu

• Social class
• Intergenerational social mobility
• Gender inequality

David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, incoming Director of the Program on Social Inequality at Stanford University, and coeditor (with Paula England) of the Stanford University Press Social Inequality Series. He is currently studying the underlying contours of social mobility and sex segregation, the structure of racial and cross-national variability in social mobility and sex segregation, the rise and fall of social classes under advanced industrialism, the sources of modern attitudes toward gender inequality, and long-term trends in patterns of occupational and geographic mobility. His recent books are Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (2nd edition), Poverty and Inequality (coedited with Ravi Kanbur), Mobility and Inequality (coedited with Stephen Morgan & Gary Fields), and Occupational Ghettos (coauthored with Maria Charles).

David Grusky's home page

H

John C. Ham

Professor of Economics
University of Maryland
3105 Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-3497
ham@econ.umd.edu

• The duration of employment and non-employment of disadvantaged women, and how they are affected by manpower training programs
• Children’s take-up of private and public health insurance, and movements between private, public and no-insurance coverage for children
• Effects of welfare reform on health insurance status of disadvantaged women
• Methods of evaluating take-up of social programs such as Medicaid
• Gender differences in laboratory experiments concerning strategic behavior
• Evaluation of medical interventions in a quasi-experimental setting
• The effect of state enterprise zone and federal empowerment zone designation on disadvantaged labor markets

John C. Ham’s research is in the areas of applied microeconomics, labor economics, health economics, experimental economics and econometrics. He has looked at the effect of different Manpower Training programs such as NSW and JTPA on the duration of employment and the duration of nonemployment of disadvantaged women. He has also addressed issues that come up in the policy evaluation of labor market programs using duration models. Ham has examined static and dynamic linear regression models of children’s health insurance take-up across private and public health insurance resulting from expansions in public coverage such as SCHIP. Current research includes: (i) an examination of the addictive nature of eating disorder behavior among young women; (ii) a quasi-experimental evaluation of the Kids ‘n’ Fitness program implemented in four California schools (which involves both primary school children and their parents in nutrition counseling and the children in a regular exercise program); (iii) the employment dynamics of the mothers, and the health insurance status of the mothers and their children, post-welfare reform; and (iv) a non-experimental evaluation of the effect of state enterprise zone and federal empowerment zone designation on disadvantaged labor markets.

John Ham's home page

Michael J. Handel

Associate Professor of Sociology
Northeastern University
500 Holmes Hall
Boston, MA 02115-4996
(617) 373-3620
m.handel@neu.edu

• Labor markets and wage inequality
• Job skill requirements
• Information technology and the changing nature of work and organizations

Michael Handel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. He studies the growth of wage inequality in the last twenty years and its relationship to job skill requirements and changes in technology and organizational structure and practice. His current research focuses on whether the diffusion of computer use at work and the increased use of high performance work practices has resulted in a mismatch between the skills employers demand and workers possess.

Michael Handel's home page

Poverty-related publications

Douglas N. Harris

Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison
575J Education Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4406
dnharris3@wisc.edu

• Academic achievement gaps between racial and income groups
• Desegregation, accountability, and other policies affecting educational inequality
• Educational influence of school and non-school resources

Douglas Harris is an economist whose poverty-related research focuses on how educational policies have influenced educational inequality over the past half-century. His most recent work focuses on how student learning is influenced by policies such as racial desegregation, school finance, accountability, standards, and school choice. He is also engaged in various projects involving how teachers influence student learning, including the influence of teacher preparation, experience, and National Board Certification.

Douglas Harris's home page

Robert M. Hauser

Vilas Research Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4715
hauser@ssc.wisc.edu

• Socioeconomic achievement across the life course
• Educational and social mobility across generations
• Aging and inequality in health and well-being
• Measurement, causes, and consequences of cognitive functioning
• Poverty measurement
• Federal statistical system
• Director, Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

Robert M. Hauser was Director of IRP from 1991 to 1994. He is currently director of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. He is principal investigator of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a long-term survey of a cohort of 10,000 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The WLS began as a study of the transition from high school to college or the work force. It has become a multidisciplinary study of the life course and aging. A new wave of WLS surveys is being conducted in 2003-2004. In recent years, Hauser has combined work on the WLS with studies of trends and differentials in educational attainment and of the role of achievement testing in American society.

Robert Hauser's home page

Robert Haveman

John Bascom Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7325 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7398
haveman@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Determinants of living arrangements of young adults
• Trends in the level and use of human capital
• Effects of BadgerCare on health insurance coverage and labor market performance
• The adequacy of savings among retired and disabled workers

Robert Haveman was Director of the IRP from 1971 to 1975 and Director of the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from 1988 to 1991. He served as Chair of the Economics Department, and is a member of the IRP Executive Committee. With Barbara Wolfe, he has published a monograph on the determinants of the economic success of young adults. The book, Succeeding Generations: On the Effects of Investments in Children (Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), explores the impacts of family economic status, family structure, and demographic factors on the education, fertility, and labor force success of the individuals. He is also undertaking research on the measurement of poverty, utilizing the concept of earnings capacity rather than reported cash income. In recent work, he studied the relationship between the economic performance of the nation and the poverty rate; he demonstrated that although prosperity during the 1970s and 1980s seemed to have little effect on the poverty rate, the experience of the 1990s indicates that the rising economic tide also lifts the boats of the poor. In his most recent book, The Level and Utilization of Human Capital in the U. S.: 1975-2000, with Andrew Bershadker and Jon Schwabish (Upjohn Institute, 2003), uses the earnings capacity concept to track changes in the level and use of the nation's human capital over the past three decades, with attention to these patterns among vulnerable groups.

Robert Haveman's home page

Carolyn Heinrich

Professor of Public Affairs
Director, Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
IRP Associate Director of Research and Training
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5443
cheinrich@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Labor policy and welfare-to-work
• Social program evaluation
• Policy impacts on families

Carolyn Heinrich is the director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs, professor of public affairs and affiliated professor of economics, a Regina Loughlin Scholar, and the associate director of research and training at the Institute for Research on Poverty. Her research focuses on social welfare policy, public management, and econometric methods for social-program evaluation. She also works directly in her research with governments at all levels, including with the federal government on an evaluation of workforce development programs, the state of Wisconsin on a child-support demonstration program, Milwaukee Public Schools in the evaluation of supplemental educational services, and the governments of Brazil and South Africa on their social and human capital development programs. Other ongoing projects involve the study of labor market intermediaries and labor market outcomes for low-skilled and disadvantaged workers, policy factors that support effective provision of substance abuse treatment services, and the use and impacts of social investment funds in developing countries. Heinrich is co-author of several books on the empirical study of governance and public management, including Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research (with Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., and Carolyn J. Hill) and Governance and Performance: New Perspectives (with Laurence E. Lynn, Jr.).

Carolyn Heinrich's home page

Pamela Herd

Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9451
pherd@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Old age policy
• Health
• Gender, race, and class inequality

Pamela Herd's research is in the areas of the welfare state and health. Her research on the welfare state focuses on how social policies shape gender, race, and class inequality. Her research on health explores how social factors, particularly socioeconomic status, shape disease processes, physical functioning, and mortality.

