New from The Urban Institute Low Income Working Families:

January 15, 2010

In this issue:

    • Just Released Book: Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net
    • Children of Immigrants Data Tool
    • Work and Income Security from 1970 to 2005
    • Do Assets Help Families Cope with Adverse Events?
    • Risk and Recovery: Understanding the Changing Risks to Family Incomes
    • Vulnerable Youth from Low-Income Families
    • Low-Income African American Youth
    • Are Families Prepared for Financial Emergencies?
    • Transitioning In and Out of Poverty
    • Enabling Families to Weather Emergencies and Develop: The Role of Assets
    • Saving and Investment among African Americans
    • Massachusetts Health Reform: Solving the Long-Run Cost Problem
    • Commentaries on Poverty



Just Released Book: Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net
By Martha Burt and Demetra S. Nightingale

The rising poverty and unemployment rates triggered by the recession are stark reminders of the need for a secure social safety net. Such programs should provide economic security, protect vulnerable families, and promote equality—but the United States falls behind other countries in accomplishing these goals. In Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net , Martha Burt and Demetra Nightingale encourage strengthening the safety net and making a national commitment to end poverty.

Watch C-SPAN's coverage of a forum discussing these issues.

Children of Immigrants Data Tool

The Urban Institute has a nifty new tool to find and chop up data about the roughly 17 million U.S. children with foreign-born parents. The tool lets you build charts and tables comparing everything from where the kids were born to their parents' income level, educational attainment and country of origin.
-- Connor Dougherty, The Wall Street Journal

The Children of Immigrants Data Tool is a comprehensive interactive resource for exploring the lives of the nation's 16.4 million children with foreign-born parents. The online tool uses recent American Community Survey data and enables users to generate detailed charts of the characteristics of children age 0 to 17 nationwide and by state.

Users can create charts and tables featuring one or more of 21 demographic, social, and economic characteristics, including citizenship and immigrant status of children and their parents; children's race, ethnicity, and school enrollment; parents' education and English proficiency; and family composition, income, and work effort. The tables can be downloaded in Excel. To help improve the Data Tool, users can provide feedback by email or by completing the brief online survey at the end of a session.

A companion publication, " Children of Immigrants: National and State Characteristics ," highlights key national data and variations across states.

Low-Income Working Families Research

Work and Income Security from 1970 to 2005
By Gregory Acs and Seth Zimmerman

This paper assesses how the economic security and mobility of nonelderly adults in families with children evolved since 1970. For individuals in low-income families with a full-time, full-year worker, economic security and upward mobility increased. However, the current high and rising unemployment rate clearly imperils the progress made during the last three decades of the 20th century.

Do Assets Help Families Cope with Adverse Events?
By Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, and Katie Vinopal

This study finds that asset-poor families experience more hardship than non-asset-poor families, with assets helping most for low- and middle-income families in case of a job loss, the onset of health limitations, or a change in family structure.

Risk and Recovery: Understanding the Changing Risks to Family Incomes
By Gregory Acs, Pamela Loprest, and Austin Nichols

More than 13 percent of nonelderly adults in families with children will see their incomes fall by half at some point over the course of a year, and about 40 percent fully recover within a year. Those who lose jobs or have an adult leave the family are more likely to have a substantial drop in income and are less likely to recover.

The following LIWF fact sheets, from the Vulnerable Youth and the Transition to Adulthood series, examine youth vulnerability and risk-taking behaviors.

Vulnerable Youth from Low-Income Families
By Adam Kent

In 2007, nearly 40 percent of children lived in low-income families. These youth are vulnerable to poor outcomes as adults, as they often lack the resources and opportunities found to lead to better outcomes. This fact sheet compares the young adult outcomes and adolescent risk-taking behaviors of youth from low-income families to those from middle-income and high-income families.

Vulnerable Youth and the Transition to Adulthood: Low-Income African American Youth
By Daniel Kuehn and Marla McDaniel

This fact sheet explores racial differences in adolescent risk behavior, education, employment, and earnings among low-income youth age 18 to 24.

Also of Interest

Are Families Prepared for Financial Emergencies?
By Caroline Ratcliffe and Katie Vinopal

Data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances show that, even prior to the current recession, many families did not have enough assets to see them through a modest spell of unemployment or another financial emergency, such as unexpected medical expenses.

Transitioning In and Out of Poverty
By Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, and Stephanie R. Cellini

Slightly more than half of Americans experience poverty before age 65. Roughly half of those who get out of poverty will become poor again within five years. This fact sheet summarizes key findings from the poverty dynamics literature to describe how, why, and when people move in and out of poverty, as well as what events are associated with falling into and climbing out of poverty.

The following papers, by LIWF authors, were presented at the 2009 fall conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management:

Enabling Families to Weather Emergencies and Develop: The Role of Assets
By Signe-Mary McKernan and Caroline Ratcliffe

In this essay, the authors suggest a cluster of policies that would improve financial markets and savings opportunities for low-income families across the life cycle.

Recent Trends in Saving and Investment among African-American and White Households: Implications for Federal Policy to Increase Saving
By Margaret Simms and Charles Betsey

Margaret Simms presented the preliminary findings of this exploratory paper, which examines differences in savings goals and behaviors by race and income.

Massachusetts Health Reform: Solving the Long-Run Cost Problem
By John Holahan and Linda Blumberg

Many of the features included in the Massachusetts health reform law, passed in early 2006, are being discussed as part of national reform. This paper is intended to inform the national debate and ongoing work in Massachusetts

Commentaries

Jobs Programs Must Be Targeted
Margaret Simms

In this op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , Margaret Simms argues for targeted job-creation policies to address disproportionate unemployment among African Americans

Poverty in the United States: The New Census Poverty Figures
By Gregory Acs, Margery Austin Turner, Harry Holzer, Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, and Austin Nichols

In this set of commentaries and fact sheets created in response to the Census Bureau's release of 2008 poverty figures, Urban Institute experts discuss poverty in America.

Status of Low-Income Women and Their Families
By Margaret Simms

This presentation to the Washington Area Women's Foundation outlines the circumstances of low-income women and their families in terms of employment, family type, incomes, and asset holdings. Institute fellow Margaret Simms takes a closer look at the situation in Washington, D.C.

Please visit their website: http://www.urban.org/center/lwf/index.cfm