December 14, 2022
Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?
Key Points
December 9, 2022
“Automatic Stimulus”: How It Would Have Increased the Record Unemployment Benefits Paid During the Great Recession and Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary The COVID-19 pandemic saw unemployment claims reach a high of over 33 million in June 2020—over two and a half times the prior record set during the Great Recession. From March 2020 until temporary federal programs expired in September 2021, nearly 1.6 billion weeks of benefit checks were…
December 6, 2022
Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids
Every day, more and more children in America lack a safe, permanent, and loving home. Evidence increasingly shows that child welfare agencies and family courts aremuch more concerned with adults’ needs and sensibilities than with children’s safety.While reform must come from many different corners of this field, Congress should committo creating a stronger and smarter…
December 1, 2022
Was Rising Inequality Behind Falling Absolute Mobility? Reassessing Chetty et al. (2017)
In 2017, a widely publicized paper by a research team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that while the vast majority of American kids born in 1940 ended up better off at age 30 than their parents fared at the same age, that was only true of half of kids born in 1980. Moreover,…
November 28, 2022
Public School Instructional Offerings and Enrollment Changes: Evidence from Two Years After the Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary We examine how COVID-related reopening policies during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years affected enrollment in public school districts. We use difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate plausibly causal effects of different reopening policies on public school enrollment. Consistent with prior research, we find that public school…
November 17, 2022
American Renewal: Launching a New Conservative Policy Book with Paul Ryan and Angela Rachidi
Event Summary On November 17, AEI’s Paul Ryan and Angela Rachidi launched their new volume, American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances (AEI, 2022). In his opening remarks, Speaker Ryan noted our unique social and political moment, contending that many Americans are suffering at the hands of…
November 3, 2022
Child Poverty: Trends and Outlook
Spotlight hosted an engaging and substantive discussion on recent trends in childhood poverty. The event, held with the support of the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, was moderated by Aparna Mathur, Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center. The panelists were Dana Thomson of Child Trends, Samuel…
September 30, 2022
Off Track: An Assessment of Wisconsin’s Early Care and Learning System for Young Children
Preface Raising children, as can be fully appreciated only after you’ve done it, takes place in realtime. They eat, sleep and grow whether you’re ready or not. So as parents supply childrenwith the most crucial material treasure they ever will receive — a stable, loving home — manyrely on some outside help in caring for…
September 21, 2022
Lessons from the Unprecedented Fraud and Abuse of the Unemployment Benefits System During the Pandemic
Chairman DeSaulnier, Ranking Member Allen, and other members of the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, thank you for inviting me to testify at this morning’s hearing examining the administration of the Unemployment Insurance system. My name is Matt Weidinger, and I am a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar in poverty studies at the…
September 19, 2022
Men Without Work in the Post-Pandemic Era
Event Summary On September 19, Harvard University’s Lawrence Summers and AEI’s Michael Strain joined AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt to discuss the new edition of Mr. Eberstadt’s book, Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (Templeton Press, 2022). Mr. Eberstadt began by describing the decades-long flight from work by prime-age (25–54) men and the broadening of that trend to other demographics…