Pamela Herd's home page

John Hoffmire

Director, Center on Business and Poverty
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University Research Park Innovation Center
510 Charmany Drive - Box 178
Madison, WI 53719-1235
(608) 345-5111
hoffmire@wisc.edu

The Director of the Center on Business and Poverty is Dr. John S. Hoffmire, who has had a twenty-year career in equity investing, venture capital, consulting and investment banking. Dr. Hoffmire's research and work have had a particular focus on employee stock ownership plans (ESOP). As founder and CEO of his own investment banking firm, Dr. Hoffmire helped employees buy and manage approximately $1.6 billion worth of ESOP stock. He sold his firm to American Capital, which then went public. Dr. Hoffmire left American Capital as Senior Investment Officer when the company reached $1 billion in assets. Dr. Hoffmire was vice president at Ampersand Ventures, formerly Paine Webber's private equity group. After he finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University, Dr. Hoffmire was a consultant at Bain & Company.

Center on Business and Poverty's home page

Karen Holden

Professor of Public Affairs and Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 370C
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-9283
holden@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Economic status of the elderly
• Disability and mental health
• Women, pensions, and social security
• Program evaluation

Karen Holden's research is on the economic well-being of the elderly and disabled. Her work examines how social security and private pension provisions influence retirement timing and well-being after retirement and widowhood.

Karen Holden's home page

Robinson G. Hollister, Jr.

Joseph Wharton Professor of Economics
Swarthmore College
Kohlberg Hall
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1306
(610) 328-8105
rhollis1@swarthmore.edu

• Evaluation methodology
• Employment and training programs
• Labor market policy

Robinson G. Hollister, Jr., has an extensive record in poverty-related research: he served on the staff of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity at the time that the Institute for Research on Poverty was established, in 1966, and was in residence at the Institute from 1967 to 1970, working on the income maintenance experiments. His present research interests include analysis of the potential for earnings subsidies, community economic development, particularly community development financial institutions, and the evaluation of welfare reform.

Harry Holzer

Professor of Public Policy
Georgetown Public Policy Institute
Georgetown University
3520 Prospect Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 687-1458
hjh4@georgetown.edu

• Low-income workers and job availability
• Minority youth unemployment
• Employer wage-setting and hiring behavior

Harry J. Holzer's research interests include minority youth employment, welfare-to-work, discrimination and Affirmative Action, and the effects of employer hiring behaviors in the low-wage labor market more broadly. His recent books include What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (Russell Sage Foundation, 1996) and Employers and Welfare Recipients: The Effects of Welfare Reform in the Workplace (with Michael Stoll, Public Policy Institute of California, 2000). Holzer is also a Visiting Fellow at the Urban Institute.

Harry Holzer's home page

Poverty-related publications

V. Joseph Hotz

Professor of Economics
Duke University
220B Social Sciences Building
P.O. Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708-0097
(919) 660-1841
hotz@econ.duke.edu

• Labor economics
• Economic demography
• Evaluation of the impact of social programs
• Applied econometrics

V. Joseph Hotz (Ph.D., Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980) is Chair of the Department of Economics at UCLA. Hotz also serves as the Principal Investigator for the California Census Research Data Center and chair of the Center's Statewide Oversight Board. Hotz has published extensively in the areas of the economics of the family, applied econometrics and the evaluation of social programs. His published articles examine the relationship between the labor force participation and childbearing patterns of married women in the United States and Sweden. He also has written on methods for assessing the impacts of job training programs authorized by the Job Training Partnership Act and in other contexts. His recent work focuses on game-theoretic models of relationships between parents and children; analyses of the consequences of teenage childbearing; the effects of child care regulations on the choices of parents; the effects of maternal labor supply and child care arrangements on accidents among children, the returns to early work experiences among youth in the United States; and the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit, AFDC, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs on low-income populations in California during the 1990s.

V. Joseph Hotz's home page

Hilary Hoynes

Professor of Economics
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616-8578
(530) 752-3226
hwhoynes@ucdavis.edu

• Analysis of administrative data on welfare, earnings, and health care
• Welfare benefits, marriage, and fertility decisions

Hilary Hoynes's research centers on the analysis of the effects of public assistance programs on individual behavior. In "The EITC and Labor Supply: Married Couples," Hoynes examines the effect of the EITC on the labor force participation and hours of work decisions of married couples. She finds that expansions in the EITC over the last decade have led to some increase in labor supply by husbands, but no significant changes for wives. She also finds evidence that the high tax rates in the phase-out range of the credit could lead to large reductions in hours of work for those eligible for the credit. In "Local Labor Markets and Welfare Spells: Do Demand Conditions Matter?", Hoynes finds that in areas with better and improving labor market conditions the length of time on welfare is lower. In related work, she finds that entry rates in AFDC are also counter-cyclical, in that more persons enter welfare during economic downturns than in labor market expansions. In "Do Welfare Benefits Play a Role in Female Headship Decisions?" she analyzes how welfare benefits affect marriage and fertility decisions, finding that within-state variation in welfare benefits is not associated with changes in the headship rate. Much of Hoynes's future work centers on developing and using administrative data recently made available in California. These data allow one to link up welfare utilization data with quarterly earnings data and health care utilization data.

Hilary Hoynes's home page

Poverty-related publications

J

Rucker Johnson

Assistant Professor of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley
Goldman School of Public Policy
2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
(510) 643-0169
ruckerj@berkeley.edu

Rucker Johnson's work focuses on the economics of disadvantage and is organized around three broad themes. The first concerns the extent to which residential segregation patterns (by race and income) contribute to economic and racial differences in employment outcomes, wealth accumulation, and health outcomes. The second seeks to identify sources of current health disparities. The third is a separate line of research in which he investigates the effects of the welfare policy reforms of the 1990s using broader measures of well-being, beyond earnings and caseload declines, to examine effects of job transition patterns on housing and neighborhood quality, and child well-being.

Johnson is studying the intersection of labor markets, spatial features of the urban economy, and socioeconomic determinants of health and health disparities over the life cycle. The emphasis on issues of poverty and inequality is the common thread of this research. His research in labor economics has focused on the less-skilled labor market; his research in urban economics has been concerned with the concentration of the poor and its effects on the structure of opportunity; and his research in health centers on understanding underlying processes that produce health disparities over the life course. The intersection of these provides a rich set of research questions with significant policy relevance.

Rucker Johnson's home page

K

Thomas Kaplan

IRP Associate Director of Programs and Management and Senior Scientist
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3444 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0345
kaplan@ssc.wisc.edu

• Implementation research
• Evaluation research
• Wisconsin welfare and health care reforms

Tom Kaplan's research interests are in welfare reform and child support policy and evaluation, with special emphasis on program management and Wisconsin state government programs, and the history of health and social welfare programs.

