View Research by Author - Austin Nichols

Austin Nichols is a Senior Research Associate in The Urban Institute's Income and Benefits Policy Center (and an affiliate of the Tax Policy Center and the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research) who specializes in applied econometrics, labor economics, and public finance. His research focuses on the well-being of families and social insurance programs, including work on child poverty, disability insurance, income volatility, and economic mobility (within and across generations). He also studies education, health, and labor market interventions, and determinants of poverty and economic inequality. He holds an MPP from Harvard and a PhD in Economics from the Unversity of Michigan.

Publications

In April 2006, the District of Columbia implemented a child support pass-through and disregard policy for families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) caseload, passing through the first $150 per month of child support paid to these families and disregarding this amount when determining their TANF benefits. This study provides a process evaluation of the policy implementation and uses a difference-in-difference framework to assess policy impacts. Our results suggest that noncustodial parents with a current support order for children on TANF paid 5.6 percent more child support as a result of the pass-through policy.

U.S. household economic instability, as measured by the Economic Security Index (ESI), fell 1.3 percentage points from 2010 (20.2 percent) to 2011 (18.9 percent), the largest year-over-year decline in the last quarter century. States in the west saw decreases in measured instability, while some central states saw increases in measured instability.

For decades, the labor market has grown more polarized with employment and wages growing more slowly for middle-skill jobs than for other jobs. By most measures, polarization did not accelerate during the Great Recession. More polarization is evident, however, in the wages of re-employed workers.

The official U.S. Poverty rate was 15 percent in 2011, roughly unchanged since 2010, but the 2011 American Community Survey (ACS) says the poverty rate is 15.9 percent in 2011, up from 15.3 percent in 2010. The ACS rates are more precisely estimated, but the 2011 rate reflects poverty in boht 2010 and 2011; the 2010 rate reflects poverty in both 2009 and 2010. Poverty has fallen during 2011 so the official poverty rate better reflects improved circumstances toward the end of 2011, relative to 2010 and early 2011.

The poverty rate of the long-term unemployed was more than three times the rate of those with no unemployment in 2011. Nearly three out of four single parents with long-term unemployment were poor in 2011.

Poverty, at 15 percent, has not risen from 2010 to 2011, while long-term unemployment has remained at record levels. Monthly data indicate poverty may have been falling through 2011. However, poverty is still as high as it has been in any year since 1965, and the safety net that protected families during the Great Recession is likely to be cut as fiscal pressure increases.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration tested the long-term benefits of helping poor families move from severely distressed housing projects to low-poverty neighborhoods. Evaluation results recently released by HUD find significant gains in health but not in employment, incomes, or educational attainment among experimental families. One possible reason gains were limited is that few families spent much more than a year living in high-opportunity neighborhoods. This brief summarizes new evidence that the MTO families that lived longer in neighborhoods with lower poverty and higher education levels did achieve better outcomes in work and school, as well as in health.

In recent years, states have considered several changes to the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system, with the goal of expanding the pool of workers eligible for benefits. Those reforms are loosening the work history requirement (i.e., adopting the alternative base period), increasing eligibility for those seeking part-time work, and allowing workers who quit their jobs for compelling family obligations to be eligible for UI benefits. We find without such changes, slightly more than half of all individuals out of work would be eligible for benefits; if all these changes were universally adopted, more than 70 percent of them would be eligible.

The Great Recession hit black workers harder; the unemployment rate was higher for non-Hispanic black than for non-Hispanic white or Hispanic workers, and black unemployed workers had the lowest receipt of Unemployment Insurance benefits, 23.8 percent compared to whites' 33.2 percent. Differences persist even after controlling for education, past employment, and reasons for unemployment.

In 2006, New York instituted a noncustodial parent earned income tax credit (NCP EITC) to encourage low-income noncustodial parents to work and pay child support. This study examines the credit’s impacts through 2009. We use a regression discontinuity approach exploiting a drop in NCP EITC eligibility when taxpayers’ youngest children turn 18, and find the NCP EITC increased the proportion of noncustodial parents paying their child support in full by approximately 1 percentage point. Effects were stronger among parents with low child support orders. Our estimates may represent upper-bound impacts, but reflect only the first four years of implementation.

Return to list of authors