Elira Kuka

Do In-Work Tax Credits Serve as a Safety Net?

We test the EITC’s response to economic need. Using IRS data we exploit differences in timing and severity of economic cycles across states. Because the EITC requires earned income, there is a theoretical ambiguity in the credit’s cyclicality. We find higher unemployment leads to increased likelihood of EITC recipiency and in credit amounts received for married couples but has insignificant effects for single individuals. The EITC’s protective effects are concentrated among skilled workers. The EITC mitigates income shocks for married couples with children and groups likely to have moderate earnings, but does not for most recipients: single parents with children.

Child Poverty, the Great Recession, and the Social Safety Net in the United States

In this paper, we comprehensively examine the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty, with particular attention to the role of the social safety net in mitigating the adverse effects of shocks to earnings and income. Using a state panel data model and data for 2000 to 2014, we estimate the relationship between the business cycle and child poverty, and we examine how and to what extent the safety net is providing protection to at-risk children. We find compelling evidence that the safety net provides protection; that is, the cyclicality of after-tax-and-transfer child poverty is significantly attenuated relative to the cyclicality of private income poverty. We also find that the protective effect of the safety net is not similar across demographic groups, and that children from more disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those living with Hispanic or single heads, or particularly those living with immigrant household heads—or immigrant spouses—experience larger poverty cyclicality than those living with non- Hispanic white or married heads, or those living with native household heads with native spouses. Our findings hold across a host of choices for how to define poverty. These include measures based on absolute thresholds or more relative thresholds. They also hold for measures of resources that include not only cash and near-cash transfers net of taxes but also several measures of the value of public medical benefits.

Who Benefited from Women’s Suffrage?

While a growing literature has shown that women prefer investments in child welfare and increased redistribution, little is known about the long-term effect of empowering women. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. suffrage laws, we show that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who were exposed to women’s political empowerment during childhood experienced large increases in educational attainment, especially blacks and Southern whites. We also find improvements in earnings among whites and blacks that experienced educational gains. We employ newly digitized data to map these long-term effects to contemporaneous increases in local education spending and childhood health, showing that educational gains were linked to improvements in the policy environment.