John Kennan

Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6434 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5393
jkennan@ssc.wisc.edu

• Bargaining
• Migration
• Monetary exchange with private information

John Kennan's home page

Poverty-related publications

L

Rasmus Lentz

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5373
rlentz@ssc.wisc.edu

• Labor productivity growth
• Worker reallocation

Rasmus Lentz's current research focuses on the contribution of labor reallocation to aggregate productivity growth. In particular, an explicit modeling that links labor market performance to aggregate productivity growth will allow a better understanding of the impact of labor market policies such as minimum wage legislation and employment protection on aggregate welfare. The research uses matched employer-employee data merged with detailed firm data to quantify the importance of worker reallocation in the economic growth process. Currently the data are from Denmark, but future work will include work on U.S. data.

Another line of work studies the link between self-insurance against income loss through savings and government-provided unemployment insurance. The work uses Danish unemployment duration data linked with a rich set of individual characteristics such as wealth holdings.

Rasmus Lentz's home page

John Allen Logan

Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4438 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0995
logan@ssc.wisc.edu

• Social mobility
• Computationally intensive estimation methods
• Systemic opportunity constraints

John Allen Logan's research focuses on social mobility and stratification in general, and actor-oriented models of employment and marriage in particular.

John Allen Logan's home page

M

Timothy D. McBride

Professor of Social Work
Institute for Public Health
Washington University in St. Louis
242 Goldfarb Hall, Campus Box 1196
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
(314) 935-4356
tmcbride@wustl.edu

• Health economics
• Elderly and disabled

Timothy D. McBride's primary research interests are in public economics, with special emphasis on the economics of health and aging. He has examined issues such as the number of people without health insurance and their duration without insurance, the demand for nursing homes and long-term care, the retirement behavior of the elderly, and projections of the economic needs and demographics of the elderly in the 21st century. Several of these studies have focused on the poverty population, especially their access to health insurance and health care, including long-term care. Professor McBride is currently working on analyses of the following subjects: the market for Medicare managed care, proposals to restructure Medicare, the duration of uninsured spells for children and the poor, and the impacts of health insurance mandates on the incomes of low-wage workers.

Tim McBride's home page

Sara McLanahan

Professor of Sociology
Office of Population Research
Center for Research on Child Well-Being
Princeton University
265 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-4875
mclanaha@princeton.edu

• Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of poverty
• Single motherhood
• Effect of divorce on women and children

Sara McLanahan directs the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing and is an associate of the Office of Population Research. Her research interests include family demography, stratification, and social policy. She is co-author of Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement (1998), Social Policies for Children (1996); Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994), Child Support and Child Wellbeing (1994), and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (1986).

Sara McLanahan's home page

Katherine Magnuson

Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 315
Madison, WI 53706-1323
(608) 263-4812
kmagnuson@wisc.edu

• Socioeconomic status and child development
• Early education and intervention
• Welfare reform and family wellbeing

Katherine Magnuson's primary research interests focus on better understanding the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and child development, as well as how to promote healthy development among disadvantaged children. Her current work focuses on understanding the intergenerational transmission of human capital, particularly the effects of maternal education on children, and the role of early education interventions in improving children's school readiness.

Stephen Malpezzi

Lorin and Marjorie Tiefenthaler Professor and Chair of the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics
School of Business
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5257 Grainger Hall
975 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706-1323
(608) 262-6007
smalpezzi@bus.wisc.edu

• Housing markets and policy
• Housing price measurement
• Real estate, urban development
• International economic development

Stephen Malpezzi is Robert E. Wangard Faculty Scholar and Chair of the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics. His research focuses on the intersections of urban development, housing and real estate markets, and welfare economics, in the United States and internationally. For example, he has constructed housing price indexes that are being used by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the construction of experimental poverty measures. His current work includes analyzing the causes of central city-suburban economic disparities, and the effects of land use and housing regulation on low-income households. With IRP Affiliate Richard Green, Malpezzi has recently completed A Primer on U.S. Housing Markets and Policy, forthcoming from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Stephen Malpezzi's home page

Robert D. Mare

Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
264 Haines Hall
Box 951551
375 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(310) 825-5585
mare@ucla.edu

• Labor market and marriage market trends
• Intergenerational social mobility
• Socioeconomic differences in adult mortality
• Determinants of educational attainment

Robert D. Mare is Director of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current poverty-related research lies in two general areas. First, he is investigating the ways that differential fertility, mortality, immigration, marriage, and family structure, in combination with intergenerational social mobility, have affected aggregate trends in distributions of educational attainment, income, and poverty in the United States. Second, he is participating in the design and analysis of a large panel survey of neighborhoods in Los Angeles. His research based on this survey focuses on residential mobility, neighborhood formation, and processes leading to socioeconomic and residential segregation. Mare won the 1999 Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Robert Mare's home page

Maurizio Mazzocco

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of California, Los Angeles
Bunche Hall 8283
Box 951477
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
(310) 825-1100
mmazzocc@econ.ucla.edu

• Household intertemporal behavior
• Intrahousehold risk sharing
• Full commitment and limited commitment models of the household

Maurizio Mazzocco's research focuses on the analysis of the household decision process, especially under uncertainty. A specific question concerns whether household members can share individual risks and smooth consumption even in highly risky and volatile environments. A second topic is related to the intrahousehold allocation of resources and its effect on household consumption and savings. His current research includes also a theoretical and empirical work aimed at testing full commitment and limited commitment models of household behavior.

Maurizio Mazzocco's home page

Marygold Melli

Voss-Bascom Professor Emerita of Law
University of Wisconsin-Madison
9113 Law Building
975 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1610
msmelli@wisc.edu

• Family law, criminal law, juvenile justice, law and the elderly
• Legal aspects of child support

Marygold Melli's research interests center on child support issues with a particular focus on support in dual-residence cases, guideline reform, and the relation between child support and visitation.

Mary Haywood Metz

Professor of Educational Policy Studies, Emerita
University of Wisconsin-Madison
221 Education Building
1000 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6863
mhmetz@wisc.edu

• Effects of community social class on teachers' practice and students' opportunity to learn
• Qualitative study of schooling of poor children and children of color
• Models of school organization developed in research and implicit in the federal No Child Left Behind Act

Mary Haywood Metz's current research, based upon qualitative analysis of six public high schools in large metropolitan areas, is exploring the ways in which the social class of a community affects teachers' practice, thus strongly influencing the well-established links between students' social class and their educational achievement. She finds that as federal and state pressures for standardization of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment intensify, it is increasingly important to understand the myriad formal and informal ways in which local community characteristics shape the core work of staff and students in every individual school.

She is planning a systematic review of models of school organization implicit and explicit in ethnographic studies of schools and in studies based on survey research—which she will compare to models implicit in current federal law and in the standards and practices of two diverse states.

Mary Haywood Metz's home page

Poverty-related publications

Daniel Meyer

Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3434 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7336
drmeyer1@wisc.edu

• Economic support for single-parent families, including child support and welfare
• Policy knowledge

Daniel Meyer is a member of the IRP Executive Committee. In 1990-91 and again in 1993, he was an economist and policy analyst for DHHS/ASPE, researching child support, poverty, and income transfer payments and welfare reform costs. In 1997-98 and 2005-06 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of York (UK), researching international approaches to family policy. Since 2001, he has been the Director of the School of Social Work. His current research interests include effects of child support and welfare reforms; international approaches to child support policy; the economic well-being of women after they leave welfare; multiple-partner fertility; and how much individuals know about the social policies that affect them. He is Co-Principal Investigator, with Maria Cancian, of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation in Wisconsin.

