Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Austin Nichols on Employment

Using the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this brief examines the likelihood that nonelderly individuals in families with children experience substantial drops in family income and recoveries from such drops. Over 13 percent of families see their incomes fall by half at some point over the course of a year with the lowest- and highest-income families the most likely to experience a substantial income loss. Further, only two in five individuals recover to at least 100 percent of their pre-drop income in the year after the drop.

Over the past several decades, the volatility of family income has increased markedly, and own earnings volatility has remained relatively flat. Volatility may affect retirement wealth, depending on whether volatility affects accrued pension contributions or withdrawals or earnings credited toward future Social Security benefits. This project assesses the effect of the volatility of individual and family earnings on asset accumulation and projected retirement wealth using survey data matched to administrative earnings records.

A unified measure of inequality, volatility, and mobility risk is developed from well-known decompositions of a generalized entropy inequality measure using panel data. Variation across individuals in mean family income is termed inequality, and the variability of income over time is decomposed into volatility and mobility risk. I apply the decompositions to several decades of U.S. data and find every component increasing over time, and a large impact of taxes. I further find large swings in the progressivity of income growth after taxes that are not observed in pretax income, consistent with the known tax regimes in recent U.S. history.

Using PSID data from 1968 to 2005, we find that the volatility of family income has increased over time (a trend that is robust to a large variety of modeling choices) but the trend in individual income volatility is less clear. Measurement error cannot fully account for these facts, but the increasing covariance of individual incomes within the family (driven by increases in the correlation of head and spouse earnings, due largely to the increased proportion of families with two earners) can.

This paper finds that about one in four workers, ages 18 to 61, earned less than $7.73 an hour in 2003. Low-wage workers who reside in low-income families with children are substantially less educated than the average worker, are concentrated in industries with low wages, and have limited prospects for wage growth. Many policies aimed at low-wage workers are not well-targeted at workers in low-income families with children, in part because only one in four low-wage workers reside in such families. Nevertheless, policies targeted at low-wage workers may have broad benefits, including improving the lot of low-income families with children.

The policy community is increasingly focusing attention on alleviating the strain on low-income working families, particularly those with children. This paper examines both the income and expenses of these families to see if they are able to meet their expenses with the limited resources at their disposal. We find that low-income working families with at least one full-time, full-year worker fare better than one might expect in 2001, thanks to their work effort, earnings, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, but low-income families without a full-time, full-year worker do not appear to have enough income to cover their basic expenses.

Child poverty dropped dramatically from 1993 to 2000 and increased from 2000 to 2004; both trends were even more marked for black children. While work, education, and family structure, together with macroeconomic conditions, are all significant determinants of child poverty over the last twenty years, macroeconomic conditions dominate the explanation for the dramatic changes of 1993 to 2000 and 2000 to 2004. Specifically, the state unemployment rate and real minimum wage (especially interacted with educational attainment) explain most of the fall in child poverty during the 1990's and the more recent rise.

The Earned Income Tax Credit provides nearly $40 billion to low-income families with children. A potential unintended consequence of the credit is lower pretax wages, in which case only part of the subsidy would accrue to workers. We examine the extent to which EITC expansions lower the pretax wages of working parents. Our findings are inconclusive. The gross hourly wages of less-skilled single women are found not to vary by the number of children, as does the EITC. In addition, the wages of black single mothers track the minimum wage for nearly the entire time period.

This report clarifies the discussion and debate over what constitutes a low-income working family, documents the size and characteristics of low-income working population, and examines their incomes and expenditures. Using data from the 2002 round of the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF), we find that low-income families (income below twice the federal poverty line) with at least one full-time, full-year worker have incomes that are roughly in line with their basic expenses thanks to their work effort, earned income, and a generous refundable Earned Income Tax Credit; however, low-income families without a full-time, full-year worker do not appear to have enough income to cover their basic expenses.

During and following 2001's recession, families with children saw their employment rates and income decline significantly. In turn, the incidence of poverty in homes with children, especially those headed by single adults rose. However, safety net programs for working families, such as unemployment insurance, were less effective in aiding single-adult and low-income families than other types of households.