All Research

October 29, 2025

Who Is at Risk of Losing Snap Benefits Due to the Shutdown?

Unless the Senate passes legislation that reopens the federal government within the next few days (or the courts intervene), 22 million households containing 42 million individuals (approximately 12 percent of the US population) will not receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly called food stamps) starting November 1st. For background, SNAP provides nearly $8 billion per month in…

By Angela Rachidi

October 28, 2025

Suspending SNAP Benefits in November Could Push 2.9 Million People Into Poverty

The ongoing federal government shutdown has put into question whether the federal government will continue to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in November. SNAP is one of the most important safety net programs in the United States, providing food assistance to 42.7 million people in an average month in 2024, at an annual cost of…

By Kevin Corinth

October 23, 2025

Childcare Regulation Limits Choice and Opportunity

Regulation limits many aspects of opportunity and upward mobility. While analysts have highlighted the adverse impact of specific regulations — such as zoning, rent control, and occupational licensing — public discourse has given less attention to the costs and consequences of childcare regulations for families and care providers. Yet past and current research underscores these…

By Vanessa Brown Calder

October 21, 2025

Childcare Regulation and Affordability

AbstractIn recent decades, childcare costs have outpaced family incomes and put pressure on familybudgets. Legislators typically consider government subsidies to be the primary solution to risingcosts, despite the high cost of broadly subsidizing care and possible adverse effects on familiesand children. Yet policymakers have paid little attention to how existing regulations limit childcaresupply and increase…

By Vanessa Brown Calder

October 21, 2025

Reliability of Government Data Often Requires Asterisks, a Hazard That Predates Liberal Gripes About Trump Manipulating Statistics

Seattle slugger Cal Raleigh this year matched what once stood as a signature baseball record: Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs for the 1927 Yankees. Roger Maris first surpassed Ruth’s record, hitting 61 homers in 1961, but for decades his achievement was accompanied in record books by the most famous asterisk in history. Maris played a 162-game season, the asterisk…

By Matt Weidinger

October 15, 2025

Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure: Understanding Middle-Class Earnings Trends

What should we make of earnings trends in the United States? People can differ in their opinions about whether some reported trend is impressive or cause for concern, of course. However, you might think that it’s at least straightforward to determine what the relevant trend is and how to measure it. But that turns out…

By Scott Winship

October 3, 2025

The Link Between Maternal Drug Use and Rising Infant Mortality

Mississippi has just declared a public health emergency involving an alarming rise in infant mortality rates. Between 2023 and 2024, deaths of children under age one rose to 9.7 per 1,000 live births from 8.9 per 1,000 in 2023. “Every single infant loss represents a family devastated, a community impacted and a future cut short,”…

By Naomi Schaefer Riley | Emily Putnam-Hornstein

September 25, 2025

The Golden Age of Public Housing—and Why It Didn’t Last

If Americans have any shared image of public housing, it is one of dilapidated and even dangerous “projects” and locations of concentrated poverty. But there was a time—a brief shining moment—in which public housing was new and attractive and working married couples with children were glad to live in government-owned and -managed apartments. What might…

By Howard Husock

September 24, 2025

Subsidized Housing and Upward Mobility

In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length of time participants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) spent in the program. Their report, titled The Dynamics of Dependence, revealed that the average participant could be expected to remain in AFDC for 10 years — a figure that increased to…

By Howard Husock

September 23, 2025

Why the USDA Is Justified in Ending the Food Security Survey

The USDA announced plans to discontinue future Household Food Security reports, ending the annual supplemental survey that, among other things, was used as the government’s official statistic on “food insecurity”. The supplemental survey had been attached to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey each December since the late 1990s, asking households a battery of questions…