Daniel Meyer's:  home page  |   curriculum vitae

Marcia K. Meyers

Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs
Director, West Coast Poverty Center
University of Washington
Box 354900
4101 15th Avenue, NE
Seattle, WA 98195-4900
(206) 616-4409
mkm36@u.washington.edu

• Child and family welfare
• Income and gender inequality
• Child care and parental leave
• Social program implementation
• Comparative studies of the welfare state

Marcia K. Meyers earned an M.P.A. at Harvard University and an M.S.W. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Meyers' research focuses on public policies and programs for vulnerable populations, including public welfare services, child welfare programs, and child care services. Her papers have appeared recently in the Journal of Public Policy and Management, the European Journal of Social Policy, Social Services Review and Social Science Quarterly.

Marcia Meyers's home page

Robert Moffitt

Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics
Johns Hopkins University
Mergenthaler Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218-2685
(410) 516-7611
moffitt@jhu.edu

• Evaluation methodology
• Microsimulation models
• Incentive effects of welfare

Robert Moffitt's research focuses on the incentive and behavioral effects of the U.S. welfare system, including AFDC/TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid. He has studied the effects of these programs on work incentives, welfare participation, and family structure and fertility. He has also conducted research on statistical methods for evaluating poverty programs. His current research includes a study of how to model the AFDC caseload; the economic determinants of female headship; and new methods for program evaluation. He is also currently involved in a new longitudinal study of low-income women and children in the aftermath of welfare reform, with Andrew Cherlin, William Julius Wilson, and others. Professor Moffitt is past Associate Editor of the American Economic Review, past Co-Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and past Editor of the Journal of Human Resources.

Robert Moffitt's home page

Poverty-related publications

James Montgomery

Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2436 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-4475
jmontgom@ssc.wisc.edu

• Social networks in the labor market
• Urban poverty

James Montgomery is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. A mathematical sociologist, he attempts to formalize sociological theories. His work has explored the role of social networks in the labor market, examining whether the widespread use of referrals could help explain persistent inequality across demographic groups. He has also developed formal models based on ethnographic accounts of urban poverty. His current research attempts to formalize role theory.

Donald P. Moynihan

Associate Professor of Public Affairs
Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6633
dmoynihan@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Selection and implementation of public management reforms
• Crisis management
• Performance management

Donald Moynihan's research focuses on the management of public policies. This includes the implementation of such policies at the front lines, and the efforts to measure organizational performance. His research on performance management details how performance measures are used to emphasize certain goals over others. His research on crisis management studies how public agencies coordinate amid crisis response and the implications of their response for citizens included case studies of Hurricane Katrina incident command systems. Current related research includes examination of public agencies' response to catastrophic flooding in southern Wisconsin during the summer of 2008.

Donald Moynihan's home page

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Salvador Navarro-Lozano

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
7444 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-3281
snavarro@ssc.wisc.edu

• Economics of schooling
• Economic evaluation of policies
• Applied econometrics
• Identification of economic choice models and associated treatment effects

Salvador Navarro's main line of research focuses on understanding schooling attendance; in particular, trying to determine the importance played by background, family income, credit constraints, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and preferences. In recent work he also looks at the methodology used in studies of social mobility and inequality, at the determinants of participation in the informal economy, and at estimation of option values of schooling.

Derek Neal

Professor of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637-1539
(773) 702-8166
d-neal@uchicago.edu

• Racial differences in labor market outcomes
• Links between marriage market and labor market outcomes

Derek Neal's current research seeks to measure labor market inequality among black and white women as well as men in the United States. He is exploring how racial differences in patterns of employment complicate the task of measuring racial differences in labor market opportunities for men and women. In related work, he is trying to understand the determinants of family structure and the forces driving black-white differences in family structure and is studying the process of convergence in skills, earnings, and family structures between black and white populations in the United States. In this regard, he also seeks to understand the causes and consequences of rising incarceration rates among less educated black men.

Derek Neal's home page

Jennifer Noyes

Researcher, IRP
University of Wisconsin–Madison
3430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1393
(608) 262-7990
jnoyes@ssc.wisc.edu

• Child care
• Child support
• Job training and workforce policy
• Program and management evaluation
• Welfare policy
• Integration of human services programs

Prior to joining the Institute for Research on Poverty, Jennifer Noyes was a senior fellow at the Madison office of the Hudson Institute's Welfare Policy Center. She has served in senior positions with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, including Executive Assistant to the Secretary, where she was responsible for managing key external relations related to policy development for, and implementation of, the state's work-related programs. She also served as the administrator of the department's Division of Economic Support, where she was responsible for the management, development, administration, and direction of Wisconsin's programs designed to assist and support low-income families in their efforts to achieve self-sufficiency. In both of these roles, Noyes served as Wisconsin's lead in the development and implementation of Wisconsin Works (W-2) policy, the state's ground-breaking welfare replacement program. Other past professional positions include director, Performance Evaluation Office, Wisconsin Department of Administration. Her work with the Department of Administration built on her eleven years of service to the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, a nonpartisan legislative service agency charged with completing relevant and timely program evaluations and other audits of state and public agencies.

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Pamela E. Oliver

Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8143 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6829
oliver@ssc.wisc.edu

• Collective action and social movements
• Collective turmoil and violence
• Racial movements and community mobilization
• Race and imprisonment

Pamela E. Oliver's major research interests center on the interplay between grassroots or citizen action of various forms and governmental or elite responses. The ability of impoverished populations or those concerned about them to obtain redress through political systems depends on the results of various kinds of citizen action (both legal and disruptive or violent). A recent project examined the interplay among political cycles and processes and news media cycles and processes in determining whether and how people are able to bring issues into the public sphere. In this project, police and newspaper records of public events were compared. Another project seeks to identify the factors behind the large racial disparities in imprisonment rates. This work has involved a special emphasis on Wisconsin, while newer work compares states. This project recognizes that the economic and social well-being of communities are damaged when a high proportion of a community's young adult population is in prison. A theoretical project develops coevolution models for the ways in which authorities and protesters or criminals respond to each other over time.

Pamela E. Oliver's home page

Michael Olneck

Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
211 Education Building
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9967
olneck@education.wisc.edu

• Schooling and social stratification
• Schooling and racial and ethnic inequality

Michael Olneck is currently conducting research on educational responses to ethnic and racial diversity in American education since the 1920's, and is attempting to assess the potential of multiculturalism in contemporary American education to promote equality.

Michael Olneck's home page

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Alberto Palloni

Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology
Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
1808 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208-1300
(847) 467-4039
a-palloni@northwestern.edu

• Childhood and maternal health status and poverty
• Conditions of minorities

Alberto Palloni's main areas of research are maternal and child health care and mortality, aging, and formal modeling in demography. He is currently the coordinator of a large effort to collect data on the health status and economic well-being of elderly populations in Latin America.

Alberto Palloni's home page

David J. Pate, Jr.

Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 786
1053 Enderis Hall
Milwaukee, WI 53201
(414) 229-6038
pated@uwm.edu

• welfare reform policy
• child support enforcement policy
• fatherhood
• domestic violence
• the intersection of race and poverty

David Pate's research involves the use of qualitative research methods to examine noncustodial fathers of children on welfare and their interaction with their children, the child support enforcement system, the mother of their children, and the incarceration system. He conducted research under the Wisconsin Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (Institute for Research on Poverty), examining the same variables with white and African American fathers and a selected partner. Pate is a research consultant to the Strengthening Healthy Marriage project, a seven-year longitudinal research and evaluation study of strategies for enhancing couple relationships among low-income married parents in the United States.

Jamie Peck

Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography
University of British Columbia
1984 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Canada
(604) 822-0894
peck@geog.ubc.ca

• Political economy of workfare
• Labor market restructuring
• Contingent work and working poverty

Jamie Peck's research interests are in the restructuring of labor markets and antipoverty programs, theories of labor segmentation and economic regulation, and the political economy of state reform. Currently working on issues of contingent work and low-wage labor markets, he is author of Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets (Guilford, 1996) and Workfare States (Guilford, 2001).

Jamie Peck's home page

Poverty-related publications

Irving Piliavin

Emeritus Professor of Social Work and Sociology
5105 Sealane Way
Oxnard CA 93035
(805) 985-2436
piliavin@ssc.wisc.edu

• Foster care
• Homelessness
• Social service delivery
• Criminology

Irving Piliavin's areas of specialization include criminology and correctional programming, organization and delivery of welfare services, and social service program evaluation. He has served as consulting editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the American Sociological Review, and Social Psychology Quarterly. His current research interests include evaluation of welfare reform programs, foster care programs, and homelessness.

Robert Plotnick

Professor of Public Affairs and Adjunct Professor of Economics and Sociology
Evans School of Public Affairs
University of Washington
Box 353055, Parrington Hall
Seattle, WA 98195-3055
(206) 685-2055
plotnick@u.washington.edu

• Determinants and effects of nonmarital childbearing
• Welfare dynamics and welfare policy
• Demographic effects of income transfer policies

Robert Plotnick is senior advisor to the Population Leadership Program at the University of Washington. His research interests include poverty, income inequality, income support policy, teenage childbearing, and related social policy issues. His current research focuses on nonmarital childbearing in the United States. One study is analyzing the relationship between child support policy and nonmarital childbearing among both teen and adult women. Another is examining the long-term rise in nonmarital childbearing during 1920-1993 and some of the factors that have contributed to it. A third is investigating factors associated with teenagers' expectations about the likelihood that they will become unwed parents.

Robert Plotnick's home page

Poverty-related publications

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Lincoln Quillian

Associate Professor of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208-1330
(847) 491-7488
l-quillian@northwestern.edu

• Urban poverty
• Race and ethnic relations
• Statistical methodology

Lincoln Quillian's interests are, in general, social stratification, race and ethnic relations, and urban sociology. Most of his current research focuses on high-poverty neighborhoods and neighborhood racial segregation.

Lincoln Quillian's home page

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Andrew Reschovsky

Professor of Public Affairs
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
307 Observatory Hill Office Building
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-0447
reschovsky@lafollette.wisc.edu

• The distribution of tax burdens
• Fiscal responses of states to welfare reform
• Financing of an adequate public education for low-income students

Andrew Reschovsky is Professor of Applied Economics and Public Affairs at the UW-Madison. His current research interests include tax policies to increase homeownership among low- and moderate-income households, the impact of devolution on the fiscal health of central cities, school finance formulas to provide adequate education to low-income students, and the design of a grant system for the financing of education in South Africa.

Andrew Reschovsky's home page

Arthur J. Reynolds

Professor of Child Development
Institute of Child Development
University of Minnesota
51 East River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0345
(612) 625-4321
ajr@umn.edu

• Design and evaluation of early childhood interventions
• Childhood poverty and its effects
• Evaluation research methods
• Prevention science

Arthur J. Reynolds's poverty-related research focuses on the effects of school- and family-based interventions for poor children. He is also interested in evaluation research methods. For over a decade he has directed the Chicago Longitudinal Study, a prospective investigation of the long-run effects of participation in a large-scale early childhood intervention program for economically disadvantaged children and families. The project has begun the early-adulthood phase with a focus on educational attainment, postsecondary outcomes, and benefit-cost analysis.

Roberta Riportella

Professor of Consumer Science, School of Human Ecology
Health Policy Specialist - Family Living Program
University of Wisconsin-Cooperative Extension
1300 Linden Drive, Room 346
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7088
rriporte@wisc.edu

• Consumer health education
• Improving access to health care coverage
• Public-health policy evaluation

Roberta Riportella’s current research includes an evaluation of BadgerCare enrollment and outreach as Project Director for the Partnerships to Connect Schools, Health, and Public Health Insurance, the Wisconsin Healthier Partnership Program, Medical College of Wisconsin. Other current research includes Coordinating Partnerships to Improve Access to Health Care Coverage, Wisconsin Partnership Fund for a Healthy Future, UW School of Medicine and School of Public Health, which Riportella is involved with in her role as Project Director for Covering Kids and Families Wisconsin, a coalition-based Medicaid outreach organization.

Consumer Health Education home page

Stephanie Robert

Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 312
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6336
sarobert@wisc.edu

• Socioeconomic status and health across the life course
• Long-term care policy and programs

Most of Stephanie Robert's research examines socioeconomic inequalities in health over the life course, focusing particularly on how neighborhood socioeconomic and racial context affect the health and well-being of residents. She is also interested in long-term care policies and programs and is conducting research on Wisconsin's Family Care Program--a pilot long-term care program that implements a managed care approach to financing and delivering community-based and institutionally based long-term care supports and services.

Stephanie Robert's home page

Philip K. Robins

Professor of Economics
University of Miami
P.O. Box 248126
517 Jenkins Building
Coral Gables, FL 33124-8126
(305) 284-5664
probins@miami.edu

• Evaluation of welfare, employment and training programs
• Social experimentation and public policy
• Welfare reform

Philip K. Robins's current research focuses on the use of financial incentives to reduce dependence on public assistance, the economic effects of childhood characteristics on earnings as an adult, and the economic effects of employment and training programs. He recently published an article comparing the child care systems in the United States and Canada and coedited a book on the U.S. Unemployment Insurance bonus experiments.

Philip K. Robins's home page

Poverty-related publications

Joel Rogers

John D. MacArthur Professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7114B Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4266
jrogers@cows.org

• Postwar U.S. labor and employment policy; unionism
• Distribution of legal services in U.S.
• Basic income guarantees

Joel Rogers is the Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS). He is the author of numerous books and articles on American politics, political theory, industrial policy, and worker organization. Recent publications include Working Capital: Using the Power of Labor's Pensions (2001) and America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (2000).

