What's New at IRP

In 2009: Spring 2009 | Winter-Spring 2008–09

Spring 2009

IRP Director Tim Smeeding Serving on Wisconsin Poverty Summit Council
Call for 2009-2010 IRP Visiting Scholar Applications
RFP: IRP Dissertation Research Funds 2009-2010 UW-Msn Doctoral Candidates Only
Spring Seminar Schedule
Summer Research Workshop Dates Set: June 15-18, 2009
State Policy Innovations Conference, July 2009
Young Disadvantaged Men Working Conference, September 2009
Cross-National Mobility Working Conference, September 2009
2009 Robert Lampman Lecture: Irwin Garfinkel, “The American Welfare State”
IRP Affiliates and Staff Awards and Honors
New Affiliates: Scott Allard, J. Michael Collins, and Donald Moynihan
Spring Visiting Scholars: Angel Harris, John Micklewright, Koen Caminada
New Discussion Papers

IRP Director Tim Smeeding Serving on Wisconsin Poverty Summit Council

IRP Director Tim Smeeding recently accepted an invitation from Reggie Bicha, Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, to participate in the core-team planning for a May 2009 antipoverty summit, “Building Bridges to Success.”

The summit, to be led by Governor Doyle and the Department of Children and Families, will bring together a diverse set of people and organizations concerned about poverty in the state, including the Institute for Research on Poverty and other nonprofit organizations, advocates, and state agencies. Participants will examine poverty in Wisconsin and set an agenda to improve the well-being of children and families across the state.

In preparation for the conference, Smeeding and IRP Visiting Scholar Julia Isaacs are using the official federal poverty measure for 31 Wisconsin areas (covering all 72 counties) to ascertain the nature, location, depth, and scope of poverty in the state. During and after the summit, Smeeding will solicit input from attendees, actors, and policymakers and examine possible trade-offs to create a Wisconsin poverty measure that is appropriate for the policies and costs of living for the state of Wisconsin. IRP will at the same time solicit financial support from third parties to build the improved poverty measure; and, by summer 2010, will introduce the new, improved Wisconsin measure. The new measure will reflect Wisconsin values, policies, and priorities; be annually replicated; and will in future years be used to evaluate proposed and impending changes in policy and the economy in order to measure their antipoverty effectiveness.

This current initiative continues a long tradition of collaboration between the Institute for Research on Poverty and the State of Wisconsin in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, which seeks to apply University scholarship to the benefit of all state citizens.

IRP Affiliates and Staff Awards and Honors

Katherine Magnuson, Assistant Professor of Social Work and IRP Affiliate, received a Vilas Associates Award from the Social Science Division of the Graduate School Research Committee. The award recognizes a faculty member's scholarly achievements as well as the high quality of the research study proposed for the two-year period of support provided by the award.

Daniel R. Meyer, Professor of Social Work and IRP Affiliate, was recently informed that he is being named Mary Jacoby Professor, given in recognition of his research and service to the College of Letters and Science.

Donald Moynihan, Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science and IRP Affiliate, was one of nine UW-Madison faculty members to receive a 2009 Romnes Faculty Fellowship. The fellowships recognize tenured faculty members who have attained tenure within the prior four years. Don and his fellow winners will receive a flexible research fund.

J. Karl Scholz, Professor of Economics and IRP Affiliate, was one of eight UW-Madison faculty members to receive a Kellett Mid-Career Award for his research on factors affecting household wealth accumulation; public policy and household saving; and public policy affecting disadvantaged workers. Karl and his fellow honorees will receive a flexible research fund.

Coreen Williams, IRP Department Administrator, was one of five classified staff members campus-wide to receive the Classified Employee Recognition Award (CERA) in recognition of her outstanding contributions to UW-Madison. Among her accomplishments are her flawless handling of travel and other accommodations for the over 300 people IRP annually invites to conferences; leadership with a very diverse set of constituencies; innovative ideas that make work tasks easier and more efficient; and problem-solving abilities in dealing with the new Employment Certification Reporting Technology (ECRT) system, which received campus-wide recognition. The award will be presented April 29 at a ceremony hosted by Chancellor Biddy Martin.

