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Re-Centering Family Structure in Opportunity Insights’ Work on Intergenerational Mobility: How Important Is Single Parenthood?
Over the past decade, Opportunity Insights (OI) has transformed the study of intergenerational mobility through innovative uses of administrative data, reshaping the public and scholarly understanding of the factors that affect children’s life prospects. One consistent finding in this literature is the strong association between family structure, especially single parenthood, and upward mobility, though it has received relatively little sustained attention.
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The Middle Class Is Shrinking Because of a Booming Upper-Middle Class
Populists on both the political left and right routinely claim that the middle class has been hollowed out. These claims, to the extent they are based on evidence, rely on a relative definition of the middle class, such that if income doubles for every family, the middle class does not grow. Using an absolute definition of the middle class, we find that the “core” middle class has shrunk, but only because more families have become upper-middle class over time.
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You Autor Know
Along with many other controversial issues in 2025, Americans are at odds over the merits…
Report
An Early Look at the Child Tax Credit Changes in the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 would expand the child tax credit by increasing the refundable credit, indexing the maximum benefit to inflation, raising the phase-in rate for families with multiple children, and allowing a one-year earnings lookback.
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Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families
Reducing poverty should focus on not only short-term income support but also expanding opportunity and promoting upward mobility. Unconditional cash transfers risk discouraging work, marriage, and other behaviors associated with long-term economic mobility. Proposed reforms to the earned income tax credit and child tax credit would strengthen work and marriage incentives, better target tax relief to working- and middle-class families, and create “success sequence” savings accounts that build assets for children from low-income families who meet education, work, and family formation milestones.
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The Conservative Case Against Child Allowances
Child allowances would provide unconditional cash payments to families with children as a strategy to reduce child poverty. However, such policies risk increasing unemployment in single-parent households and could weaken work incentives, potentially worsening long-term poverty and reversing gains made since the 1990s welfare reforms. Evidence on these effects is mixed, but historical experience suggests that work-oriented policies contributed to large increases in employment among single mothers and substantial reductions in child poverty. Alternative antipoverty policies that build on work-based reforms may therefore reduce poverty while posing fewer risks to employment and family stability.