Joel Rogers's home page

Ingrid Rothe

Researcher Emerita, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7401 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison WI 53706
(608) 262-5843
irothe@ssc.wisc.edu

• Child support program operations and outcomes
• The uses of performance measures and indicators of client well-being to monitor welfare program operation
• How low-income families combine the of use public programs and employment to support their children

Ingrid Rothe worked in child support and welfare policy development and welfare data collection and research prior to coming to IRP. At IRP, she helps facilitate the analysis of administrative data by researchers.

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Gary Sandefur

Dean, College of Letters & Science and Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
105 South Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2303
gsandefur@ls.admin.wisc.edu

• Single-parent families
• Teenage and nonmarital childbearing
• Minorities and poverty

Professor Sandefur's research interests include the study of social and racial stratification and racial inequality. Among current projects are a study of the effects of family disruption and geographical mobility on social capital outside the family, and the effects of these on educational attainment. Another project involves following state rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing and changes in these in response to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

Gary Sandefur's home page

Nora Cate Schaeffer

Professor of Sociology
Director, UW Survey Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4422 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
schaeffe@ssc.wisc.edu

• Child support, especially quality of parental self-reports about awards and payments
• Survey methodology

Nora Cate Schaeffer's primary research interests are in the field of survey research methods; she has served on the National Research Council's Panel to Evaluate Alternative Census Methods and the Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and is currently a member of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council. Her poverty-related research has focused upon demographic and social issues related to child support. In particular, she has examined the measurement of concepts important for the study of separated families, including child support awards and payments, and how the characteristics of child support awards affect perceptions of the fairness of awards, compliance, and family conflict. Results of these studies influenced the redesign of the Child Support Supplement for the Current Population Survey.

Nora Cate Schaeffer's home page

Walton O. Schalick III

Assistant Professor of Medical History & Bioethics, Orthopedics & Rehabilitation, History of Science, and Pediatrics
Department of Medical History & Bioethics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Medical Sciences Building, Room 1410
1300 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6760
schalick@wisc.edu

• Children with disabilities in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the last two centuries and the poverty-related policies and legislation they were often subject to

Walton Schalick's research splits in three directions. His poverty-related work concerns children with disabilities (whose families were often poor and the object of poverty-related policies and legislation) in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the last two centuries. A second research interest is in clinical and applied ethics research on children with emergency conditions; and the third seeks to understand the role of universities in recreating medieval markets, particularly around pharmaceuticals. He is a member of the Waisman Center.

Walton Schalick’s Web Pages (Medical History & Bioethics, Department of Orthopedics & Rehabilitation, Department of the History of Science, and Waisman Center)

Maximilian D. Schmeiser

Assistant Professor of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 370F
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608-262-2831
Email: mschmeiser@wisc.edu

• Economics of obesity
• Labor market participation and vulnerable populations
• Earned Income Tax Credit
• Disability policy

Max Schmeiser’s current research interests are in three main areas: What are the economic causes and consequences of the increasing prevalence of obesity? Which measure of fatness best predicts various health and socioeconomic outcomes? How does the Earned Income Tax Credit alter the economic decisions of low-income families?

John Karl Scholz

Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5380
jkscholz@wisc.edu

• Earned Income Tax Credit; tax policy in general
• Consumption and saving of American households

John Karl Scholz is a past director of IRP. His current research focuses on two primary areas: understanding the effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC) and other policy interventions to assist low-wage workers, and the degree to which families are preparing adequately for retirement. His current work on the EITC uses administrative data from California and Wisconsin to study its effects (and the effects of welfare reform and local labor market conditions) on the economic well-being of low-skilled workers. His work on saving adequacy uses data from the Retirement History Survey (from the 1970s), Health and Retirement Survey (from the 1990s), and data from the Surveys of Consumer Finances to better understand factors influencing the saving and consumption decisions of American households.

John Karl Scholz's home page

Christine Schwartz

Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4404 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5791
cschwart@ssc.wisc.edu

• Marriage patterns and economic inequality
• Assortative mating
• Union formation and educational achievement

Christine Schwartz's research interests are in the areas of social demography, family, and stratification. She has several current projects that explore the relationship between changes in union formation and dissolution, assortative mating, and economic inequality in the United States. Another line of research investigates how and why partner choice differs depending on the type of union sought. To this end, she is currently investigating partner selection among opposite-sex married and cohabiting couples and same-sex male and female couples.

Christine Schwartz's home page

Sherrill L. Sellers

Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 303
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3677
slsellers@wisc.edu

• Social inequalities and health
• Intergenerational issues
• Gender and family
• Social welfare policy--urban issues
• Life course studies
• Race and ethnicity

During 1997-2000, Dr. Sellers was the investigator for an NIMH Minority Supplement Grant under the leadership of Sheldon Danziger, Director of the Social Work Research Development Center on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health at the University of Michigan. Her research examined the mental and physical health consequences of social mobility. Her research interests include the life course, health consequences of social inequalities, and intergenerational relations. Her most recent poverty-related research projects include a study of the social origins of goal striving stress, a study of the impact of racial discrimination on hypertension among high-status black men, and a study of the well-being of African immigrant children and their families.

Sherrill L. Sellers's home page

Judith A. Seltzer

Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
264 Haines Hall
Box 951551
375 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(310) 825-5646
seltzerj@ucla.edu

• Child support, custody, and visitation arrangements; conflict between parents and the effect of conflict on relationships between parents and children who live apart
• Intergenerational relationships
• Inequality within and between families

Judith A. Seltzer's poverty-related research focuses on child support issues. Her work examines the relationships among legal custody, paying child support, visiting children, and conflict between parents after divorce. Professor Seltzer is also investigating the establishment of paternity, and the child support and child-rearing arrangements of parents whose children were born outside of marriage.

Judith A. Seltzer's home page

Marsha Seltzer

Director, Waisman Center and Vaughan Bascom Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
T201 Waisman Center
1500 Highland Avenue
Madison, WI 53705-2280
(608) 263-5940
mseltzer@waisman.wisc.edu

• Mental retardation and poverty
• Aging parents of mentally retarded children

Marsha Seltzer's research focuses on the life-course impacts of disability on the family, with particular interest in how lifelong caregiving affects the well-being of parents and siblings of individuals with disabilities, including autism, Down syndrome, and schizophrenia. In addition, she has studied how the family environment affects the development of individuals with disabilities. She has recently completed a 12-year study of aging families who had an adult son or daughter with mental retardation living at home when the study began. The research examined the pattern of age-related changes and transitions in these families, how the changes affected the son or daughter with the disability, and the antecedents and consequences of out-of-home placement of the adult child.

A second line of research involves the comparison of parents of adults with developmental disabilities (most recently, autism) with parents of adults with schizophrenia. A third line of research traces the life course impacts of parenting a child with a disability through study of a unique cohort, the participants in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). Together, these studies offer specific insights about parenting a child with a disability, revealing both the stresses of this challenge and the resiliency of parents who cope successfully.

Marsha Seltzer's home page

Ananth Seshadri

Associate Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI  53706
(608) 262-6196
aseshadr@ssc.wisc.edu

• Demography and the Wealth of Nations
• International Fertility Differences

Ananth Seshadri currently works on the effects of demographic change on the wealth and poverty of nations. His recent work shows that differences in fertility rates and life expectancies across countries create large disparities in stocks of human capital and consequently output per capita. In ongoing work, he argues that differences in productivity levels across countries explain international differences in fertility and schooling.