Winter-Spring 2008-09

Research: New Projects, Thematic Seminar Series, and Conferences
Training, Mentoring, and Visitors
Dissemination of Research and Outcomes

Research: New Projects, Thematic Seminar Series, and Conferences

Administration for Children and Families Award: IRP recently won a competitive research agreement with ACF and the newly formed Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF) to conduct a set of integrated data-development, analysis, and evaluation activities designed to generate an improved capacity to analyze TANF administrative data, and to merge data from TANF, FoodShare (food stamps), Medicaid/BadgerCare, child welfare, child support, Unemployment Insurance, and the National Directory of New Hires. This award will allow us to better consolidate our data and research efforts and to help the DCF better serve the needs of the State of Wisconsin and its clients.

National Science Foundation Award: This new award will support the addition of middle-income nations (e.g., China, India, Brazil) to the Luxembourg Income Study database, which currently features only rich OECD nations, and to begin conducting research on the new data.

Fathers Conference: In September 2009, our conference will bring together scholars and policymakers to examine strategies for reducing barriers to marriage and father involvement, designing child support and other public policies to encourage the involvement of fathers, and coping with fathers who have multiple child support responsibilities. Representatives of the Obama Administration will be in Madison to respond to the ideas put forth at the conference.

State Innovations Conference: In July 2009, our conference will bring together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners whose work focuses on improving the well-being of families, especially vulnerable families, to discuss recent state-level policy innovations and lessons learned from them. This meeting will facilitate the sharing of information across state agencies while also better informing researchers of the types of work that will help state agencies better serve needy families and children.

Healthy Families Seminar Series: This year, James Kemple, MDRC; Andrew Sum, Northeastern University; Kathryn Edin, Harvard Kennedy School; Kristin Anderson Moore, Child Trends; Maria Cancian, UW–Madison; and Sara McLanahan, Princeton University, are all coming to present their work on assessing the role of public policies in ensuring healthy, supportive families.

Additional information on other new research projects (e.g., Gates Award, Sutton Trust Award, and others); on other recent conferences ("Pathways to Self-Sufficiency," "Changing Poverty," "State of Agents," and "Faith-Based Social Services"); as well as information about the 9th Robert Lampman Lecture; the 18th and 19th Annual Summer Research Workshops; and the Summer 2008 Microeconometrics Workshop can also be found at the IRP Web site (www.irp.wisc.edu).

Training, Mentoring, and Visitors

Graduate Research Fellows (GRF) Program: The GRF program, founded by IRP in spring 2003 with nine students, is in its 6th year with 32 promising students under the tutelage of Carolyn Heinrich, IRP's associate director of research and training. This rigorous program prepares future poverty researchers for every aspect of their career, including substantive policy and research discussions; methodological training; professional training on the IRB process, journal article submission, and proposal development; and support of students' dissemination of research and conference attendance. Students meet with every major thematic speaker who comes to campus to discuss research development, evaluation, and research presentations. This program is a major development over the types and levels of training that we all received when in Madison and it sets IRP apart as a unique leader in research training at the doctoral level.

Summer Dissertation Support: Four students (Benjamin Cowan, Malcolm Gold, Callie Langton, and Marci Ybarra) received support that enabled them to concentrate on their dissertation, the topics of which include the effect of teenagers' expectations of future schooling outcomes on their risky behavior in high school, such as drug and alcohol use and truancy; and earnings and income patterns of low-income new mothers who rely on welfare during maternity-related job interruptions, and exits from the welfare application process.

Dissertation Fellowship: The recipient of the 2008–09 fellowship, Fabian Pfeffer, is examining intergenerational wealth effects in the United States and Germany. The 2009–2010 award will be made to one of the 32 GRFs, but is open only to those GRFs that have applied for one or more outside dissertation funding opportunities.

