Research Archive

January 21, 2025

President Trump’s USDA Should Fix Food Stamp Work Requirement Waivers

As President Donald Trump begins his second term, he and his administration will be exploring ways to improve government efficiency and economic outcomes for low-income Americans. One such policy—a 2019 regulation governing states’ use of waivers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s (SNAP) work requirement—does just that. Although the regulation was never implemented after being…

By Richard Burkhauser | Kevin Corinth | Thomas O'Rourke | Angela Rachidi

January 17, 2025

Regulations Keep Millions of Bedrooms Empty During a Housing Crisis

The U.S. is facing a housing affordability crisis, and new data from Realtor.com highlight an often missed contributing factor: millions of empty bedrooms. Census data reveal 31.8 million “excess” bedrooms in American homes—compared to just 4 million in 1970. Overregulation, particularly in zoning and local occupancy laws, is among the culprits. Realtor.com tries to put a positive…

By Howard Husock

January 17, 2025

Reforming Work Requirement Waivers in SNAP

By Richard V. Burkhauser | Kevin Corinth | Thomas O'Rourke | Angela Rachidi

January 16, 2025

Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ “Lyin’” Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.

Many Americans are convinced the economy is ailing and that life is financially tougher today than a decade—or a generation—ago. Social media posts wax nostalgic for a long-lost era when all single breadwinners allegedly could afford a home and two cars for a family of four. Everyone seemingly knows someone who did everything they were…

By Scott Winship

January 14, 2025

Unprotected From Porn

By Brad Wilcox | Jason S. Carroll | Brian Willoughby | Michael Toscano

January 14, 2025

The Pornography Industry Should Not Be Allowed This Much Access to Our Children

Imagine someone drove a white van into your neighborhood, opened up the panel door, and invited children and teens from the neighborhood, including yours, to watch sexually explicit videos of men and women doing the most degrading things possible. In most of our neighborhoods, such a man would be arrested in minutes, and we would…

By Brad Wilcox | Jason Carroll | Brian Willoughby | Michael Toscano

January 10, 2025

Marriage: America’s Keystone Institution

Marriage is linked to better financial, social, and emotional outcomes for children, men, and women—and many of these effects appear to have a causal dimension. Many social scientists have discovered these basic patterns of findings in their work over the years. But one new development in this research is that we are seeing more evidence…

By Brad Wilcox

January 8, 2025

Menu Adjustment in Response to the Minimum Wage: A Return to the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Border

Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…

By Michael R. Strain | Kerry L. Paaps

January 7, 2025

Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family

During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax credit (CTC). Attempts to expand the credit to make it easier for two-parent families to have kids and rely on a sole breadwinner were thwarted by objections that a child allowance would also promote single-parent families in which no one…

By Scott Winship

January 7, 2025

Ozempic and Your Community

As holiday treats give way to New Year’s Resolutions, the names of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy will be on millions of lips this January—in addition to any leftover fruitcake, eggnog, cookies, and latkes. But the benefits of these drugs aren’t limited to what they can do for an individual’s health. Recent analysis…

By Brent Orrell