Kristen Shook Slack

Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 310
Madison, WI  53706
(608) 263-3671
ksslack@wisc.edu

• Child maltreatment
• Child welfare services
• Welfare reform

Kristi Shook Slack's research interests focus on the etiology of different forms of child maltreatment and the relationship between poverty and child neglect. She is also interested in the relationship between welfare and child welfare systems, particularly in the context of welfare reform. She is currently a co-investigator of a five-year longitudinal study of low-income families with young children. The major goal of this study is to assess the unique etiologies of various types of child neglect as a function of changes in family income, parental employment, and health care coverage.

Kristi Shook Slack's home page

Timothy M. Smeeding

Director, Institute for Research on Poverty
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3420 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-1317
smeeding@lafollette.wisc.edu

• public policy, especially social policy and at-risk populations
• poverty and income distribution, income transfers, and tax policy
• health economics

Tim Smeeding's home page

Michael R. Sosin

Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago
969 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637-2640
(773) 702-1129
m-sosin@uchicago.edu

• Organizations/institutions serving the poor
• Homelessness
• Managed care
• Nonprofit social service agencies

Michael R. Sosin is currently involved in two projects of relevance to poverty. One (with Thomas D'Aunno) is a national study of the relationship between drug treatment units and behavioral health managed care firms. The study considers the way managed care firms attempt to control treatment providers, the reasons that the mechanisms they use vary, and the impacts of the mechanisms on various types of providers. The second (with Steven R. Smith), is examining the role of religious providers in delivering care under devolution. This pilot study considers how faith-based and faith-related providers make use of religion in service delivery and in their responses to changes in government priorities. We specifically focus on material assistance, child welfare, advocacy, and immigrant service organizations.

Michael R. Sosin's home page

Joe Soss

Professor of Public Affairs
Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
301 19th Avenue, South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 626-9865
jbsoss@umn.edu

• Politics of poverty and inequality
• Policy formation and implementation
• Race/ethnicity, gender, and class
• Public opinion and political behavior

Joe Soss is Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs. His primary areas of teaching and research include the politics of poverty and social policy; political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior; and empirical theory and research methodology. He is the author of Unwanted Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System (University of Michigan Press, 2000), a study that investigates welfare institutions as sites of political action and learning for citizens. He is also co-editor of Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (University of Michigan Press, 2003), a volume that explores the historical and contemporary role of race in U.S. welfare politics. His current research projects focus on the race and gender politics of social policy formation, the ways policy choices shape the politics of poverty and inequality, and the ways welfare policy implementation is being shaped by privatization, devolution, and frontline discretion.

Michael Stoll

Professor and Chair of Public Policy and Urban Planning
UCLA School of Public Affairs
3250 Public Policy Building, Box 951656
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656
(310) 206-4774
mstoll@ucla.edu

• Urban poverty and inequality
• Labor market difficulties of low-skilled workers
• Employment situation of ex-offenders

Michael A. Stoll is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His main research interests include the study of urban poverty and inequality, specifically the interplay of labor markets, race/ethnicity, geography and workforce development. Dr. Stoll's published work includes an examination of the labor market difficulties of African Americans and less-skilled workers, in particular the role that racial residential segregation, job location patterns, employer discrimination, transportation and job information play in limiting employment opportunities. He served as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City in 1999-2000.

Currently, Dr. Stoll has begun major research projects to examine the labor market consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. This research program will include a detailed examination of employers' willingness to hire ex-offenders, how employers check for criminal backgrounds of potential employees, and whether employers statistically discriminate in hiring against groups with high incarceration rates, such as African Americans. He is also investigating whether the recent increase in prisoner release as a result of mass incarceration in the U.S. has affected regional crime rates.

Michael Stoll's home page

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Christopher Taber

Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6446 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7791
ctaber@ssc.wisc.edu

• economics of education
• wage growth
• sources of income inequality

Christopher Taber, Richard A. Meese Chair of Applied Econometrics, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a labor economist whose research focuses on the development and implementation of econometric models of skill formation including schooling, on-the-job training and other forms of human capital investment. His research includes studies of Catholic schooling and vouchers, wage growth among low-wage workers, the importance of borrowing constraints in schooling decisions, and general equilibrium models of the labor market.

Elizabeth Thomson

Professor of Sociology, Emerita
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4452 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6125
thomson@ssc.wisc.edu

• Fertility
• Values, life plans, and life events
• Education and family stability
• Family structure and child well-being

Elizabeth Thomson is Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison and Professor of Demography at Stockholm University. She is a demographer with roots in social psychology and the measurement of subjective phenomena. Much of her work has focused on couple data on fertility and family behavior. She has also studied stepfamily childbearing decisions and the relationship between union experience and contraceptive sterilization. She is currently directing a project on the implications of education for family building and family stability and will soon develop a program of research on family change, economic resources and child well-being. All of this work takes a cross-national comparative perspective using data from the United States and several European countries.

Elizabeth Thomson's home page

Leann M. Tigges

Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
314 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-0347
lmtigges@wisc.edu

• Flexiblization of employment: contingent work and nonstandard schedules
• Economic transformation and labor market inequality

Leann M. Tigges's research interests focus on issues related to economic transformation and labor market inequalities. Professor Tigges is interested in the relative explanatory power of human capital (what one knows) versus social capital (who one knows or where one lives) for a variety of labor market processes and outcomes. Her current research concerns labor utilization strategies of manufacturers in Wisconsin, especially their use of temporary workers and their shift schedules. These strategies are associated with wages and labor force composition.

Leann Tigges's home page

Ruth N. López Turley

Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4424 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-0726
rturley@ssc.wisc.edu

• Neighborhood effects
• Child poverty
• Educational inequality

Ruth López Turley is investigating factors that lead to educational inequality that are often experienced by poor children. In particular, she is studying the effect of college proximity (living close to colleges) on high school students' chances of applying to college. She is especially interested in students whose parents want them to stay home for college and in seeing how this parental preference influences their college application patterns.

Ruth N. López Turley's home page

Poverty-related publications

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James Walker

Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6462 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3863
walker@ssc.wisc.edu

• Modeling fertility behavior
• Internal migration

James Walker is a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Human Resources. Professor Walker's research interests include the study of influence of economic conditions and public policies on migration and fertility decisions over the life cycle. A current project investigates how teens form expectations and aspirations and their influence on teenage pregnancy and fertility behavior. Another project investigates the influence of economic conditions on internal migration flows.

James Walker's home page

Geoffrey Wallace

Associate Professor of Public Affairs
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6025
wallace@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Economics of marriage and the family
• Poverty and public policy
• Labor economics

His research is in the areas of labor economics, the economics of marriage and the family, and policy issues relating to poverty. Current projects examine the effects of changing economic conditions on living arrangements among young people, the effects of competition on educational outcomes, and issues of child support enforcement. His research on educational outcomes includes a study of the effects of Milwaukee's public school choice program on student achievement. Professor Wallace received his doctorate in Economics from Northwestern University.