Visiting Scholars: IRP is hosting six Visiting Scholars: Rodney J. Andrews, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; Angel L. Harris, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Princeton University, and Faculty Associate, Office of Population Research, Joint Ph.D. Program in Social Policy, also at Princeton; Julia B. Isaacs, Child and Family Policy Fellow, Economic Studies, Brookings Institution; Fernando Antonio Lozano, Assistant Professor of Economics, Pomona College, and National Poverty Center Postdoctoral Fellow, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan; John Micklewright, Professor of Social Statistics and Policy Analysis, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton, United Kingdom; and Udaya Waglé, Assistant Professor, School of Public Affairs and Administration, Western Michigan University, Local Research Affiliate, National Poverty Center, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan.

Dissemination of Research and Outcomes

FOCUS: The fall issue features: "The new global labor market" by Richard B. Freeman; "Improving individual success for community-college students" by Susan Scrivener; "A primer on U.S. welfare reform" by Robert Moffitt; "Rethinking the safety net: Gaps and instability in help for the working poor" by Scott W. Allard; and "A longitudinal perspective on income inequality in the United States and Europe" by Markus Gangl.

The spring Focus will feature articles based on the papers presented at the spring 2008 Changing Poverty conference: "Poverty levels and trends in comparative perspective" by Daniel Meyer and Geoffrey Wallace; "Economic change and the structure of opportunity for less-skilled workers" by Rebecca Blank; "Family structure, childbearing, and parental employment" by Maria Cancian and Deborah Reed; "Immigration and poverty in the U.S." by Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolensky; "Enduring influences of childhood poverty" by Katherine Magnuson and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal; "Mobility in the U.S. in comparative perspective" by Markus Jäntti; "Trends in income support" by John Karl Scholz, Robert Moffitt, and Benjamin Cowan; "The role of family policies in antipoverty policy" by Jane Waldfogel; "Improving educational outcomes for poor children" by Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig; "Workforce development as an antipoverty strategy" by Harry Holzer; "Health care for the poor" by Katherine Swartz; "Poverty politics and policy" by Mary Jo Bane; and "What does is it mean to be poor in a rich society?" by Robert Haveman.

IRP's Web Site: A rich poverty research and policy resource, IRP's Web site (www.irp.wisc.edu) features the full text of every issue of Focus, 1976 to the present; IRP's Discussion Papers Series, 1966 to the present, comprising some 1,360 papers; a set of frequently asked questions about poverty that are among the most popular pages on the site; and a fully searchable publications database, which allows users to view citations and full records of publications, as well as export and print bibliographies, which was recently updated to include bibliographies of IRP affiliates’ most recent work, from 2005 to early 2008.

Electronic Mailing Lists You Can Join
(To subscribe to IRP listservs, visit http://www.irp.wisc.edu/aboutirp/contact.htm.)

• Fast Focus: IRP just introduced this single-topic, electronic-only publication, which will summarize recent IRP research between issues of the Focus newsletter. Coming later this fall will be the first two issues: Carolyn Heinrich on the growing use of third-party entities in the design, execution, and management of public policy; and Jennifer Noyes and Maria Cancian on the role of faith in program outcomes.
• Poverty Dispatches: Biweekly messages with links to Web-based news items dealing with poverty, welfare reform, and related topics. Each Dispatch lists links to current news in popular print media.
• What’s New at IRP: Quarterly messages with IRP news, including recent publications, seminar schedules, conferences, IRP Affiliates’ awards and honors, and other general Institute news.
• Publications Alert: Periodic notification of and links to recently released Discussion Papers, Special Reports, and issues of Focus. Hear first about our newest working papers, including a dynamite analysis of the strong positive effects of Food Stamps on birth weight in the Deep South in the late 1960s by Doug Almond, Hilary Hoynes, and Diane Schanzenbach (Discussion Paper No. 1359-08).
• Announcements: A semi-monthly compilation of poverty-related employment and research opportunities.