Latest Urban Institute Reports

In The State of Society, measures of national well-being that go beyond gross domestic product (GDP) are identified. Existing indicators and systems are found lacking in assessing the full economic value of caregiving and the contributions of women. This report presents the results of a meeting of leading experts on national indicators convened by the Urban Institute and the Center for Partnership Studies. Participants considered the strengths and weaknesses of existing indicators that measure social wealth, identified measures that need to be developed, and made recommendations for the placement of social wealth indicators in U.S. National Key Indicator System.

This issue brief provides nearly "real-time" tracking of the recession's impact on children, with state-by-state data through 2012 on children with an unemployed parent and individuals receiving SNAP benefits, as well as the authors' predictions of state child poverty rates for 2012. There has not been much change in children's economic well-being over the past year, but there has been a sharp deterioration compared with conditions before the recession. Compared to 2007, more children today live in families with an unemployed parent, families that turn to SNAP benefits to help pay their grocery bills, and/or families below the poverty threshold.

In the 2010-2011 school year, 2,500 high school students were chronically truant in District of Columbia Public Schools; at four schools over half of the students were chronically truant. High school truancy rates were moderately related to poverty and crime in students' residential neighborhoods and to violence near school. But the absenteeism of students in eighth grade was the strongest predictor of high school truancy rates. Focusing on middle school attendance issues may therefore be the most effective means of lowering high school truancy rates.

The Price Family Charitable Trust has awarded the Urban Institute a seven-year, $5 million grant to support the Tax Policy Center. The Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, will use the grant to expand its independent, objective research on taxes and equity and to enhance its sharing of timely, reliable information with policymakers, journalists, advocates, educators, and citizens.

Surrounding many of the debates about the public sector has been one about which government level should be involved in performing which functions. As an empirical matter, both centralization and decentralization have occurred together throughout U.S. history. The vast majority of federalism choices are mainly made to resolve the equality/diversity (pro-centralism) and uniformity/ experimentation (pro-decentralization) dilemmas endemic in a federal system. There is no a priori basis for knowing which government level is best, but beyond constitutional restrictions, the criterion should be the very pragmatic one of which level is best able to take on the problem at hand.

This chapter is an excerpt from the book The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations, available from the Urban Institute Press.

In developing countries, through the process of decentralization, municipal officials are constrained by administrative and governing practices that reflect a highly centralized, command driven economic system that has left a lasting impact on the culture and behavior of municipal administrations. In order for these local governments to become efficient and responsive providers of local infrastructure and public services, individuals and the organizations in which they work have to be transformed from entities that are local administrators of centrally-mandated public functions -which in large part requires compliance with central government rules and responsiveness to instructions from the top- into high-performing local government organizations (HPLGOs) which are capable of proactively identifying and responding to local needs.

The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Since then, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet reports the value of assets held in retirement accounts and defined benefit plans and how they have changed since 2007-before the stock market crash and the Great Recession. It replaces "Retirement Account Balances"

This paper examines the effect, by state, of the state's decision to adopt the Medicaid expansion. It also estimates the impact of the state’s decision on Medicaid enrollment and the number of uninsured. The paper shows that if all states implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion, the federal government will fund the vast majority of the increase in Medicaid states. Due to several provisions of the ACA, states will face increased enrollment even if they do not implement the Medicaid expansion. The additional cost of implementing the expansion is small relative to total state spending without the expansion and relative to large increases in federal funding and current state budget expenditures.

The CCDF Policies Database Book of Tables provides tables containing key Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) policies for each state as of October 1, 2011. The tables are based on information in the CCDF Policies Database, a database tracking state child care subsidy policies over time and across the States, D.C., and the Territories. The Book summarizes a subset of the information available in the database, including information about eligibility requirements for families; application, redetermination, priority, and waiting list policies; family copayments; and provider policies and reimbursement rates. The 2011 Book also includes a complete set of 2010 tables.

Using a series of maps, Foreclosure Indicators by Servicer in Prince George's County highlights how foreclosure indicators – including share of notices, days delinquent, and amount to cure - vary by servicer in Prince George's County, Maryland. Among other findings, our analysis of loan-level Notice of Intent to Foreclose (NOI) filings from July 2011 through June 2012 revealed stark contrasts in when mortgage servicers issue NOIs. These differences in servicer behavior could have serious implications for troubled homeowners and whether they can keep their homes. This analysis is a continuation of NeighborhoodInfo DC's ongoing tracking of the foreclosure crisis in the Washington, D.C. region.