Geoffrey Wallace's home page

Franklin Wilson

William H. Sewell-Bascom Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4446 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
wilson@ssc.wisc.edu

• Migration/Immigration
• Urban housing and labor markets
• Ethnicity

Franklin Wilson's home page

Michael Wiseman

Research Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Institute of Public Policy
George Washington University
614 Media and Public Affairs, Suite 602
805 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052-0002
(202) 994-8625
wisemanm@gwu.edu

• Evaluation of welfare reform
• Management of social assistance
• Use of administrative data for program management and evaluation

Michael Wiseman's research interests include comparative social welfare policy, program and policy evaluation, and the management of programs of public assistance. Over the past decade Dr. Wiseman has been an active participant in the formulation and evaluation of welfare reform initiatives in the United States, Europe, and South Africa. He is a consultant on program management and evaluation to various state and federal agencies and has served as consultant on policy and evaluation for the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom and the South Africa Department of Welfare. In 1997 he was appointed by then Governor Tommy Thompson to be Vice Chair and ranking external member of the Steering Committee for the Wisconsin Works Management and Evaluation Project (W-2 MEP), a research effort intended to provide guidance for analysis of implementation and contracting issues arising in the context of Wisconsin's reforms. He currently is a resident consultant on welfare reform in the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Visiting Scholar in the Office of Disability and Income Assistance Programs (ODIAP) in the Social Security Administration. At OFA he is working on alternatives for comparative assessment of state programs for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. At ODIAP he is contributing to research on the Supplemental Security Income program as well as international comparison of disability assistance policy and outcomes.

Michael Wiseman's home page

Poverty-related publications

Whitney P. Witt

Assistant Professor of Population Health Sciences
Co-Director, BioPop: Integrative Biopsychosocial Research in Population Health
School of Medicine and Public Health
University of Wisconsin–Madison
610 Walnut Street, Room 503
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6290
wwitt@wisc.edu

• Social, behavioral, and psychological factors that contribute to healthy aging
• Impact of acute, chronic, and terminal illness on the family system
• How familial relationships influence individuals’ health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use

Whitney Witt’s research focuses on the impact of acute, chronic, and terminal illness on the family system and aims to determine how familial relationships influence the health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use of individuals over time. The poverty-related aspects of her work include the examination of (1) the influence that illness has on family finances and (2) poverty as a risk factor for the development of illness in the family.

Whitney Witt's home page

John Witte

Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
217 North Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5715
witte@lafollette.wisc.edu

• School choice
• Public policy and administration
• Organizational theory

John Witte was Director of the Robert M. La Follette School for Public Affairs from 1999 to 2002. He served as Executive Director of the Governor's Commission on the Milwaukee Metropolitan School System, and as independent evaluator of the Milwaukee School Choice Program. His book The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program appeared in 1999.

John Witte's home page

Barbara Wolfe

Professor of Economics, Public Affairs, and Population Health Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2029
wolfe@lafollette.wisc.edu

• Determinants of success of young adults
• Poverty and health issues; disability, children's health
• Economic well-being of children
• Teen pregnancy
• Adequacy of savings of retired and disabled
• Evaluation of S-CHIP, especially BadgerCare

Barbara Wolfe's recent research has addressed five main issues: the intergenerational determinants of success in young adults (with Robert Haveman and Gary Sandefur), the economics of disability, the adequacy of savings among the recently retired and disabled (with Bob Haveman and Karen Holden), and the effects of welfare reform. Work on the first topic has included the roles of family and neighborhood (including income and stress-related factors), and of state and community programs on the educational achievement of young adults. Research on the economics of disability has examined the incentive effects of disability-related transfer programs, the impact of poor health on wages and hours worked, and the role of social security in reducing poverty among the disabled. Wolfe's studies of welfare reform include work with IRP affiliates Cancian, Haveman, Kaplan, and Meyer on the economic well-being and labor force experience of former welfare recipients in Wisconsin. Current research focuses on the role of expansions in public health insurance on health care coverage and labor force outcomes. Wolfe is also examining the association of income and wealth with health, emphasizing trends over time and differences by race, and (with John Mullahy) is exploring trends in health across subpopulations in the United States, using a broad set of indicators of health and health-related behaviors. Wolfe's other research interests include the incentives of state-based TANF programs, measuring the wealth and economic well-being of recent retirees as well as the disabled, and private, employer-based provision of health insurance.

Barbara Wolfe's home page

Poverty-related publications

Erik Olin Wright

Vilas Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8112D Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0068
wright@ssc.wisc.edu

• Cross-national study of class structure in industrial societies

Erik Olin Wright is Director of the A.E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at the UW-Madison. Current research relevant to poverty revolves around the general problem of class in contemporary capitalist societies and the nature of the class structure within which poverty is a central feature. He is currently working on a project exploring the changing pattern of the quality of job growth across employment expansions since the early 1960s, focusing specifically on the relationship between the expansion of good and bad jobs.

Erik Olin Wright's home page

Poverty-related publications

Lawrence Wu

Professor and Director, Center for Advanced Social Science Research
New York University
295 Lafayette Street
Puck Building, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 992-9565
lawrence.wu@nyu.edu

• Family structure and single motherhood
• Nonmarital childbearing and the life course
• Statistical methods

Lawrence Wu's current research interests include nonmarital fertility, life course transitions during early adulthood, and statistical methods. His research has investigated black/white differentials in nonmarital fertility and how changes in family structure during early life affect subsequent risks of a first out-of-wedlock birth, entry into sexual activity, and other fertility and family formation outcomes. He chairs the Technical Review Panel of the National Longitudinal Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America.

Lawrence Wu's home page

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Zhen Zeng

Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
4406 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4436
zzeng@ssc.wisc.edu

• Immigration
• Race/ethnicity
• Stratification
• Demography
• Social psychology
• Quantitative methods

Zhen Zeng’s research includes examination of Asian Americans’ earnings disadvantage, personality development in late midlife, the contextual determinants of racial boundaries in adolescent friendship, and a longitudinal analysis of Asian Immigrants’ earnings assimilation.

Zhen Zeng's home page

James P. Ziliak

Professor and Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics
Director, UK Center for Poverty Research
University of Kentucky
335 Gatton Business and Economics Building
Lexington, KY 40506-0034
(859) 257-2776
jziliak@uky.edu

• Incentive and insurance effects of U.S. tax and welfare programs
• Asset accumulation among low-income households

James P. Ziliak is Director of the University of Kentucky’s UK Center for Poverty Research, one of the three ASPE-funded Area Poverty Research Centers. His primary research focuses on the impacts of the U.S. income tax and transfer system on household labor supply, consumption, and saving. In addition, he has conducted several studies on the impacts of the macroeconomy and welfare reform on AFDC/TANF and food stamp caseloads. Recent projects include an examination of the 1980s tax reforms on the ability of households to insure consumption against shocks to income; a decomposition of the poor-nonpoor wealth gap; an examination of the impact of TANF on household saving; and an examination of the impact of income inequality, welfare reform, and economic growth on state-level poverty rates.

James Ziliak's home page