March 25, 2026
Opportunity Book: A New Tool for Connecting Policymakers with Innovative Ideas
Today the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is…
May 20, 2025
The Share of Medicaid Recipients in Compliance with the House Bill’s Community Engagement Requirement
The reconciliation proposal approved by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2025 would impose community engagement requirements on nondisabled, working-age Medicaid recipients without dependent children, requiring at least 80 hours per month of work, training, education, or community service during a specified number of months to maintain eligibility. Analysis using Survey of Income and Program Participation data indicates that, as of December 2022, 44–60 percent of the 18.2 million recipients subject to the requirement would already be in compliance, depending on how many months of participation states require. As a result, 7.3 million–10.3 million recipients would need to increase their work or other qualifying activities to retain Medicaid coverage.
January 21, 2025
President Trump’s USDA Should Fix Food Stamp Work Requirement Waivers
A 2019 regulation would tighten the criteria states use to waive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents. Under existing policy, states can qualify for waivers using several broad criteria and can group contiguous areas together, allowing many counties to receive waivers even when unemployment rates are relatively low. Using county-level data from 1997 to 2023, simulations show that the 2019 rule would substantially reduce waiver eligibility, increase the responsiveness of waivers to changes in local unemployment, and better target waivers to areas with the weakest labor markets.
September 19, 2024
Government Benefit Programs Already Do a Lot to Help Low Income Families
Politicians, policy analysts, and advocates have proposed increasing the generosity of the Child Tax Credit…
March 4, 2024
Social Conservatives Who Care About Marriage Should Think Twice About a “Per-Child” Refundable Child Tax Credit
The United States Senate is currently debating H.R. 7024, a House-passed bill that would modify…
February 27, 2024
Options for Improving the Child Tax Credit Provisions in H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024
H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, passed the…
January 31, 2024
The Wyden-Smith Child Tax Credit and Work: Responding to Critics
The Wyden-Smith tax bill under consideration in the House has rekindled a debate about the…
January 30, 2024
How Sensitive Are Single Mothers’ Work Decisions to a Change in Incentives? Correcting Misperceptions of the Evidence
Estimates of how employment responds to changes in single mothers’ return to work are central to evaluating policies such as child tax credit expansions. A review of decades of research finds that commonly used labor supply elasticity estimates cluster around 0.75, with averages of roughly 0.8 across both literature reviews and original studies. These findings indicate that the assumption of a 0.75 elasticity in policy analyses is consistent with the broader empirical literature rather than an outlier estimate.
October 11, 2023
Changing the Official Poverty Measure Would Help Rich States and Hurt Poor States
Earlier this year, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report recommended elevating the Supplemental Poverty…
October 5, 2023
Changing the Official Poverty Measure Would Help Rich States and Hurt Poor States
In this post I discuss the policy implications of declaring the Supplemental Poverty Measure the…