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…
February 26, 2026
Young Men’s Earnings over the Long Run – An Update
Let me start with the chart: Median pre-tax earnings of men ages 25-29 rose 24…
April 15, 2025
Is There Really Pent-Up Demand for Ten Times the Manufacturing Jobs We Have?
Data analysis is hard. Admittedly, the consequences of getting it wrong are less severe than…
July 26, 2024
Two Cheers for Shrinking Black-White Opportunity Gaps
The latest in a series of important reports on social mobility by the research group…
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…
February 8, 2024
Another Flawed Analysis Shows that Single Mothers are Highly Sensitive to Changes in Work Incentives
Tuesday, I published a critique of a paper by Council of Economic Advisers senior economist…
February 6, 2024
Research by a Top Biden Administration Economist Reinforces the Importance of Work Incentives in the Child Tax Credit and the Safety Net
For the past two years, economist Jacob Bastian has been the main researcher dedicated to…
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.
December 11, 2023
Has Inequality Made Americans Poorer than Bulgarians, Russians, and Filipinos?
A recent column by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times presents statistics side-by-side showing that…
October 5, 2023
Do 60 Percent Of American Workers Have Insecure Jobs?
American Compass has a new survey out in which it finds, among other results, that…
September 15, 2023
Putting This Year’s Poverty Numbers in Context
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its latest income and poverty estimates covering calendar year…