Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Developing Care: Recent Research on the Care Economy and Economic Development

Policy makers are beginning to appreciate the constraints that unpaid care work imposes on both economic development and the empowerment of women in low-income countries. Empirical research on these topics is in its infancy but is already yielding significant results. This paper contextualizes and reviews recent research on unpaid care work in the Global South, […]

The American Economy Is Rigged

Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor). But some examples […]

Longevity Economics: Leveraging the Advantages of an Aging Society

An aging society is a fact for the United States, much of the developed world, and many developing countries. People are reaching traditional retirement ages with many years of expected life remaining and their functional capacity largely intact. Many of these people want to continue contributing to society through activities that are meaningful to the […]

In-Work Poverty in the United States

In-work poverty became a prominent policy issue in the United States long before the term itself acquired any meaning and relevance in other industrialized countries. With America’s embrace of an employment-centered antipoverty strategy, the working poor have become even more of an issue. This paper reviews some key trends, drivers and policy issues. How much […]

The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940

One of the defining features of the “American dream” is the aspiration that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. When children are asked to assess their economic progress, they frequently compare their own standard of living to that of their parents. Such measures of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children earning […]